90 animal, vegetable, miracleon a strategy of giving our food a good life until it was good on the table.
Our turkeys would be pampered as children, and then allowed a freedom
on open pasture that’s unknown to conventionally raised poultry. Thanks-
giving was still far away. And some of these birds would survive the holi-
days, if all went according to plan. Our goal was to establish a breeding
flock. These were some special turkeys.
Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than
99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad- Breasted White, a quick-
fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial- scale setting. These
are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at the
rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-
Breasted White should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year
old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapa-
ble of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that
make turkeys behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing-
to- wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or sui-
cidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works
better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend
holds for all animals bred for confi nement. For turkeys, the scheme that
gave them an extremely breast- heavy body and ultra- rapid growth has also
left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them
unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.
So how do we get more of them? Well you might ask. The sperm must
be artifi cially extracted from live male turkeys by a person, a professional
turkey sperm- wrangler if you will, and artificially introduced to the hens,
and that is all I’m going to say about that. If you think they send the toms
off to a men’s room with little paper cups and Playhen Magazine, that’s
not how it goes. I will add only this: if you are the sort of parent who
threatens your teenagers with a future of unsavory jobs when they ditch
school, here’s one more career you might want to add to the list.
When our family considered raising turkeys ourselves, we knew we
weren’t going to go there. I was intrigued by what I knew of older breeds,
especially after Slow Food USA launched a campaign to reacquaint Amer-
ican palates with the flavors of heritage turkeys. I wondered if the pale,
grain-fattened turkeys I’d always bought at the supermarket were counter-