What’s wrong with turkey on Thanksgiving Day?
If eating turkey on the day when it is eaten most will support the unsustainable and environmentally damaging factory farming industry then we most certainly should not eat it, it’s as simple as that. In Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer writes “Thanksgiving day accounts for 18 percent of annual turkey consumption” (pg 249). There is a huge amount of money being made every Thanksgiving producing something Americans love and are thankful for at the price of eliminating a true American tradition, the independent farmers and ranchers who until this last century were feeding the entire nation. Turkey certainly is a tradition itself though. For over a hundred years people have been eating it on the fourth Thursday of November every year, but it wasn’t eaten at the first real Thanksgiving, “they didn’t have corn, apples, potatoes, or cranberries, and the only two written reports from the legendary Thanksgiving at Plymouth mention venison and wildfowl” (pg 250). Which is the more valuable American tradition; turkey on Thanksgiving, or the American family farm? One has supported millions of Americans in the most rural areas of the country and the other has contributed to those very places being among the poorest in the nation while factory farm owners get richer and richer.
The family farm has been going the way of the dodo for a few decades leading to today when “99 percent of all animals eaten in this country come from ‘factory farms’” (pg 12) as Foer puts it succinctly. That isn’t just turkey, but all animals, billions of them, going from a factory into our mouths with only a hot damp truck and a filthy slaughterhouse in between. The industry is also as damaging to the small farmer as it is to the environment. “According to the UN, the livestock sectory is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships—combined” (pg 58). People have embraced the idea of cutting down on gas when it started to cost them money, but they don’t even realize the food they eat is a much bigger contribution. It could be argued that the amount of meat produced is necessary to feed America’s 300 million people, however it is simply not the case. The American midwest is full of crops that people use for a number of reasons beside eating and a healthy human diet in no way needs as much meat as Americans consume. “On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime” (pg 121). 21,000 animals might seem absurd, and it is, you don’t have to eat hundreds of animals a year to survive, you could easily live eating meat once a week, or not at all, like millions of vegetarians do whose hearts manage to continue beating despite a lack of meat in their diet.
