Recipes for Turkey: Reflections on a Meal that Almost Wasn’t

From time to time, ecological change wreaks havoc on the foods that cultures and peoples choose to eat. The nineteenth century’s taste for passenger pigeon and many species of sea turtle, for instance, has since faded into obscurity following an overindulgence that caused them to become, quite literally, eaten off the face of the planet.

But now as Thanksgiving approaches, it might be time to pause and reflect upon another dish that almost wasn’t: the roast holiday turkey. Yes, that regal and omnipresent bird that graces festive tables every autumn almost went the way of the passenger pigeon, joining  multitudinous others that lost their battle against the settler’s plow and pioneer’s stomach as the nineteenth century came to a close.

Wild turkey—scientifically speaking, Meleagris gallopavo—originally inhabited nearly all of North America. It was a ubiquitous, forest-dwelling bird whose thrifty appetite and diverse habitat tastes allowed it to thrive in a variety of conditions.  Wild turkey, no doubt, was one of many fowl served at the first Thanksgiving, though by all accounts roast venison took center stage. From the beginnings of Euro-American settlement, wild turkey represented an essential part of the American diet; the birds’ inability to achieve a quick exit made them easy targets for even neophyte hunters, and the grains grown by American farmers ensure their close and constant proximity to human settlement.  The more wheat and corn farmers cultivated, the more gobblers lurked about in anticipation of a free lunch.

The wild turkey’s haplessness around gun-toting humans, combined with its ill-suited love of the man-made landscape, nearly spelled its demise. In 1813, Connecticut became the first state to declare wild turkeys extinct. The wild turkey population then collapsed: ten million birds declined to a few million, millions became hundreds of thousands; hundreds of thousands became tens of thousands. The ecological coming-undone was unsettlingly similar to that of the American bison on the Great Plains. By 1900, a robust population of more than ten million turkeys was reduced to only thirty thousand, with remnant flocks scattered through a small portion of the turkey’s former range.

Meanwhile, the domesticated turkey was experiencing a no less drastic population decline, although due to a slightly different predator. As with other fowl such as chicken and duck, many farmwomen raised turkeys in their barnyard flock, both for food and sale on the fall market, when consumer demand for turkey increased. The domestic turkey was a bit of a genealogical mutt. Its stock is generally thought to have come from Mexico through Europe, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that farmwomen crossbred these turkeys with the wild gobblers poking around their farms. Crossbreeding with wild turkeys gave domesticated birds an especially hardy character while allowing farmwomen to sustain their flocks with little cost.  For those who enjoyed the taste of such fowl, this thriving system of farm-raised turkeys compensated for the dwindling numbers of their wild cousins.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a liver disease called blackhead, or histomoniasis, barreled across the continent leaving decimated domesticated turkey populations in its wake.  The parasites that caused blackhead attacked young brood, causing nearly one hundred percent mortality by preventing them from properly digesting their food. Even though the domestic decline was neither as steep nor as complete as that of the wild turkey, domestic turkey populations nonetheless fell from over ten million birds to around three million in just over a decade, costing tens of thousands of farmwomen their livelihood and hundreds of thousands of families their fowl-centric Thanksgiving repast.

The virtual disappearance of the wild and domestic turkeys reveals the fragility of the ecosystems that underpin our foodways. It also suggests, however, the resiliency and dynamism of those very same food and ecosystems. Within decades of their population nadirs, after all, the wild and domestic turkeys had rebounded, although under much different circumstances and with quite different physical birds.  The rebirth of the wild turkey population resulted from game managers interbreeding domestic hens with wild toms, and then interbreeding those offspring until they achieved a bird that was 99% “wild,” perhaps unaware that they were simply effecting the reverse of what farmwomen had accomplished throughout most of the 19th century. After the blackhead epidemic, domestic turkey production consolidated and industrialized, with new and modern turkey factories overtaking the upper Midwest and West in service of one simple goal: to satisfy Americans’ distinctly seasonal and ever-growing demand for the iconic Thanksgiving turkey.

So, when you toast that stately American bird this Thanksgiving, recognize the long and complicated ecological story behind your dinner. And, more importantly, appreciate the dinner that almost wasn’t.