Re: [OT:] Thanksgiving

From: Jonathan Kirwan (jkirwan_at_easystreet.com)
Date: 11/25/04 

Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 19:11:31 GMT

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 17:01:01 GMT, Fred Bloggs <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:

>Active8 wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 05:12:30 +0000, Guy Macon wrote:
>>
>> That was a nice excerpt for turkey day. Have a nice one, everyone.
>> If you're not celebrating, have a nice day anyway.
>
>Heheh- you do know you will be eating a "genetically modified turkey"
>that is so damned fat it would drop dead of a heart attack if it was so
>adventurous as to take ten steps out of its cage:-) Sounds classy
>eh...ummm-hmmmm good!- enjoy your new breasts:-)

I've a small farm with turkeys, pheasants, chickens, quail, guineas, ducks, and
geese (and rabbits, chipmunks, finches, a parrot, cats, and a dog -- the six
cats all get along perfectly with the parrot, finches, and chipmunks, just
liking to lay around them but never hurting any. Everyone is completely
trustworthy with the rest and in fact act to protect each other.) I keep them
mostly for two reasons -- a petting 'zoo' for disabled children who come here
and as a source of eating eggs.

Since I just learned what good pets turkeys make, we don't eat turkeys now.
They are just way too gentle and caring.

But I discovered some of the truth in Fred's comment along the way. I went down
to our local feed store and bought three turkeys two years ago for the first
time. One each of three different breeds -- including a "wild turkey," a
"Bourbon red" turkey, and a so-called "bronze-breasted." We were stunned at how
fast the bronze-breasted grew up, compared with the other two.

When the other two arrived at their final size, the differences were obvious:
the wild turkey was the slimmest and perfectly competent at flying like a bird
(all of our birds are free-ranging, here.) She could fly just as well and just
as high as our quail or pheasants. (She's very nice and talks about almost
everything, too.) Our Bourbon red is a male, somewhat larger, and flies
"mostly" -- in other words, prefers to stay on the ground but can fly when
pushed. The bronze-breasted is so large and over-the-edge heavy that she would
often prefer to simply sit on the ground and, we could tell, has some trouble
even walking because of the strain.

It made us furious to see this kind of thing done. It was patently clear that
the bronze-breasted was _developed_ for the sole purpose of rapidly growing for
early slaughter (less effort and less risk at market because the time between
the decision to grow them and the time they are sold is short, meaning that the
outcome is more predictable) at a good profit ...

... and it is also patently clear that this animal could never survive for long
on its own.
personality

Wild oranges look almost nothing compared to what we are sold in the stores --
they are developed for high water content and low use of fertilizers, so that
they cost less to grow and sell for more. Washington apples, even those that
are only brought into the state from elsewhere for a time, wind up in cold
storage and taste "corky" and bad to someone like me, who grew up on an orchard
(I cannot eat Washington apples), because they will spend anywhere from six to
18 months in a special kind of cold storage so they can be sold all year 'round.
Chicken eggs from the stores have often been a long time in storage and are
frighteningly poor quality, when compared to my eggs from our chickens and ducks
(you can test by dropping the insides from about a meter above the kitchen floor
-- if the yolk breaks, throw it away; if not, it's fresh and will taste good --
no store-bought egg will survive this test as they are too old and probably
developed by chickens never allowed to move much.) Vitamins are extracted from
various grains before they are sold as flour and a small amount is metered back
in as "enrichment," with the rest being sold into the lucrative vitamin market
(which you need to take, if you are trying to live on the nearly useless flour!)
Hormones are added to cows and wind up in our milk and meat supplies. Etc.

Our entire food system is optimized for profit at levels few of us realize. All
these things I can manage being around, avoiding eating as many of them I can
because I think they taste very poor or are bad for us. But, at least, I can
understand while I avoid them

But this bronze-breasted has such a sweet personality. I suppose if it were
mean-spirited, I might imagine differently. But she's such a wonderful, nice,
considerate pet and doing this to such a breed of turkeys is a very sour deed.

Bottom line is that Fred's right -- the turkeys you eat (in the US, anyway) have
been grotesquely contorted to competitively meet a market demand.

Jon

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