Cold Turkey for the Holidays

Like all good Nebraska natives whose grandmothers canned carp and saved potato water, I was duty-bound to recycle my Thanksgiving turkey carcass.

Crammed it into my extra-large Crock-Pot, tossed in onions, celery, carrots and leftover gravy, and eight hours later dinner was on the table.

The process was rewarding and gross.

Rewarding in that a 20-pound bird produces a lot of cheap food and makes you feel industrious. Gross, in that there’s a lot of skin, bones and scary yellow flaps to deal with. Not to mention that special gift with purchase: a wet bag of jiggly vital organs you’d just as soon leave on the car seat of some deserving subprime-mortgage mogul down the street.

Which brings me to my point.

I’m not sure any of us are really deserving. For $10 – the cost of a couple of Starbucks coffees – we can go to our local supermarket and bring home a beautifully engineered, magnificently breasted bird – cleaned, plucked and outfitted with handles and plastic thermometers – neatly shrink-wrapped, complete with detailed thawing and cooking charts and even hot lines to call in case of a full-blown crisis, like realizing an hour before dinner that your turkey is too big to fit in your microwave.

Somewhere, Adam Smith is smiling.

Others aren’t. They would argue we’ve made it all too easy for human carnivores. They would say we’ve so industrialized and sanitized the process of killing animals for their flesh that we’ve forgotten where our food comes from.

And so what? Here’s so what: Not only do we choose to turn our eyes from a lot of animal suffering, but we also ingest birds filled with fat, cholesterol, hormones and antibiotics.

Furthermore, the 252 million turkeys we consume every year produce an awful lot of pollution. And all the grain and energy it takes to grow these pullets to market size in six months? That’s grain and energy that’s not going toward malnourished human populations, some argue.

One answer is to get a fresh free-range turkey that lived a normal life before it wound up on your table. Order it from somewhere like Spinelli’s Market in Park Hill, where you know it didn’t come from a factory.

Or become a vegetarian or, more to my liking, a flexitarian. Flexitarians eat a mostly vegetarian diet but will eat meat when they are guests, when it’s the only food available or when they know that the beast it came from didn’t live out its life in confinement.

If you’re worried about global warming, one of the best things you can do is eat less meat or join the meatless-once-a- week movement, since livestock production is a major source of greenhouse gases.

For more inspiration, read any of Michael Pollan’s books, or check out the “Top 10 Reasons To Pardon a Turkey This Thanksgiving,” which I found on a blog by Bruce Friedrich at HuffingtonPost.com, attributed to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Here are two reasons they cite for not eating turkey:

“1. If you wouldn’t eat your cat, you shouldn’t eat a turkey.

“As poultry scientist Tom Savage says, ‘I’ve always viewed turkeys as smart animals with personality and character and keen awareness of their surroundings. The “dumb” tag simply doesn’t fit. They’re as interesting and have personalities every bit as developed as any dog or cat.’

“When they’re not forced to live on filthy factory farms, turkeys spend their days caring for their young, building nests, foraging for food, taking dust baths, preening themselves and roosting high in trees. These social, playful birds relish having their feathers stroked and like to chirp, cluck and gobble along to their favorite tunes.”

“2. Factory farms deny turkeys everything natural to them.

“Ben Franklin called turkeys ‘true American originals.’ He had tremendous respect for their resourcefulness, agility and beauty. In nature, turkeys can fly 55 miles an hour, run 25 miles an hour and live up to four years. Yet turkeys raised for food are killed when they are only 5 or 6 months old, and during their short lives, they will be denied even the simplest pleasures, like running, building nests and raising their young.”

To read the eight other reasons not to eat a turkey, click on Extras at RockyMountainNews.com.

I’m still weighing what to prepare for the upcoming holidays. All I know is, it won’t involve a factory turkey or canned carp.

Grandma, who raised generations of free-range hens with yolks the color of pumpkins, would support that.