The Worst Bird

Newsletter 2023-11-27

If you don’t like controversy, you might want to sit this one out. I’m about to ruffle some feathers. Turkey is a garbage bird and I don’t care who knows it. As a society, we’re collectively lying to ourselves when we pretend to enjoy it. Deep down, everyone hates turkey. This is a universal truth. If you claim you enjoy eating turkey, that’s not a flavor preference; it’s Stockholm syndrome. Big Turkey has you in its terrible talons. Today, I will set you free.

When I say I don’t like turkey, I mean the food, the bird, and the metaphysical concept. (I have no quarrel with the country of the same name. Unless they like turkeys there. Then we have a problem.) The very idea of a turkey should be abolished. Let’s start with the food because it’s the most topical. Most likely, you were recently subjected to the culinary assault known as Thanksgiving. That wretched holiday proudly features the trash eagle as its centerpiece. There’s a reason the only activity associated with Thanksgiving is eating. After you have turkey, you’re too depressed to do anything else. That sets Thanksgiving apart from other holidays. After a delightful Christmas ham, you’re energized to do a gift exchange. After a Fourth of July hot dog, you’re amped up to literally blow up the sky. But following a traditional Thanksgiving meal, the best you can hope for is a nap. If I wanted a food whose only positive quality was that it knocks me out, I’d stick to alcohol. Unlike turkey, beer has never let me down.

You might still think you like turkey. I assure you that you’re wrong. Thanksgiving is one big, elaborate diversion. If you believe you like turkey, you are merely distracted by the pomp and circumstances around it. You don’t like turkey; you like seeing your family. You simply conflated the two memories. Or, conversely, you hate your family, and dry, flavorless meat was the only thing you had to look forward to. When your abrasive brother-in-law is choking it down, he can’t spew his unpopular political opinions, like how Grover is the best Muppet. In my house, those are fighting words.

Strip away everything else associated with Thanksgiving and focus on the turkey itself. If someone laid out a platter of all possible meats in front of you, what would you reach for first? Second? Third? If you’re being honest, you’d finally settle for turkey after rabbit but before horse. If you deny that basic truth, you’re still in the thralls of Big Turkey’s seasonal propaganda campaign. Don’t worry. I’m not giving up on you yet.

Turkey meat is bland, dry, and uninspired. To get around that, turkey proponents built a holiday entirely dependent on elaborate side dishes. It’s hard to notice that your signature bird has less moisture than the Sahara when it’s surrounded by the juiciest mashed potatoes and gravy known to man. The list of possible Thanksgiving side dishes is endless. Turkey is so bad, though, that sticking stuff off to the side isn’t enough. You have to actually stuff a side dish inside of it. That’s what stuffing is. Someone created an internal carb source to jam in the middle of a dead bird like the Tootsie Roll at the center of a Tootsie Pop. It’s gimmicks all the way down.

You might think I’m trashing the dedicated people who spend days preparing these useless birds. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have the utmost respect for everyone who cooked this Thanksgiving. In fact, I had many delightful Thanksgiving dinners. Those meals were wonderful in spite of the turkey, not because of it. Last year, my brother-in-law, Jerry (unrelated to the hypothetical brother-in-law I made up earlier with cancellable opinions about Grover) made the best turkey I’ve ever had. He smoked it for hours and then covered it with delicious herbs and spices. Here’s the problem: The smoke, herbs, and spices were the entirety of the flavor. The turkey was just the bland delivery platform. Wolfgang Puck could make the world’s most delicious pine cone, but no matter what cooking techniques he used or what flavors he infused it with, it would still be a pine cone. That’s turkey in a nutshell. We’re holding back the world’s best cooks with inferior materials. It’s like making Michelangelo sculpt with Play-Doh. If my real brother-in-law had instead dedicated the same amount of effort to smoking and spicing pork, beef, chicken, or any other animal it’s socially acceptable to eat, his entree would have been enough to be lethal. People would have actually died from its superior flavor, and it would have been worth it. Cause of death: epic veal. Regrets: none.

No one has ever collapsed from a turkey being too good, but they’ve died for lots of other turkey-related reasons. No other holiday comes with public service announcements about how not to accidentally kill yourself while cooking. Thanksgiving is full of reminders about turkey’s explosive properties. It’s so inedible that people had to create culinary circus acts to make it even remotely digestible. The most dangerous form of this is deep frying turkey outside in hot oil heated up by propane. The process makes turkey the one and only holiday food likely to erupt in a giant ball of fire, killing you at everyone you love. That still might be preferable to having the turkey make it to the table. Cooking turkey indoors isn’t much better. It takes endless hours in the oven. It’s the most slowly developing disappointment since my parents watched me grow up.

There’s a reason we only eat this useless bird once a year. Nobody gets a craving for turkey in July. Yes, you can eat it in lunch meat form, but turkey sandwiches benefit from many of the same distractions as Thanksgiving turkey. No one eats straight deli sliced turkey as a snack. It has to be surrounded with bread and condiments. Rather than the stuffing being on the inside, it’s on the outside, but the terrible meat remains the same. No sane human being celebrates a big milestone by cooking a whole turkey. They go out for steaks. Imagine marking your wedding anniversary by cooking a twelve pound turkey. You’d be single before the oven cooled down. That’s why, if you want a whole turkey out of season, you have to find it in the weird section of the grocery store that sells seal flippers and raccoon eggs. Turkey only exists as a meal at all because there’s a holiday absolutely married to it. It’s time for a national divorce from nature’s worst animal.

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

You might be thinking that since turkey meat is so bad, we should stop eating turkeys and let them live out their natural lives. You’re half right. Removing them from the menu would be a good first step. Encouraging their existence beyond that would be a critical mistake. Turkeys are nearly as bad as animals as they are as food. Animal lovers always point out how Benjamin Franklin wanted to make turkeys the national bird. That decision wouldn’t have been all bad. At Thanksgiving, we could have eaten bald eagles instead. I bet they’re delicious. Unfortunately, turkeys would have been a poor representation of our national spirit. They are stupid beyond the point of redemption. It’s not true that they look up with open mouths and drown in the rain, but they’re not much brighter than that, either. They have brains the size of pebbles and angry dispositions to match. Years ago, when driving in Iowa to visit my grandmother, a turkey swooped at my dad’s minivan, missing it by inches. When we told my grandma about the incident, she already knew about the bird. That was its corner. It guarded that section of highway from passing cars. This was not an animal built for long-term survival. Wild turkeys can sort of fly, but only enough to dive bomb cars. They can sort of fight, but only enough to get themselves killed. They’re also omnivores, so they lose any sympathy they might otherwise get from vegetarians. Turkeys eat mice, insects, lizards, and any other small animal that can fit in their mouths. If they were big enough, they would eat us, too. Thankfully, we’re larger than them. By right of the food chain, we deserve to eat them. I say we let them off the hook. I’m extending them this undeserved mercy because they are so deeply disappointing as food. They are, of course, too dumb to appreciate this great kindness. If they were to all suddenly fly into the sun tomorrow, the world would be no worse off.

On top of all that, wild turkeys are ugly. Their heads look like they were designed for a horror movie. Other birds have feathers there. Even bald eagles aren’t actually bald. They just had different coloring up top. Not turkeys. For some reason, they alone in the animal kingdom have scrotums for heads. Just look at them. The similarity is undeniable. Add two beady eyes and a sharp beak and you have the stuff of nightmares. Why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to eat the things is a mystery to me. The pilgrims really must have been desperate that first Thanksgiving. Conversely, maybe the Native Americans were just looking to unload a useless animal that they wouldn’t eat themselves. Imagine if some new neighbors you hated invited themselves over for dinner and you served them cooked rat to make them go away. Then, instead of being repulsed, your awful guests created an entire holiday around eating rats. I can only assume a version of that is what really happened in America’s mythological Thanksgiving origin story. The native peoples had the last laugh after all.

Thanksgiving is about being thankful. I’m grateful for the wonderful people in my life and for all the food we have to eat. It’s a first world problem to complain that, on our national day of gluttony, we’re gorging ourselves on the wrong food. I complain not because I hate, but because I love. I want better for all of us. I truly enjoy eating too much. It’s basically my only hobby. In that spirit, I propose we break the shackles of tradition and openly admit what we’ve all secretly known all along: Turkey is a waste of a holiday. We owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to do better. There are so many amazing alternatives. They don’t even have to be primarily meat. You could have a Thanksgiving five cheese pizza with breadsticks and extra dipping sauce. You could serve a delightful Thanksgiving lasagna or a Thanksgiving ice cream bar with fifteen different flavors and every possible topping. You could even offer a Thanksgiving bowl of leftover Halloween candy. The fact that not a single one of these ideas ever made it into a Norman Rockwell painting is a true cultural tragedy. As Americans, we’re supposed to be innovators. If anyone can think up a better way to do a day of pigging out under the guise of thankfulness, it’s us. It’s time to put our heads together and brainstorm superior alternatives. Leave the turkeys out of it. Let them go be awful someplace else.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James