Talking Turkey
by Ben Popper
NOVEMBER 24, 2009 TAGS:
I try not to get too friendly with animals I plan on killing. This was my rookie year working at White Gate Farm, a small organic operation in East Lyme, Connecticut. Every six weeks we slaughtered a flock of around 100 chickens. Emotionally this was easy, since the birds had ignored me completely while they were alive. Things weren’t so simple with the broad-breasted bronze turkeys we were raising for Thanksgiving. When I walked by their pen, they would come running up to the fence, flapping their wings and addressing me in a cacophony of gobbles and chirps. If I walked to the other end of their enclosure, they would follow, eyeing me in profile. Their curiosity was endearing, but also a little too personal. It got me thinking about the strange relationship between giving thanks and taking lives.
The Aztecs believed that they needed to sacrifice human captives to the gods in order to sustain the universe. They were also some of the first to domesticate turkeys, later introduced to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors. The first Thanksgiving held in America was declared in Florida on Sept. 8, 1565, by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a Spanish explorer who promptly followed the feast with the slaughter of 300 French Protestants.
The bird and the holiday enter our national mythology through the Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. William Bradford, one of the group’s leaders, wrote about this first Thanksgiving, celebrated after the harvest of 1621, and the meal they shared with local Wampanoag tribe. “Besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” More than half of the Pilgrims had perished during the first winter in America, so it was with immense gratitude that they acknowledged their good fortune with the feast of these birds.
The turkey became further entangled with our national identity thanks to a Founding Father. When I told a friend about the Thanksgiving slaughter on the farm, she reacted with horror, then noted that Benjamin Franklin had preferred the turkey to the bald eagle as our national bird. “For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America,” Franklin wrote to his daughter, Sarah, in 1784. But even if Franklin held the turkey in high esteem, he didn’t show it any special sympathy. In fact, turkeys were one of his preferred test subjects for his early experiments with electricity, and he noted that, “Birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.”
Inevitably, our triumph over nature changed our relationship to the turkey. These days some 46 million turkeys are killed and eaten on Thanksgiving. Since 1940 the president has engaged in an annual turkey pardon, commuting the death sentence of one bird and its mate, which are then allowed to live out their lives on a special preserve. The birds, in this scenario, are the ones who should be grateful.
The ritual has prompted delightful histrionics from the academic set. “The Thanksgiving turkey pardon is a prime example of an act that is only seemingly innocuous but actually serves to shape our modern consciousness,” writes Cornell University anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjo in his treatise, The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, The Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo. “Masquerading as a joke, it is really a symbolic pardoning act which, through public performance, establishes and manifests the sovereign’s position at the helm of the state by highlighting, as an attribute of this position, his power to control matters of life and death.”
It took a politician as sublimely clueless as Sarah Palin to fully illustrate this macabre theater. Last Thanksgiving, the then governor visited a farm in Wasilla, Alaska, and spared the life of one fortunate fowl. Afterwards she paused outside the turkey pen to chat with reporters. “You need a little bit of levity in this job,” she said, while in the background a man placed a turkey head-first into a metal funnel and slit its throat. “It’s nice to get out and do something that isn’t such heavy-handed politics that it invites criticism,” Palin continued cheerily, as the bird convulsed in its death throes.
The clip aired on MSNBC with a warning intoned by the anchor, “You may want to consider getting the kids out of the room right now, and anyone who’s a little squeamish about where Thanksgiving dinner comes from.” It’s this kind of sentiment that makes me grateful for my time on the farm. That anyone could be shocked about the killing of turkeys in the days before Thanksgiving shows how removed the average person has become from the agricultural process.
The organs of the turkeys we slaughtered on the farm this year were coated in a glistening layer of fat. It was a reminder of the comfortable life they had enjoyed, and by extension that I live as well. I’m a dilettante farmer at best, but I take comfort in the knowledge that I have the courage of my culinary convictions. “I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater,” writes Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” I shouldn’t presume to know what the turkeys were thinking when they chatted me up each morning as I walked by their enclosure. But whatever their intentions, they forced me to acknowledge what I had to take in order to give thanks.
The Aztecs believed that they needed to sacrifice human captives to the gods in order to sustain the universe. They were also some of the first to domesticate turkeys, later introduced to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors. The first Thanksgiving held in America was declared in Florida on Sept. 8, 1565, by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a Spanish explorer who promptly followed the feast with the slaughter of 300 French Protestants. The bird and the holiday enter our national mythology through the Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. William Bradford, one of the group’s leaders, wrote about this first Thanksgiving, celebrated after the harvest of 1621, and the meal they shared with local Wampanoag tribe. “Besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” More than half of the Pilgrims had perished during the first winter in America, so it was with immense gratitude that they acknowledged their good fortune with the feast of these birds.
The turkey became further entangled with our national identity thanks to a Founding Father. When I told a friend about the Thanksgiving slaughter on the farm, she reacted with horror, then noted that Benjamin Franklin had preferred the turkey to the bald eagle as our national bird. “For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America,” Franklin wrote to his daughter, Sarah, in 1784. But even if Franklin held the turkey in high esteem, he didn’t show it any special sympathy. In fact, turkeys were one of his preferred test subjects for his early experiments with electricity, and he noted that, “Birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.”
Inevitably, our triumph over nature changed our relationship to the turkey. These days some 46 million turkeys are killed and eaten on Thanksgiving. Since 1940 the president has engaged in an annual turkey pardon, commuting the death sentence of one bird and its mate, which are then allowed to live out their lives on a special preserve. The birds, in this scenario, are the ones who should be grateful.
The ritual has prompted delightful histrionics from the academic set. “The Thanksgiving turkey pardon is a prime example of an act that is only seemingly innocuous but actually serves to shape our modern consciousness,” writes Cornell University anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjo in his treatise, The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, The Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo. “Masquerading as a joke, it is really a symbolic pardoning act which, through public performance, establishes and manifests the sovereign’s position at the helm of the state by highlighting, as an attribute of this position, his power to control matters of life and death.”
It took a politician as sublimely clueless as Sarah Palin to fully illustrate this macabre theater. Last Thanksgiving, the then governor visited a farm in Wasilla, Alaska, and spared the life of one fortunate fowl. Afterwards she paused outside the turkey pen to chat with reporters. “You need a little bit of levity in this job,” she said, while in the background a man placed a turkey head-first into a metal funnel and slit its throat. “It’s nice to get out and do something that isn’t such heavy-handed politics that it invites criticism,” Palin continued cheerily, as the bird convulsed in its death throes.
The clip aired on MSNBC with a warning intoned by the anchor, “You may want to consider getting the kids out of the room right now, and anyone who’s a little squeamish about where Thanksgiving dinner comes from.” It’s this kind of sentiment that makes me grateful for my time on the farm. That anyone could be shocked about the killing of turkeys in the days before Thanksgiving shows how removed the average person has become from the agricultural process. The organs of the turkeys we slaughtered on the farm this year were coated in a glistening layer of fat. It was a reminder of the comfortable life they had enjoyed, and by extension that I live as well. I’m a dilettante farmer at best, but I take comfort in the knowledge that I have the courage of my culinary convictions. “I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater,” writes Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” I shouldn’t presume to know what the turkeys were thinking when they chatted me up each morning as I walked by their enclosure. But whatever their intentions, they forced me to acknowledge what I had to take in order to give thanks.
RELATED CONTENT
TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
