America's Bird
yoffe, eMily
BOA America's Bird The turkey, in love and war. by Emily Yoffe Books about how a particular foodstuff explains our world have become a publishing staple. There are volumes on salt, cod (although...
...tory—that quoting from it extensively at the Thanksgiving table could make you the Ken Jennings of the feast...
...There are volumes on salt, cod (although not salt cod), potato, and rum, among others...
...Smith describes how this holiday—even if it rests on shaky history—has been a portal through which successive decades of immigrants have learned to celebrate their Americanness...
...This transcontinental turkey traffic resulted in the most popular turkey breed in the United States in the 19th century, the American Bronze, which was a cross between domesticated turkeys brought back to America from Europe, and then mated with wild birds...
...then the turkeys are stunned by submerging their heads and necks in a bath of electrified water...
...It wasn't until after the Civil War that the mythology about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims came into being, spawning a million elementary school reenactment pageants...
...Franklin and Thomas Jefferson came up with a depiction of Moses crossing the Red Sea...
...Audubon also described how, when the clutch of about a dozen eggs hatched, the mother would walk along with her brood under the tender cover of her wings...
...Turkeys and Muscovy duck were the only fowl domesticated by the native people of the Americas in pre-Columbian times...
...Or make your fellow revelers want to shove a drumstick down your throat...
...does that fate await us if we get ever more corpulent...
...Hale hoped a national day of thanks would help prevent the union's dissolution...
...Within days of hatching it is debeaked, desnooded, and de-toed—to curb their ability to injure each other under conditions of "intense confinement...
...during the Renaissance a forerunner of the turducken was served at feasts...
...One of these new breeds was even named "Bronze Mae West...
...But when Smith describes the modern commercial history of the domesticated turkey, one wonders if the birds don't sometimes wish they had just disappeared...
...by 2004 it was 17.4...
...Now food historian Andrew F. Smith has contributed The Turkey: An American Story...
...Despite the seeming blandness of his topic, he has produced not a turkey—he explains that the term of opprobrium comes from unfair assumptions about turkeys' lack of intelligence—but a surprisingly palatable volume on our native fowl and how it became a symbol of America's providence (if not gluttony...
...Undeterred by the war, Hale finally succeeded when, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a national day of thanks...
...But the trends are not going the turkeys' way...
...But they were so out of proportion that they could barely stand, and were completely unable to mate...
...When the image of the eagle was chosen instead, Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter lamenting that, as long as a bird was to become our symbol, he would have preferred the turkey, "in comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America...
...Turkey quickly became an important Old World food...
...By the 1930s, in response to consumer desires, breeders began producing crosses that had mountainous flesh on their breasts...
...The birds are raised in groups of up to 10,000 in windowless barns that are constantly lit to encourage the birds to eat...
...By the 1880s, there were predictions that the wild turkey would soon join the dodo...
...About four months later, Smith writes, they are "shackled upside down on an assembly line...
...When Europeans first arrived on this continent, it was covered with wild turkeys...
...I can attest to their comeback, having seen a flock in the Maine woods this summer, and one in Washington's Rock Creek Park this fall...
...And for the next two centuries, little was made of Winslow's celebration...
...You can only read this chapter with the thought that maybe this is the year to try Tofurkey...
...Like another abundant species, the buffalo, wild turkeys were so prodigiously hunted, and their habitat so widely destroyed, that their population began plunging almost immediately after European settlement...
...By the 1950s, these broad-breasted turkeys had become the commercial standard...
...It was the two-decade campaign begun in 1846 by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale (author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb") that was the driving force behind this holiday...
...Her campaign took on particular urgency as the nation headed toward civil war...
...They exclusively reproduce through artificial insemination— although Smith does not say if the deed is done with a turkey baster...
...It's true that Pilgrim Edward Winslow wrote a letter in 1621 describing how the governor of the colony "sent four men on fowling," after which there was a lengthy feast attended by Massasoit and his men...
...Smith says that one of the biggest admirers of our native bird was the immigrant John James Audubon, whose Birds of America opening plate is of the wild turkey...
...But 20th-century efforts have saved the wild bird, and it is now estimated that seven million turkeys roam the continental United States...
...Here are likewise aboundance of Turkies often killed in the Woods, farre greater than our English Turkies, and exceeding fat, sweet, and fleshy," wrote the Massachusetts Bay Colony minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1630...
...Smith quotes Audubon's wonderful descriptions of turkey courtship, with the males strutting and puffing until the female "suddenly opens her wings, throws herself towards him, as if to put a stop to his idle delay, lays herself down, and receives his dilatory caresses...
...Smith vividly describes the short, unhappy life of the commercial bird...
...And by the end of the evening this November 23rd, many of us will feel that we have eaten our annual allotment in a single meal...
...By the 19th century, Charles Dickens, in A Christmas Carol, enshrined turkey as the centerpiece of the Christmas meal...
...Of course, Smith dismantles the myth of the first Thanksgiving...
...In 1970, per capita turkey consumption was 8.1 pounds...
...Smith writes that the colonists delighted that they didn't have to tend or raise these birds, but The Turkey An American Story by Andrew F. Smith Illinois, 264 pp., $29.95 they were readily available...
...The bird that is the focus of our modern feast is a grotesque that defies the principles of natural selection...
...Smith wisely does not try to make the case that the turkey is the central actor in American history...
...The controversy was over the design of the official seal of the United States...
...But it was not a day of thanksgiving as the pilgrims would have understood it, which were religious commemorations observed in church...
...The image of these creatures seems like a warning to Americans who consume them...
...Smith also clarifies the story about Benjamin Franklin campaigning for the turkey, not the bald eagle, to be the national bird...
...The turkey was quickly embraced by European explorers who brought the birds back with them as early as the 1520s...
...The book is stuffed (all right, I'll stop) with so much turkey information —from their natural history, to their commercial history, to their role in hisEmily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 11
