Right now, tens of tens of millions of People will partake in a nationwide ritual many people say we don’t particularly get pleasure from or discover which means in. We are going to collectively eat greater than 40 million turkeys — manufacturing facility farmed and closely engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds which have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The primary Thanksgiving in all probability didn’t have turkey.) And we are going to do all of it despite the fact that turkey meat is extensively thought-about flavorless and unpalatable.
“It’s, virtually with out fail, a dried-out, miserable hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland exercise,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we all know this, however bury it beneath glad reminiscences of Thanksgivings previous.”
So what is basically the nationwide vacation of meat-eating revolves round an animal dish that nobody actually likes. That truth clashes with the extensively accepted reply to the central query of why it’s so onerous to persuade everybody to ditch meat, and even to eat much less of it: the style, silly.
Undoubtedly, that has one thing to do with it. However I believe the true reply is much more sophisticated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.
• Why People eat turkey on Thanksgiving, regardless of many people not liking it very a lot!
• What life is like for a Thanksgiving turkey.
• What to eat as an alternative of turkey, and why you may even see going turkey-free as extra genuine to the values of Thanksgiving.
People crave ritual, belonging, and a way of being half of a bigger story — aspirations that attain their apotheosis on the Thanksgiving desk. We don’t wish to be social deviants who boycott the central image of one among our most cherished nationwide holidays, reminding everybody of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could possibly be extra human than to associate with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity appear notably sturdy round meals, a social glue that binds us to 1 one other and to our shared previous. And though many people at the moment acknowledge there’s one thing very incorrect with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all events may appear to be a perfect time to overlook that for a day.
In my expertise, loads of people who find themselves attempting to chop again on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves — however when they’re company at different individuals’s properties or celebrating a special day, they’ll eat no matter, to keep away from offending their hosts or frightening awkward conversations about manufacturing facility farming.
However this Thanksgiving, I wish to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of meals shapes our tastes, much more than style itself, then it’s in exactly these settings that we should always focus efforts to vary American meals customs for the higher.
“It’s consuming with others the place we even have a chance to affect broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark dialogue, and revamp traditions to make them extra sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, informed me.
Lots of of years in the past, a turkey on Thanksgiving might need represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare factor in these days, and subsequently one thing to be glad about. Right now, it’s onerous to see it as something however an emblem of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty in opposition to nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the most effective of humanity, and a imaginative and prescient for a extra excellent world, certainly we are able to give you higher symbols.
In addition to, we don’t even like turkey. We should always skip it this 12 months.
The distress of the Thanksgiving turkey
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella revealed a wrenching investigation into situations within the US turkey business. He wrote:
The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of each 100 grocery retailer turkeys, has been bred to emphasise — you guessed it — the breast, one of many extra helpful components of the chicken. These birds develop twice as quick and change into practically twice as large as they did within the Nineteen Sixties. Being so top-heavy, mixed with different well being points attributable to speedy progress and the unsanitary manufacturing facility farming setting, could make it troublesome for them to stroll.
One other drawback arises from their big breasts: The males get so large that they will’t mount the hens, so that they have to be bred artificially.
Creator Jim Mason detailed this apply in his e book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with thinker Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey big Butterball to analysis the e book, the place, he wrote, he needed to maintain male turkeys whereas one other employee stimulated them to extract their semen right into a syringe utilizing a vacuum pump. As soon as the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, the place Mason would pin hens chest-down whereas one other employee inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen utilizing an air compressor.
Employees on the farm had to do that to 1 hen each 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the toughest, quickest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever performed, Mason wrote.
Have questions or feedback on this piece? E-mail me at marina@vox.com!
Within the wild, turkeys reside in “smallish teams of a dozen or so, they usually know one another, they relate to one another as people,” Singer, writer of the e book Take into account the Turkey, stated final 12 months on an episode of the Easy Coronary heart podcast. “The turkeys offered on Thanksgiving by no means see their moms, they by no means go and forage for meals… They’re fairly traumatized, I’d say, by having 1000’s of unusual birds round who they will’t get to know as people,” packed collectively in crowded sheds.
From start to demise, the lifetime of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, together with mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling journey to the slaughterhouse, and a killing course of the place they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled the wrong way up, and despatched down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “In the event that they’re fortunate, they get shocked after which the knife cuts their throat,” Singer stated. “In the event that they’re not so fortunate, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat whereas they’re absolutely acutely aware.”
On Thanksgiving, People throw the equal of greater than 8 million of those turkeys within the trash, in keeping with a 2024 estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to scale back meals waste. And this 12 months would be the fourth Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control chicken flu outbreak, by which tens of tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on contaminated farms have been culled utilizing stomach-churning extermination strategies.
After I seek for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can solely describe it in non secular phrases, as a form of desecration — of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On each different day of the 12 months, it’s obscene sufficient. On a vacation that’s purported to symbolize our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you may perceive why Thanksgiving, for a lot of vegetarians or vegans, is usually described as probably the most alienating day of the 12 months.
I depend myself amongst that group, though I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to find it irresistible as a vacation ripe for inventive reinvention. I often spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (identified by most individuals as “sides,” although there’s no cause they will’t be the principle occasion).
To call a couple of: a mushroom Wellington, a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a brilliant autumnal Brussels sprout salad, roasted crimson cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add numerous white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart extra advanced and fascinating than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align superbly with the vacations.
Vegan turkey roasts are completely non-obligatory, although lots of them have gotten superb lately — I really like the Gardein breaded roast and Subject Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You may also make your personal.
The toughest a part of going meatless isn’t in regards to the meals (if it had been, it may not be so onerous to persuade People to desert parched roast turkey). “It’s about disagreeable truths and moral disagreements being introduced out into the open,” Levin stated, about confronting the weird dissonance in celebrations of pleasure and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations aren’t simple, however they’re value having. And we don’t need to concern shedding the rituals that outline us as People. On the contrary, tradition is a steady dialog we now have with one another about what we maintain expensive — and any tradition that’s not altering is lifeless. There’s way more which means available in adapting traditions which can be not genuine to our values. We are able to begin on Thanksgiving.
Replace, November 27, 2025, 7:30 am: This story was initially revealed in 2024 and has been up to date for 2025.
