Support independent journalism that matters – Become a Vox member today.

On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will take part in a national ritual that many of us say we don’t particularly enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory-farmed and heavily manipulated animals that bear little resemblance to the wild birds that were apocryphally written into Thanksgiving history. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we’ll do anything, even if turkey meat is generally considered tasteless and inedible.

“It is almost invariably a desiccated, depressing piece of sun-baked papier-mâché – an incredibly tough, unsatisfying and depressingly boring workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down we know this, but we bury it under happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”

So what is essentially the National Meat Eating Day revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. This fact flies in the face of the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to give up meat, or even eat less of it: the taste, stupid.

No doubt that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is much more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.

People crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—desires that culminate at the Thanksgiving table. We do not want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays and remind everyone of the animal cruelty and environmental destruction that led to its creation. What could be more humane than getting involved, jerky and all?

Our instinct for conformity seems particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And while many of us now recognize that there is something very wrong with the way our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all days seems like the perfect time to forget about it for a day.

In my experience, many people who are trying to limit their meat consumption say that they are vegetarian or vegan when they cook for themselves – but when they are at other people’s houses or celebrating a special occasion, they eat everything so as not to offend their hosts or provoke unpleasant conversations about factory farming.

But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, dear readers, to flip that logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes even more than taste itself, then it is precisely these conditions that we should focus on to change American eating habits for the better.

“It is eating with others where we actually have the opportunity to influence broader change, share plant-based recipes, spark discussions and reshape traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” says Natalie Levin, PEAK Animal board member Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from Vegan Twitter told me about it.

Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have been a symbol of abundance and good news – a little too rare back then and therefore something to be grateful for. Today it can be seen as little more than a symbol of our waste and rampant cruelty towards non-human animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity and the vision of a more perfect world, we can certainly think of better symbols.

Plus, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year.

The Misery of the Thanksgiving Turkey

In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a harrowing investigation into conditions in the U.S. turkey industry. He wrote:

The broad-breasted white turkey, which makes up 99 out of 100 turkeys in grocery stores, was bred to highlight – you guessed it – the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds are growing twice as fast and almost twice as large as they were in the 1960s. They may find it difficult to walk due to their top-heaviness and other health problems caused by rapid growth and unsanitary factory farming.

Another problem arises from their huge breasts: the males become so large that they cannot mount the hens, so they have to be bred artificially.

Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The ethics of what we eatwritten together with the philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job at turkey giant Butterball to research the book, in which, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker encouraged them to extract their sperm into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the chicken coop, where Mason held the chickens breast-down while another worker introduced the syringe’s contents into the hen using an air compressor.

The workers on the farm had to do this to a hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting and lowest paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.

In the wild, turkeys live in “smaller groups of about a dozen, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” says Singer, author of the new book Think about Turkeysaid in a recent episode of Simple heart Podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go out looking for food… I would say they are pretty traumatized because they have thousands of strange birds around them that they can’t get to know as individuals,” he packed up in crowded sheds .

From birth to death, a factory-farmed turkey’s life is marked by routine violence, including mutilations of beaks, toes and collars, an arduous journey to the slaughterhouse and a killing process in which he is roughly grabbed and killed by being poked, tied upside down and sent on a fast-paced killing tape. “If they’re lucky, they’ll be stunned and then the knife will cut their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they’ll miss the shock and the knife will cut their throat while they’re fully conscious.”

According to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste, Americans throw about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash on Thanksgiving. And this year, the third consecutive Thanksgiving will be celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak that has killed tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms using lethal extermination methods.

When I look for language to describe this dismal state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration – of the fullness of our planet, of our humanity, of life itself. Every other day of the year it is obscene enough. For a holiday meant to symbolize our gratitude for the earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving is often described as the most alienating day of the year for many vegetarians or vegans.

I count myself in this group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend the time preparing a feast of plant-based dishes (what most people call “side dishes,” although there’s no reason they can’t be the main course).

To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, a cashew-lentil casserole, a bright autumnal Brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (as a substitute for dairy-free cheese), a soup without mushroom clams (I add lots of white). ). beans), challah for rolls, a pumpkin miso pie that’s more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving cake you’ve ever tasted, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors pair beautifully with the holiday.

Vegan turkey roasts are completely optional, although many have become very good in recent years – I love the breaded Gardein roast and the field roast with hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make it yourself.

The hardest part about giving up meat isn’t the food (if it were, maybe convincing Americans to give up fried turkey wouldn’t be so hard). “It’s about bringing uncomfortable truths and ethical disagreements to light,” Levin said, and about grappling with the bizarre dissonance that arises from celebrations of joy and giving born of mass-produced violence.

These conversations aren’t easy, but they’re worth having. And we need not fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. On the contrary, culture is an ongoing conversation we have with each other about our shared values ​​- and any culture that doesn’t change is dead. I’ve found that it makes much more sense to adopt traditions that no longer fit our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.