Why We Should Rethink Thanksgiving

The deeper you look, the darker it gets.

Turkey at Thanksgiving is one of the most bizarre rituals in American culture.

First, all of us literally eat the same thing — and something we rarely otherwise eat. 85% of Americans have turkey on Thanksgiving, leading to the slaughter of over 45 million birds (and over $1 billion in sales) on a single day. It’s the most successful food marketing campaign in history.

Second, the original act of generosity by Native Americans that inspired Thanksgiving had nothing to do with turkeys. When Squanto discovered starving Pilgrims in 1621, he brought eels and corn, not turkey. But “eels at Thanksgiving” just doesn’t have the same ring.

Third, while Thanksgiving is intended to be a holiday about kindness, generosity, and gratitude, we instead celebrate the occasion with widespread corporate animal cruelty and by largely ignoring the genocide of the indigenous people of this land. Take the President’s Thanksgiving. It starts with the pardoning of a turkey where everyone is compassionate and smiling and petting a cute animal on the head. And it ends with carving up the flesh of another animal who is virtually identical to the one pardoned — a genetically engineered sibling, in fact. That’s not how pardons are supposed to work! You don’t pardon one man then execute his brother when neither has committed any crime.

But it gets even worse. To show his commitment to the ag industry, President Biden gets his turkeys from Jennie-O, a subsidiary of poultry giant Hormel Foods. Jennie-O is a factory farm where a 25-pound animal is crammed with thousands of others into an indoor shed where each one receives around two square feet of space. (It’s like raising a mid-sized dog on two sheets of legal paper.) It’s so crowded that the company burns the turkeys’ beaks to a blunt nob when they're babies to prevent them from tearing each other to pieces when they become adults. A turkey’s beak is filled with sensitive nerve endings, similar to a human hand. It how they explore the world. Envision a torture chamber filled with thousands of amputees missing their hands, and you'll see Jennie-O.

This is a far cry from the kindness and generosity that we’re taught the Thanksgiving holiday is supposed to embody. This is corporate cruelty and greed, endorsed by the most powerful office in the country, and indeed one of the most powerful offices in the world.

I won’t be having a “normal” Thanksgiving. I’m sitting in a Sonoma county jail. But maybe its time for all of us to give up some normal traditions — and leave cruelty off our Thanksgiving plates.