The Thanksgiving Turkey: A Tradition Worth Rethinking
This Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will participate in a national ritual that many admit they don’t particularly enjoy or find meaningful. We will collectively consume over 40 million turkeys—factory-farmed birds that bear little resemblance to the wild turkeys of Thanksgiving lore. Even though turkey meat is often considered flavorless and unpalatable, this tradition persists.
“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 Thanksgiving's past.”
The paradox is that the national holiday centered around meat eating revolves around a dish that few genuinely enjoy. This contradicts the common belief that taste is the primary reason people find it hard to give up meat. While taste certainly plays a role, the real answer is more complex, and the Thanksgiving turkey illustrates why.
Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—aspirations that reach their peak at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social outcasts who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal suffering and environmental degradation involved. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity are particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. Many of us recognize the ethical issues with how our meat is produced, but Thanksgiving might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day.
In my experience, many people trying to cut back on meat eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves but will eat whatever is served when they are guests, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming.
This Thanksgiving, I invite you to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes more than the taste itself, then it is in these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better.
“It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana, told me.
Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings—a rare and valuable 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 excess and cruelty toward 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. We should skip it this year.
### The Misery of the Thanksgiving Turkey
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote:
The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book *The Ethics of What We Eat*, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin the hen's chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
In the wild, turkeys live in small 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 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. 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.
### Reclaiming Thanksgiving
When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration—of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year.
I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).
To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and ras malai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays.
Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years—I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own.
The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food (if it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey). “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. On the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.
Three out of four Gen Z Americans will likely buy something on this year's Black Friday, which is traditionally seen as one of the most important days for e-commerce platforms and brick-and-mortar retailers. This is the result of a Statista Consumer Insights survey conducted in the U.S. at the end of October. The survey also shows that Cyber Monday, which is more focused on online shopping, is more relevant for the other three generations.
The divide is especially visible with Baby Boomers born between 1960 and 1964, where 45 percent will be shopping on Monday, and only 35 percent plan to buy something for Black Friday. On the other side of the age spectrum, 59 percent of Gen Z Americans are rather or very likely to spend money on Cyber Monday deals.
The five-day period after Thanksgiving is one of the most important timeframes for the holiday shopping season. According to data from the National Retail Federation (NRF), 200 million people in the U.S. bought something between November 23 and 27, 2023, up three million or 1.5 percent compared to 2022. Total spending for the period between November 1 and December 31 will hit $980 to $990 billion according to a recent NRF forecast.
Imagine skipping Thanksgiving dinner with your family or passing up a chance to write a heartfelt thank-you note, believing these moments aren’t worth your time. Think again. A researcher from the University of Florida finds that people consistently underestimate the profound emotional impact of life’s seemingly mundane experiences.
Dr. Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology leading the research, has uncovered a curious human tendency: we’re remarkably bad at predicting how meaningful our experiences will be.
“We don’t make sense of events until they actually happen,” Westgate explains in a university release. “We don’t process events until we need to when they actually happen and not before.”
The research began with a simple yet provocative question during Westgate’s graduate school days: Do people accurately anticipate the emotional significance of future events? Her initial study with University of Virginia undergraduates provided a surprising answer. Students consistently misjudged how meaningful their Thanksgiving holiday would be, underestimating the emotional depth of the experience.
Intrigued by these initial findings, Westgate expanded her research during the pandemic, replicating the study with a larger group of University of Florida students. The results were consistent: people systematically fail to recognize the potential meaning of upcoming experiences.
This isn’t just about holiday gatherings. The three-year National Science Foundation-funded study will explore how this psychological blind spot affects major life decisions — from career choices and volunteer work to personal milestones like starting a family. Perhaps most intriguingly, the research will examine how people might avoid potentially transformative experiences that involve discomfort, missing out on opportunities for personal growth and resilience.
“We want to live meaningful lives, we want to do meaningful things,” Westgate notes. “If we are not realizing that an experience is going to be meaningful, we may be less likely to do it and miss out on these potential sources of meaning in our own lives.”
The ultimate goal of the research is not just to understand this phenomenon but to develop strategies to help people better recognize and embrace potentially meaningful experiences.
“Sometimes we go into a project, and we know what we are going to find,” Westgate says. “This is one of those projects that surprised us.”
So, if you’re thinking about skipping this Thanksgiving or your family’s annual holiday get-together this year, stop for a second and reconsider. That seemingly insignificant moment might just be the source of unexpected meaning you’ve been overlooking.