Why turkey? Hundreds of millions of Americans will sit down to dinner today to give a little thanks and eat a lot of food, and most of them will partake in a heaping helping of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey.
It’s not that we have anything against the turkey, a perfectly lovely beast that Benjamin Franklin once advocated as a symbol of the nation. But turkeys are hardly engaging while alive — they aren’t considered to be particularly bright — and they aren’t notably attractive. Once they arrive on the dinner table, they don’t have anything on chicken or ham or pork when it comes to taste, although that, to coin a phrase, is a matter of taste. And while the noble-but-undistinguished turkey is undoubtedly a fixture of holiday meals, historians say it is unlikely that the bird made an appearance at the inaugural Thanksgiving feast, believed to have taken place in 1621.
So, why turkey? Why has this particular bird become synonymous with the holiday Americans celebrate as a precursor to the Christmas shopping season? Well, it turns out that the turkey’s various shortcomings are, in large part, behind its role in the Thanksgiving holiday.
Turkeys, you see, don’t have much utilitarian purpose, at least in American culture. Chickens make for good eating, as well, but when the United States was primarily agrarian, chickens were more useful if they were alive, so long as they could lay eggs. And cows? Cows have become a staple of the American diet, but they could be more beneficial if they were left alive to produce milk.