Turkey Americana
11.19.21
Fall arrives and residents of Toms River, New Jersey are greeted by some unexpected visitors strutting across their lawns. Hordes of wild turkeys roam the streets, knocking on doors and swarming black vehicles in their quest for food. “They don’t move, even if you beep your horn,” said Brenda Yard, who lives near a main road in Toms River. “They just stand there, like, ‘Oh yeah, this is my territory.’”
Some residents harbor more resentment and regard them as little more than neighborhood gangsters. “One or two wild turkeys is one thing,” said Marge Keller, a Wisconsin native whose land has been engulfed by flocks. “But those monsters travel and fly and migrate in packs. They are extremely bright and could probably drive our car if we left the keys on the hood… I used to think pigeons were a nuisance, but wild turkeys are like pigeons on steroids — bigger, bolder, badder. I no longer feel any remorse when I see one on a platter come Thanksgiving Day.”
Turkeys’ innate intelligence and boldness is what inspired Benjamin Franklin’s early infatuation with the breed. Unlike like the bald eagle — a lazy bird of “bad moral character” that robs more talented hunters of their dinner — the turkey struck Franklin as a bird of unusual courage who “would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards.” (At the time, people believed that turkeys hated the color red and would attack anyone wearing the color.) What animal could make a stronger claim to patriotism?
Today, however, Franklin might revise his assessment. The bird that graces the majority of our tables come Thanksgiving bears little resemblance to its feisty ancestor. Pale, disproportionate, and “pathologically obese,” the commercial American turkey is a utilitarian creature invented by the commingling demands of the US Department of Agriculture and the supermarket consumer.
This holiday season, we discuss the biological transformation of the national turkey population and how one monster breed — the Broad-Breasted White — gained market dominance, catapulting the turkey population to new heights while traversing genetic territories never before crossed.
The Turkey Claims Thanksgiving
Early European arrivals were besotted with the turkey’s unusual flavor and dense nutrient profile. One Franciscan priest, who recorded Aztec customs for nearly fifty years, was rhapsodic about the meat. He devoted endless journal entries to the bird, which “leads the meats; it is the master.” The hen, in particular, he described as “tasty, healthful, fat, full of fat, fleshy, fleshy-breasted, heavy-fleshed.” The turkey was brought back to the Old World, where it was enthusiastically adopted and became one of the original stocks for the Bronze, one of the oldest American heritage breeds.
Domestic turkeys were first used commercially on tobacco farms, where farmers were desperate to control the notorious hornworm, a fat crawler that could eat its way through half a crop. Without pesticides or modern biological agents, planters relied on slaves to comb their way through the leaves, an incredibly expensive and labor-intensive process. Turkeys freed them of this task. Speedy, greedy, and dexterous, turkeys proved to be ideal pest control agents. One turkey could protect over a thousand plants. Fifty, if managed correctly, could handle 100,000.
Turkeys soon stoked the national appetite with the increased adoption of Thanksgiving. The holiday first became trendy among New England Puritans, who hated most holidays for their drunkenness and pagan associations. Conveniently, Thanksgiving had none of the usual British baggage, and they outfitted it with a host of “New World bounty,” including “turkeys, pumpkin pies, sweet potatoes, succotash, and cranberries.”
Migrators transplanted the holiday west, and it took on new significance with the onset of the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale, a pastoral poet and famed author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” believed Thanksgiving was the perfect tonic to combat civil unrest. She launched a decades long campaign to have the holiday federally recognized. By 1859, thirty states and three territories officially celebrated the holiday. “If every state would join in union thanks-giving on the twenty-fourth of this month,” she asked, “would it not be a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States?” (President Lincoln finally indulged her in 1863.)
Every Farm A Factory
Post-World War I, the USDA, according to one economist, fixated on “making two blades of grass grow where but one grew before.” Promoting agricultural abundance — whether in livestock or food — became the USDA’s singular goal. If farms did not model themselves after factories, warned one industry insider, they “must remain the slow and backward brother in the family group of our economic life.”
Enterprising farmers took up the cause with great zeal. In Every Farm a Factory, Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of agricultural technology at MIT, describes modern poultry farms as “the Lowell Mills of the agricultural revolution.” Specialization in poultry production was facilitated by the “introduction of such technologies as the mammoth incubator, the use of electric lighting to induce egg-laying out of season, the use of coal-stove brooders, as well as the systematic breeding of hens with high egg production.” Refrigeration threw open the door to wider markets, but high capital expenses squeezed out smaller players and led to intense consolidation.
Nowhere was the focus on productivity and abundance more pronounced than in the genetic makeup of the turkey. The wild turkey is an incredibly athletic bird capable of flying up to 55 miles per hour and running 25 miles per hour. Early breeders recognized the benefits of incorporating wild blood into their stocks, which seemed to make for hardier turkeys. “They hate confinement,” wrote one nineteenth century breeder. “In the most severe of our freezing nights they will reach the utmost limbs of our highest trees and there boldly face the northwest wind.”
Roaming across vast vistas, however, is hardly conducive to factory farming. Plus, it darkens the meat, a characteristic American consumers have repeatedly shunned. Housewives were coached by the Bureau of Home Economics, an arm of the USDA, to look for uniformity in their purchases. Pamphlets, quoted by the Associated Press, instructed women to look for “a good covering of fat, complete bleeding, and few or no pin feathers.” What did this translate to from a breeding perspective? Less beauty and more bulk.
In 1905, a grower in Texas, E. A. Tully, started the novel practice of selling birds by weight instead of by head. “Fat and heavy” became the market standard, with growers carefully selecting for birds that grew rapidly and developed large chests. One early variety was called the “Bronze Mae West,” but it was eventually eclipsed by the Broad-Breasted White.
Today, commercial turkeys grow twice as fast as they did in 1966 and are nearly double the size of their original trim 16 pounds. “Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket [can] walk normally, much less jump or fly,” said one farmer. “Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore.” Handicapped by their massive girths, commercial turkeys cannot mate on their own, and must be artificially inseminated.
Modern turkeys are also more prone to disease, health problems, and a shortened life span. Sadly, most presidentially pardoned turkeys are so inbred that they croak within a few months of freedom: the breed simply wasn’t engineered to survive past adolescence.
Revival of Heritage Breeds
Another side effect of standardized breeding is the erosion of genetic diversity in livestock. Today, two companies — Hendrix Genetics and Aviagen (a subsidiary of the EW Group) — control nearly the entire global supply of turkey breeding stock. This concentration has prompted a growing cohort of conservationists, farmers, cooks, and government agencies to call for the revival of heritage breeds — those colorful, patterned birds first cultivated by small scale farmers before mass production.
“We know from things like the recent occurrence of a highly pathogenic avian flu outbreak in the Midwest, or even going back to the potato famine in Ireland, that putting all of your genetic hope into a few really strong robust lines is kind of risky,” said Julie Long of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. “We need to make sure that we maintain the other genetics that are out there in wild populations and in heritage turkeys. They may not be good for commercial production right now, but we can’t predict what will happen in the future, so we need to hang on to every bit of genetic diversity that we’ve got.”
Heritage breeds are distinguished by their exemplary taste, slow growth rate, and active lifestyle. Compared to the spongy Butterballs most of us suffer through today, heirloom birds offer a veritable cornucopia of flavor. They include breeds such as the Royal Palm, Bourbon Red, Holland White, and Bronze. “The taste is very robust,” says Dana Kee of Moose Manor Farms, who raises Narragansetts. “It’s not just a vehicle for gravy.”
In 1997, there were barely 3,000 heritage birds remaining (some breeds, such as the Narraganset, had fewer than 10 breeding birds left). But today, the march towards extinction has been reversed, and the population has grown to over 35,000. While profitable, they are also more of a luxury product. Given their increased cost and time of production, heritage turkeys typically run between $4 and $6 per pound as opposed to $1 per pound for the average supermarket turkey.
Wild turkeys, also once near extinction, have made an even more impressive comeback. Thanks to the efforts of hunting groups and conservationists, over 7,000,000 wild turkeys exist in the United States today (and they have even expanded their geographic range: hence the flocks terrorizing Wisconsin).
Even traditional breeders are making their own inroads towards a more well-rounded breed. Christine Baes, a geneticist who is working with Hendrix Genetics on a breeding research program, is trying to statistically link animal welfare to meat quality. “If we can convince everyone that breeding a healthy, happy bird will improve the quality of the production and the quality of the meat, you’ll be breeding for animals that can move freely and all of that good stuff,” said Baes.
Baes hopes that machine learning, video analysis, algorithms, and sensors can help pave the way for the evolution of a healthier breed, tracking which birds exhibit greater bone integrity, gait, docility, etc. “You ever see the movie Moneyball? The whole thing can be summed up with that,” said Baes. “You create a whack ton of information, and you can find the best candidates to breed.”
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