Photo: D’Arcy‘Tis the season for turkey shopping, and the price is right. According to this Wall Street Journal squib, the price of whole frozen turkeys has fallen from 94 cents per pound last year to just 66 cents per pound, with Wal-Mart leading the way, selling turkeys for just 40 cents per pound. (Note: price estimates vary.)
The estimated volume of turkeys raised in the U.S. this year is about 250 million, down slightly from last year. But if the past is predictive, that may be because of an increase in average turkey weight. Six states — Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Missouri, and Indiana — account for two-thirds of all U.S. turkey production. The actual number of turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving, meanwhile, often reported to be 46 million — is, according to Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guy at the Journal, fuzzy at best.
In any case, how many commercially raised turkeys do you think were the result of artificial insemination?
The answer seems to be 100 percent.
Why?
Because Americans particularly love to eat the breast meat of male turkeys. (“I suspect — though don’t ask me to prove! — that at root it’s about increasing the surface area for gravy,” says Suzanne Freidberg, who guest-blogged here about her book Fresh.) This means that turkeys have been bred to have abnormally large breasts. As Karen Davis reports in More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality, citing William M. Healy, “such gross breast development [means that] few adult males can even walk, let alone breed.” As you can imagine, this leads to conditions that are abhorrent to animal-rights activists and others.
Here are some of the particulars of the how the mass artificial insemination is carried out; you may want to save this reading until a few days after Thanksgiving (unless PETA has already scared you into going the Tofurkey route). If you’re especially brave, you might want to check out this Technical Advice Sheet (pdf) from British United Turkeys Ltd. For instance:
When the straw is inserted into the everted oviduct (fig. 2) the operator (or “cracker”) should release the pressure with the hands and knees to prevent “blowback” of the semen. When the pipette has been removed gently lower the hen to the ground in the direction of the inseminated hens. If the hen is dropped this may force semen out of the oviduct.
Anyway … now that Thanksgiving has nearly arrived, a great many of us are preparing to roast that bird to a golden-brown crisp. One word of advice: if Al Gore happens to stop in, you might want to keep him out of the kitchen. As he told Conan O’Brien in this recent Tonight Show interview, while discussing geothermal energy, “the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees.”
Unfortunately, Gore was off by — well, a lot. So he may think your oven too is far, far hotter than it actually is, and if you leave the roasting duties to him you’ll end up with one seriously raw bird.
Thanks to Will Masters and James McWilliams for help with the turkey literature.
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I don’t see how Tofurky is an appealing option for a Thanksgiving dinner. I mean, I don’t want to eat Turkey, so why should I eat a bad substitute for Turkey?
There’s already 2 to 3 times more food on a typical thanksgiving menu then we need, cut out the turkey, and you get to enjoy more of the rest of the food.
Al, Al, please leave the science to the scientists. You are becoming an embarrassment to environmentalists. Good to know info about turkeys. Most of us have the image of the wild tom in our heads when we think about the Thanksgiving bird, not the strange mutants we actually eat. By the way, ours was 25 cents a pound at a Houston HEB. Under certain circumstances, the store was giving the turkeys away.
funny, i guess, that al gore got something so wrong. but in all your defenses of the global-warming stuff in your new book, i have yet to read an explanation for what seems to be the basic, underlying mocking/skeptical tone regarding gore. i mean, i get that he’s wrong about stuff, but why does his wrong-ness provoke ire in you guys in a way that the wrong-ness of nearly every other politician doesn’t?
Well, if this Al Gore dude has found out that the temperature in the interior of the earth has risen to several million degrees, that explains the global warming thing he got a Nobel Peace Prize for. Right?
Everyone needs a little (more?) semen blowback in their lives.
OMG! Maybe if Al is wrong about the temperature of the Earth maybe he’s wrong about global warming too! I totally get where you’re going with that!
Or, you know, maybe he just misspoke, which happens to mortals sometimes.
I don’t think I have too much to add to this discussion, apart from the fact that my local paper’s syndicated ultra-conservative has been pimping the shoddy facts from your latest book (i.e. the thermal heat generated by “black” solar cells which has been subsequently debunked.)
I’m all for contrarianism and thinking outside the box, particularly in heated controversial subjects that have enormous ramifications.
That said, there are a variety of center-right blogs with a focus on science and economics to choose from, ones that are more rigorous about their fact-checking. Places where intellectual rigor and professionalism go beyond the snarky post about Al Gore.
This comment is merely posted to mention that I have struck Freakonomics from my google reader. I will check in from time to time. I applaud your contrarianism, but please try to be more factual moving forward.
Gore provokes ire because he constantly pretends to know more of the science than he does, and encourages a mocking tone of people who have abandoned science, or won’t listen to scientists.
He provokes more of my ire because he doesn’t practice what he preaches, suggesting others have to consume less, and he shrugs off agriculture arguments because he knows that telling people not to eat meat would, while more effective than more efficient cars, would make him less popular and too left wing.