Tag: food

“We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”

So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.

Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.”

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“Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.

Besides, we don’t even like turkey.”

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“In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.

From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”

On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388106/thanksgiving-turkey-food-waste-sides-dry-bland

“There are two primary reasons for the recent uptick in announcements of tainted food. One, the US food system has become extremely complicated in recent decades: There are more imported foods now as well as more highly processed foods, which creates more opportunities for disease to enter the food system.
Two, the government has better and faster tracing capabilities, thanks to legislation around food safety modernization. That makes it easier for the Food and Drug Administration, one of the bodies that investigates such outbreaks, to track problems to their source. It also makes it easier for companies to recall tainted products before they spread further into the food system and sicken large numbers of people. (The US Department of Agriculture oversees recalls of meat, poultry, and eggs as well, but it’s not subject to this legislation.)”

https://www.vox.com/food/379474/mcdonalds-e-coli-boars-head-listeria-salmonella-outbreak