As we speak, 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 that 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 were apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The primary Thanksgiving most likely didn’t have turkey.) And we are going to do all of it though turkey meat is broadly thought of 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 blissful recollections of Thanksgivings previous.”
So what is actually the nationwide vacation of meat-eating revolves round an animal dish that nobody actually likes. That truth clashes with the broadly accepted reply to the central query of why it’s so laborious 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 difficult, 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 would possibly 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 need 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 might be extra human than to associate with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity appear notably robust round meals, a social glue that binds us to at least one one other and to our shared previous. And though many people as we speak acknowledge there’s one thing very unsuitable with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all events would possibly appear to be a super time to neglect 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 folks’s properties or celebrating a special day, they’ll eat no matter, to keep away from offending their hosts or scary awkward conversations about manufacturing facility farming.
However this Thanksgiving, I need 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 alter 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, instructed me.
A whole lot 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. As we speak, it’s laborious to see it as something however an emblem of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty towards nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the perfect of humanity, and a imaginative and prescient for a extra good world, absolutely we will provide you with higher symbols.
Moreover, we don’t even like turkey. We should always skip it this yr.
The distress of the Thanksgiving turkey
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella revealed a wrenching investigation into circumstances 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 beneficial components of the chicken. These birds develop twice as quick and change into practically twice as huge as they did within the Sixties. Being so top-heavy, mixed with different well being points brought on by fast progress and the unsanitary manufacturing facility farming setting, could make it troublesome for them to stroll.
One other downside arises from their big breasts: The males get so huge that they will’t mount the hens, so that they should be bred artificially.
Writer Jim Mason detailed this apply in his ebook The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with thinker Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey big Butterball to analysis the ebook, 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.
Staff on the farm had to do that to at least one hen each 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the toughest, quickest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever executed, Mason wrote.
Have questions or feedback on this piece? Electronic mail me at marina@vox.com!
Within the wild, turkeys stay in “smallish teams of a dozen or so, and so they know one another, they relate to one another as people,” Singer, writer of the ebook Take into account the Turkey, mentioned final yr on an episode of the Easy Coronary heart podcast. “The turkeys bought 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 surprised after which the knife cuts their throat,” Singer mentioned. “In the event that they’re not so fortunate, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat whereas they’re totally aware.”
On Thanksgiving, People throw the equal of greater than 8 million of those turkeys within the trash, based on a 2024 estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to scale back meals waste. And this yr would be the fourth Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control chicken flu outbreak, through which tens of tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on contaminated farms have been culled utilizing stomach-churning extermination strategies.
Once I seek for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can solely describe it in non secular phrases, as a sort of desecration — of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On each different day of the yr, it’s obscene sufficient. On a vacation that’s speculated to signify our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you possibly can perceive why Thanksgiving, for a lot of vegetarians or vegans, is typically described as probably the most alienating day of the yr.
I rely myself amongst that group, though I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to adore it as a vacation ripe for artistic reinvention. I normally spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (recognized by most individuals as “sides,” although there’s no purpose they will’t be the principle occasion).
To call just a few: a mushroom Wellington, a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a vibrant autumnal Brussels sprout salad, roasted crimson cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add a number of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart extra advanced and attention-grabbing than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align fantastically with the vacations.
Vegan turkey roasts are completely optionally available, although lots of them have gotten superb lately — I really like the Gardein breaded roast and Subject Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can even 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 laborious to persuade People to desert parched roast turkey). “It’s about disagreeable truths and moral disagreements being introduced out into the open,” Levin mentioned, about confronting the weird dissonance in celebrations of pleasure and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations aren’t simple, however they’re price having. And we don’t should worry shedding the rituals that outline us as People. On the contrary, tradition is a steady dialog now we have with one another about what we maintain pricey — and any tradition that’s not altering is useless. There’s way more that means available in adapting traditions which are 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.
