How Turkeys Become Turkeys

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is the celebration and expression of gratitude: for family, farmers and all the goodness in the world. I'm also partial to a good pumpkin pie and even the cranberry jelly that comes out of a can. The turkey, however, I can do without. That changed a bit when I harvested this main course for the first time. 


In honor of our dear friend the turkey, and in appreciation of those who raise them and prepare them for our tables, I present to you the annual romp through the slaughterhouse. I always feel that knowing the origins of my food increases its taste and my appreciation for it. This piece was originally featured in the Slow Food Tufts blog in 2009. I enjoy revisiting it every year, and I hope you will too.

Warmest wishes to you and yours on the national holiday of gorging and appreciation. May your turkey be juicy, your mashed potatoes buttery and your revelry savory.

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Waking at 5 am, I dug my favorite farming clothes out from under the bed. I missed the early mornings, dirty hands and exhaustion from physical labor and looked forward to the long day of work ahead. This used to be my every day routine, pre-dawn mornings and perpetually dirty work clothes, when I spent my days on a farm in Portland, Oregon. Since going back to graduate school in Boston, mornings start later and the farming clothes are tucked out of site, undoubtedly a bit lonely.

Today began with a three-hour drive south to a diversified farm in the Hudson River Valley of New York. It was a long haul to visit Sara, one of my dearest friends, and some soon-to-be Thanksgiving turkeys. I was off to help harvest and process 150, seven month old Broad Breasted Whites that spent most of their turkey lives foraging on pasture. “Harvest” and “process” are, of course, pleasant euphemisms for slaughter, the last stage of raising livestock and getting it to market.

 As many Americans were in the pre-Thanksgiving frenzy of buying frozen turkeys at the store, my excitement peaked knowing I would experience this process from a new perspective. Today's turkeys would not come from the aisles of a grocery, but from the wet, slippery tiled floor and food-grade surfaced walls of a small-scaled poultry processing facility. All the birds were scheduled to be slaughtered and readied for market largely by hand that day, all pre-purchased by those willing to trek to the farm to pick up a turkey from its source. And for myself, I was just grateful to place one more puzzle piece into the landscape of skills needed to raise food and successfully market it as a small farmer.

On the walk from my car to the barn I felt that familiar mix of excitement and nervousness roiling in the bottom of my belly. I was in an unfamiliar place about to embark upon a new, and quite messy, expedition. My step was quickened by that first-day-of-school anticipation, the squawk of the geese in the pasture and the glow of the early morning autumn sun warming me through my wool sweater. Being at once totally present, and looking forward to the day poultry processing would become part of my own routine, I opened the heavy door and stepped in to the small facility. Before the door could close, I was immediately instructed to change into a pair of sanitary rubber boots for slaughterhouse use only, lined up by the door.

“So, what made you want to come here and do this?” one of the farm crew asked as I walked toward him down the white-walled hall.

My answer was simple: I want to gain all the firsthand experience I can because one day I plan to raise poultry on my own.

I had a few weeks  to mentally prepare for this adventure between accepting the invitation and my three-hour early morning drive to these rolling hills. I spent the time recognizing my immense excitement at participating in harvest and learning a bevy of new skills about small-scale poultry processing. Not only did it feel like an important step to gain poultry production knowledge, but also a huge step toward a deeper understanding about what it takes to produce the food I eat. Tempering my overt enthusiasm was the awareness that turkey harvest unavoidably included killing a living animal. I believe strongly that animals are an important part of the nutrient cycle of the farm, and of our food system. So for me, I concluded that if I’m going to eat the meat, it should be humanely raised using sustainable practices and that I should be able to kill it…or at least be intimately aware of how it ends up on my plate. But at my core, I was just inexplicably excited to experience a part of the food system in this way.

I knew, roughly, what to expect inside the small slaughterhouse: the large cones that would hold the birds upside-down as their necks were cut, the hot water scald to loosen tough feathers for plucking and the stainless steel work tables for manual tasks. Not to mention the infamous plucker: the stainless steel cylinder lined with rubber fingers that quickly pull feathers from the birds as they spin around and around in the basin. Then evisceration…the process of removing the turkey guts by hand. I’ll call them guts because before that day all I thought of inside a bird was a mish-mash of intestines and the mysterious ‘giblets’. This last step of the process was the biggest mystery, and I was thrilled to become intimately familiar with the internal organs of a turkey.

Quickly, the door to the small processing room swung open to expose five farmers, gloved and aproned like disorganized surgeons, along with large tubs filled with ice and cooling turkeys. I waved a hello to Sara, as there are no hugs when covered in turkey, and introduced myself to the rest of the crew. Sara was disassembling turkeys as they landed in a pile after spinning out of the plucker. At this stage they remained whole birds, featherless and pink, but missing heads and feet. Sara’s job, and later mine, was to remove the oil gland, trachea, crop and neck. The necks were collected in a bucket of ice and then each bird hung one at a time on a rack for evisceration.

Two very skilled and quick moving livestock apprentices took on this task as I watched with awe and jealousy. First, a sharp knife cut a circle around the vent of the hanging bird. Then the intestines were gently escorted out of the bird and onto the stainless steel table below, ultimately into a barrel to be composted. Internal organs were then removed. The sponge-like lungs headed to the compost, but the liver, gizzard and heart were sorted into buckets of ice. They would later be packed into bags with the necks and stuffed into the cavity of the birds, the infamous giblets. I tried my hand at this, and at first it was the equivalent of playing Operation, blindfolded. But slowly I became familiar by touch -rough, slippery, tough and squishy- with these distinct organs inside a still-warm bird.

OK, this is the point where you may say, “Stop! Please! Too much information!” The point of these precise details is not for the gross-out factor or to open debate about the ethics of eating animals. But for those of us who believe in good, clean, fair food: this is it. This is small-scale production that treats animals, farmers and environment fairly. And the more we understand exactly what it takes to raise this kind of food, the easier it is to support farmers, growers and producers who share these values. Each of us may value a different part of the process, but the power is in the knowing.

After half the turkeys were resting in ice baths, we got to the task of cleaning out the gizzards so they could join the other giblets. Turkeys do not have teeth, so the gizzard is an internal organ, a secondary stomach, that mashes up ingested food. It looking something like a round oyster or mussel covered with a smooth layer of muscle.  The external squeezing of the muscle grinds ingested food with grit: rough non-food matter that’s pecked up by the turkeys and stored in the gizzard for this purpose. Little did I know that each gizzard gets cut open, grit cleaned out by hand, and the rough lining peeled out before it joins forces with the rest of the giblets.

We stood around the processing room, the floor slippery with melting ice and turkey mess, chatting as we worked our way through the icy buckets of fist-sized gizzards. Sharing small, sharp knives each gizzard was cut open like a clam, exposing the gritty contents of the turkey’s stomach and an edge of yellow lining. This is delicate, detailed work when compared to the previous hours of the day, but rewarding. I slowly opened my first gizzard, almost like unwrapping a small gift, to find a collection of pebbles, short pieces of straw and small bits that looked eerily like sea glass. I paused, not quite believing what I saw. Maybe there was something about turkey digestion that I just didn’t understand.

Sea glass?

I glanced around the room; every other gizzard was full of the frosted glass too. Everyone in the room was noticing this treasure at the same time. Jovial accusations and laughter sparked up in the circle around me and I caught only snippets of conversation.

“It just appeared out of nowhere,” the newest apprentice spoke quietly amidst the teasing.

“Middle of the pasture…”

“…and there went another windshield,” spilled out of the livestock manager’s mouth.

Through the rapid-fire banter of the crew and the jovial finger pointing, the best I could piece together was this: Someone drove the farm truck quickly through the turkey pasture, and the remnants of an old farm building suddenly appeared on the horizon. There was not enough time to avoid hitting the structure. A collision ensued and the windshield busted, leaving a sparkly pool of safety auto glass on the grass, irresistible to the curious turkeys. For all these turkeys knew, this was the best looking meal they would ever eat. This unusual ‘grit’ was then burnished into the equivalent of sea glass in the gizzard of every single turkey, helping to grind food from that day forward. Not to worry, the glass didn’t harm the turkeys, as the thick lining inside the gizzard serves to protect the bird in just this situation. Despite it all, I was awestruck as all the pieces came together.

It was amazing to see such odd and unexpected contents in the belly of the beast. More importantly, it served as a very direct reminder of the connection between what we put into the animals that will become our food and where it all ends up…be it the gizzard of a turkey, fresh produce, our air or water.

I left the farm that day exhausted, content, dirty and empowered. I was more steadfast than ever to make educated choices about the source of my food, proud to learn a new skill and determined to honor the gibblets of my next Thanksgiving turkey.