Turkeys: Are You What You Eat?

One of the things most of us do around the holidays - no matter what our religious beliefs - is eat special foods. The Turkey Post - that's what this is, illustrated by Jan's wonderful pictures - is in honor of this time of feasting.

Every meal should try to meet three standards:

• Delicious
• Healthy
• Sustainable

Nobody's perfect, not to mention their cooking - but for me, those are the goals present in every act of food consumption. Another way to say this is we judge what we eat according to:

• aesthetics
• individual benefit
• community benefit 

About 20 or 25 years ago, my friend and co-worker HP turned up some turkey chicks. We called them NMB3's since the full name was a bit much: Naturally Mating Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys. There were only a few hundred left alive on the planet.

All turkeys used to look like the ones you see in Jan's photos. Around here, they live in the woods, fields and along the roads.  The NMB3s looked like the wild ones, although an expert like HP could probably spot the differences. Any non-expert could tell the difference between wild turkeys and commercial birds because they're conveniently color-coded: turkeys from the factory farms are mostly white.

In the 20th Century, the US and Western Europe converted their food supplies from a traditional agrarian arrangement to an industrialized system. The food supply gradually met goals of all industrial products from Model T Fords to iPhones: predictable supply, standardized parts, and large-scale marketing.

The food industry says its system enables large numbers of people to be fed reliably, safely and cheaply. Critics say the industrialized food supply is unhealthy and destructive to small and mid-sized farmers, and it's not cheap if you count the costs of personal and environmental ill health that result.

Turkeys have been bred to meet industrial standards. They are kept in severe confinement, fed antibiotics and other probably unhealthy chemicals to decrease problems of overcrowding and inbreeding. They are bred to be white so that the dots left on their skin after being killed and plucked don't show up dark.

Around 80% of Americans demand white meat. There's a whole literature of white meat debate - don't worry, I'll spare you. Whatever the reasons, fowl money is in white, that is breast meat. So turkeys are bred to have huge breasts. In fact for "modern" industrialized turkeys, the breast of the males are so huge the toms are unable to mount the females.

Next time you're thinking about how crummy your job is, remember that there are people out there who work as turkey inseminators. I don't know exactly how it's done, but I can't conceive of a method that would't be incredibly obnoxious. Even if you have a regrettable job like working in a shopping mall kiosk, or being the aide to a Republican politician, there's at least one job I know that's worse.

The NMB3s, as the name says, can do the turkey cha-cha without assistance from human helpers. Like their wild counterparts.

Turkeys like the ones HP and I raised many years ago are now available for general sale around Thanksgiving, and at all times of the year if you are willing to poke around. They cost more and I guarantee, taste better.

But wait a minute, there's more.

Animals we eat do one thing really well. They convert carbohydrates to concentrated protein. This reflects a crucial difference in how our bodies use what we eat. Carbs - that are converted by our bodies to sugar - are what keep us going. Many people eat way too many carbs. Carbs - grain and sugar are examples - can be delicious, and the food industry pushes them because carb-rich food fits the industrial model so well - it's cheap and easy to sell. When we eat too many carbs, we become overweight and some people get diabetes. The American Diabetes Association says about 26 million people in the USA have diabetes and another 79 million are pre-diabetic. That's a third of the population at risk for a serious disease linked directly to food consumption.

A cow needs to eat about 6 pounds of grain to produce a 16 ounce steak on your table. A turkey needs to eat 4 pounds of grain for a pound of that white meat. A chicken needs 3 grain pounds to give us the same pound of flesh.

By eating meat, we are eating concentrated plants turned into the protein that maintains and builds our bodies. On a global scale, this concentration can be a problem, since there are a lot of very hungry people who could eat the pounds of grain that become a single hamburger. There are other problems with industrialized meat production like the huge amount of water that goes into producing that pound of flesh, environmental destruction of rain forests to create pastureland, waste produced by factory farms, and insane cruelty to creatures jammed in nightmare conditions.

If you're a vegetarian for those or other reasons, you'd better be careful to get enough protein, and not get carb-loaded. If you're a meat eater, you could be snarfing down nasty chemicals, heart-stopping quantities of fat, and supporting global evils like starvation, pollution, and animal cruelty.

What to do? Now for some hopeful news.

The strengths of the industrial food system are also strengths for people who want to change the food supply. In fact I wrote my first book over 20 years ago about just this topic. ⇒

Because the modern food system turns a biological and cultural act into an industrial one, food becomes a commodity. Cultural acts are priced according to complicated factors, while the price of commodities reflects simple supply and demand. The consumer of food creates a demand and the supply responds.

Here are a few easy steps:

1. Read Michael Pollen and others who counsel moderation andy common sense in eating. We don't really benefit from fads, cults, finger-wagging, guilt-tripping or other paraphernalia of personal change movements. Just return to the relaxed, balanced and sensible traditions that support all family and culturally-based values.

2. Reverse engineer the food supply by buying the food, if you can find it and afford it, that you know is healthier for people and the world. This means Thanksgiving turkeys from "heritage" breeds, as well as from the locally-sourced or organic or farmers markets or CSA or gardens. There's also something to be said for buying some healthy items in your supermarket, so their checkout scanners that count every item, create more orders for good stuff from their suppliers - thus making the overall food supply better and better.

2.5. If you hunt to put food on your table, your family is eating an animal that lived and died a lot better than its industrialized distant cousins.

3. Take it easy in making changes. Leaping in crazily, serving up long dinner table rants to captive audiences and foisting strange meals on your poor kids will not last. Leave the revolution in Tahrir Square and bring change to yourself and your family slowly and gently and with respect. That's the change that endures.