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Excerpts from “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King. Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. But Thanksgiving is freed from any particular thing we are thankful for. We aren’t celebrating the Pilgrims, but what the Pilgrims celebrated (The Pilgrims weren’t even a feature of the holiday until the late nineteenth century.) Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but there’s nothing specifically American about it - we aren’t celebrating America, but American ideals. Its openness makes it available to anyone who feels like expressing thanks, and points beyond the crimes that made America possible, and the commercialization, kitsch, and jingoism that have been heaved onto the shoulders of the holiday.

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What is added by having a turkey on the Thanksgiving table? … Perhaps the turkey is there because it is fundamental to the ritual - it is how we celebrate Thanksgiving. Why? Because Pilgrims might have eaten it after their first Thanksgiving? It’s more likely that they didn’t. We know that they didn’t have corn, apples, potatoes, or cranberries, and the only two written reports from the legendary Thanksgiving at Plymouth mention venison and wildfowl. Though it’s conceivable that they ate wild turkey, we know that the turkey wasn’t made part of the ritual until the nineteenth century. And historians have now discovered an even earlier Thanksgiving than the 1621 Plymouth celebration that English-American historians made famous. Half a century before Plymouth, early America settlers celebrated Thanksgiving with the Timucua Indians in what is now Florida - the best evidence suggests that the settlers were Catholic rather than Protestant, and spoke Spanish rather than English. They dined on bean soup.

But let’s just make believe that the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving and were eating turkey. Putting aside the obvious fact that the Pilgrims did many things that we wouldn’t want to do now (and that we want to do many things they didn’t), the turkeys we eat have about as much in common with the turkeys the Pilgrims might have eaten as does the ever-punch-lined tofurkey. At the center of our Thanksgiving tables is an animal that has never breathed fresh air or saw the sky until it was packed away for slaughter. At the end of our forks is an animal that was incapable of reproducing sexually. In our bellies is an animal with antibiotics in its belly. The very genetics of our birds are radically different. If the Pilgrims could have seen into the future, what would they have thought of the turkey on our table? Without exaggeration, it’s unlikely that they would have recognized it as a turkey.

And what would happen if there was no turkey? Would the tradition be broken, or injured, if instead of a bird we simply had the sweet potato casserole, homemade rolls, green beans with almonds, cranberry concoctions, yams, buttery mashed potatoes, pumpkin and pecan pies? Maybe we could add some Timucuan bean soup. It’s not so hard to imagine it. See your loved ones around the table. Hear the sounds, smell the smells. There is no turkey. Is the holiday undermined? Is Thanksgiving no longer Thanksgiving?

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The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades. According to Benjamin Franklin, whom I think of as a kind of patron saint of the holiday, it was “a farmer of plain sense” who proposed that feasting “would be more becoming of gratitude.” The voice of that farmer, who I suspect was a stand-in for Franklin himself, is now the conviction of a nation.

Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining. Good is not so much a symbol of freedom as the first requirement of freedom. We eat foods that are native to America on Thanksgiving to acknowledge that fact. In many ways, Thanksgiving initiates a distinctly American ideal of ethical consumerism. The Thanksgiving meal is America’s founding act of conscientious consumption.

But what about the food we feast upon? Does what we consume make sense?

All but a negligible number of the 45 million turkeys that find their way to our Thanksgiving tables were unhealthy, unhappy, and – this is a radical understatement- unloved.  If people come to different conclusions about the turkey’s place on the Thanksgiving table, at least we can all agree on those three things.

Today’s turkeys are natural insectivores fed a grossly unnatural diet, which can include “meat, sawdust, leather tannery by-products,” and other things whose mention, while widely document, would probably push your belief too far. Given their vulnerability to disease, turkeys are perhaps the worst fit of any animal for the factory model. So they are given more antibiotics that any other farmed animals. Which encourages antibiotic resistance. Which makes these indispensible drugs less effective for humans. In a perfectly direct way, the turkeys on our table are making it harder to cure human illness.

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Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while traveling to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop and help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of the birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem or God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away. Lincoln was a hugely inconsistent personality, and of course he ate birds far more often than he aided them. But presented with the suffering of a fellow creature, he responded.