I suspect that part of the reason for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! being aired in the run-up to the festive season is because seeing people coerced into eating unpleasant things out of social obligation hits close to home for many viewers at this time of year.
People can identify with the contestants’ revulsion because they know that in several short weeks, amongst the jollity and bacchanalian revelry of their Christmas Day, they will themselves feel obligated to force roasted turkey down their throats.
Tasteless turkey
Anybody who claims to genuinely enjoy eating turkey should be made to take a polygraph test. Admittedly, I’ve been vegan for a while, and would contend that many meats are rather flavourless without smoking or seasoning. But turkey is the driest, chewiest, blandest and – except for parsnips – least edible thing on the Christmas table; it’s practically a choking hazard.
Hence why we typically only eat it once a year (maybe twice if you’re American). It’s an austere juxtaposition with the rest of the festivities, seemingly a kind of penance by which we justify the delights of Christmas. Its persistence on the yuletide menu requires a collective, socially maintained lie that we like it; we should stop pretending.
Breaking this spell is especially important given the horrors that constitute the production of your turkey. The natural distribution of wild turkeys extends across most of North America, where they forage in small groups for nuts, seeds and berries across a wide range of habitats. They roost in trees at night to avoid predation, and nest in shallow depressions on the ground.
They’re notable as a textbook example of kin selection through cooperative courtship: males display in leks, often in pairs, to attract females, but the more dominant male does most of the breeding. Males in the same lek are usually close genetic relatives, such that the subordinate ‘helper’ male obtains indirect fitness benefits by helping his brother or father to breed, which outweighs the costs to his own survival and sacrificed reproductive opportunities.
Turkey farming is far from merry
The farming of turkeys is worlds apart from their natural existence. They’re usually kept in giant sheds for most of their short lives, which in the UK may cram over 20,000 birds inside in various states of poor health or decomposition.
They typically lack sufficient space to move or exhibit natural behaviours and are prone to lesions on their feet and legs from standing in their own excrement (which subsequently pollutes nearby watercourses).
It’s not uncommon for the birds to attack and even cannibalise each other, partly due to their overcrowding, for which reason their snoods and the ends of their beaks are chopped off without anaesthetic.
Selective breeding, primarily for larger breast muscles, has contributed to a range of health and mobility issues, and means that males are now too massive and ungainly to safely mount the females, so hatcheries and breeding farms rely completely on artificial insemination. Are you feeling that Christmas spirit yet?
They often suffer serious injuries while being caught and transported to abattoirs, whereupon they’re usually gassed in the UK. In the US, despite the practices being frowned upon, birds are often killed by mass suffocation using firefighting foam, or in emergencies such as an avian influenza outbreak, by ventilation shutdown causing heatstroke. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.
The perils of the poultry industry
Which brings me to the fact that, if you were trying to create perfect conditions for the emergence of a new pandemic, you probably couldn’t do better than the poultry industry. Indeed, current forms of avian influenza began circulating in 1996-97 after emerging from poultry markets in China.
The H5N1 epidemic currently affecting livestock around the world is a variant of these viruses. Earlier this year, it began spilling over to dairy herds in the US, and there have subsequently been multiple infections of dairy workers. In the UK, avian influenza has thus far mainly affected birds, both domestic and wild.
The highly pathogenic variant of H5N1 currently causing concern in the US has recently been detected in a Norfolk turkey farm. If we want to minimise the risk of future zoonotic diseases, we should cease farming animals, especially those we don’t even enjoy eating.
A relatively new tradition
Some might argue that turkey at Christmas is a valued tradition. That hardly seems a good reason to persist with it, but it’s debatable anyway.
Turkey at Christmas only caught on with the emerging middle class during the mid-19th century, and like much of the modern Christmas culture, it originates with Charles Dickens. At the end of A Christmas Carol, the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge sends a prize turkey to the Cratchits on Christmas morning.
The whole point here is that at the time, this was an extravagant and ostentatious gesture in contrast to Scrooge’s earlier miserliness. This exotic and expensive bird would have been accessible only to the wealthy, with the average Christmas table instead featuring a goose.
Even in the turkey’s native North America, where the bird is now a staple of Thanksgiving, this also only became so during the 19th century.
Christmas turkey is an unpalatable, pointless convention incurring hideous cruelty to produce. That’s without even considering the amount that is simply wasted; the equivalent of two million out of the 11m birds annually slaughtered in the UK are thrown away.
This year, why not break from this dismal ‘tradition’?
Ideally, people would have a Christmas dinner free from any meat; there are any number of hearty, seasonal plant-based dishes to try instead. But why not at least go cold turkey on turkey?
Would you really miss it?
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