Save a Turkey?


Hope y'all had a wonderful thanksgiving, whether you spent it with family, friends, or working in the hospital (like some of my fellow interns), and whether you thanked God, yo'mama, or anyone else meaningful to you.

My bro and I ate some yummy enchiladas in our vegetarian way of celebrating thanksgiving. Both Nalin and I have chosen to remain vegetarian for the animals (I'll save the interesting story of how we became vegetarian for another day). Neither of us push this way of thinking and living on our friends, and yes, our friends do eat meat around us, but we chose this for ourselves. Turkey day does, however, present an opportunity to discuss the issue, and I've taken that opportunity in the past (for a writing assignment in 7th grade, I wrote a play on two school-age friends who went from meat-eating to convincing their families to not to turkey on thanksgiving -- but not quite in the way Huey did in the Boondocks cartoon above).

As many folks wished each other a "Happy Turkey Day" as they left work on Wednesday, 45 million turkeys in the US were experiencing the opposite of happy (or had already met their fate). The Free Press has a short piece on The Making of a Turkey -- it's not for the weak at heart, but hey, it answers the age old "how do you go from Turkey Birth to Turkey on My Plate?" question.

A friend forwarded me a link to the "Adopt-a-turkey" campaign. Sounds cheezy, yes, especially the part where you receive a (signed) photo of your turkey. But I love the idea. And I'm eager to check out the upcoming Los Angeles outdoor safehaven that Farm Sanctuary is creating.

In related news, those turkeys are beginning to think they're the bosses around here:

Last month, jogging on a back road in Massachusetts' Berkshire hills, Betsy Kosheff passed a farmers' field where farm-raised wild turkeys were pecking for grain. Suddenly about 30 of them took off after Ms. Kosheff, who has a public-relations firm in West Stockbridge, Mass.

"It was like that scene in 'The Birds' except there was no phone booth," says Ms. Kosheff, referring to the famous refuge in the Alfred Hitchcock movie. A passing friend stopped her pickup truck and Ms. Kosheff ran around it several times. The turkeys kept up the chase, although she says "they were too stupid to split up or change directions" to trap her. Finally, Ms. Kosheff got in the truck, where, she says, her friend "was laughing so hard she almost choked on her Dunkin' Donut."

Payback time! (yikes!) But of note: We're not reducing the wild turkey population by eating them on thanksgiving and christmas and other occasions -- most turkeys born in the US for human consumption arise from artificial insemination, as the turkeys who are raised on factory farms ain't healthy enough to breed).

And for those of you who thought Tofurkey was weird (I'd rather not eat something in the shape of a turkey, or made completely out of tofu, if it were up to me), well, there's always jello-turkey . I'll, um, go for the homemade enchiladas...the ones that look like...well, enchiladas.

(cross posted on LosAnjalis)