Turkey Tales, Turkey Tails
What we can learn from the definitive North American bird (sorry, bald eagles)
Zach Galifinakis: In 2013 you pardoned a turkey. What do you have planned for 2014?
Barack Obama: We’ll probably pardon another turkey. We do that every year. Was that depressing for you, seeing one turkey taken out of circulation, a turkey you couldn’t eat?”
“I feel eleven turkeys creeping up on me.” -Taylor Swift (misheard lyrics of “Lavender Haze”)
Turkey gets a bad rap. We malign the birds as dumb, dismiss the meat as bland, and overlook the country in favor of a dumb, bland bird, and so on. No matter how many individual turkeys our presidents pardon, the reputation of turkeys doesn’t seem to improve. Is the turkey really as boring and bland as you’ve been told or can it teach us some important lessons about America? This Thanksgiving, let’s chase a few important turkey tales and find out.
Ben Franklin and the great bird misunderstandings
You have been lied to about bald eagles. They don’t sound like you think they do. Anytime you’ve sees a bald eagle on screen patriotically swoop down from its perch atop a Humvee and land grasping an American flag in its talons, the epic war cry coming from is razor sharp beak is in fact stolen from another bird.
The confident screech you’ve heard in commercials and memes is actually the vocalization of a red tailed hawk. Real bald eagles produce a shrill, high-pitched warbling noise, like they’re scolding each other for forgetting to move the laundry. Just listen to this side by side comparison.
The mythology of bald eagles has stolen the sound of another bird in the way that real bald eagles steal fish from Ospreys. This key American ornithological misconception leads us to yet another.
Contrary to popular belief, Ben Franklin never formally advocated for the turkey being our national bird. However, he wasn’t shy about his true feelings about both bald eagles and turkeys. In a letter to his daughter in 1784, Ben Franklin wrote:
“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him."
Never before has a founding father thrown so much shade on one bird species. Who knew our national emblem was just a freeloader with a beak? Accusing bald eagles of being winged socialists is the kind of rhetoric that just might get you a show on Fox News or tear the modern Republican party asunder. Either way, I’m here for the chaos. Franklin went on to say this about turkeys:
“For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”
That man did not mince words. I for one would watch a movie where turkeys attacked British Grenadiers during the Revolutionary War. It would likely be twice as entertaining as Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot and just as historically accurate.
The turkey tails of American Samoa
When you think about turkey as part of a meal you likely think about the light meat and dark meat. Perhaps you make plans to simmer the neck and wings along with the carcass leftover from the Thanksgiving meal to make a batch of turkey stock. Your pozole game will be better for this foresight, but what of the tail? Every turkey has one. The story of where they go manages to touch on the obesity crisis, post-colonial capitalism, and AAPI food ways so efficiently I’m frankly astounded Johnny Harris hasn’t made a video about it yet.
Fatty and tough cuts of meat like turkey tails have a long history of being rejected by the white ruling class in America. For example, despite their trendiness today, oxtails were once overlooked as undesirable scraps, often given to Black cooks who creatively transformed them into delicious meals. No where was this meaty microcosm of America more present than the hierarchy of pork butchery, giving us the pithy phrase “high on the hog” and the subsequent book by Jessica Harris and informative Netflix series hosted by Steven Satterfield.
Most off cuts of meat have eventually gained mainstream acceptance and sometimes extreme popularity. Chicken wings in this country used to be dismissed as an inexpensive, chewy byproduct fit mainly for stocks until the Anchor Bar in Buffalo New York began to fry them and market them as a spicy bar snack in 1964. They have since achieved a renaissance thanks to a concerted effort to market them as a mainstream American party food. These efforts, bolstered by the NFL and the beer industry, were so successful that we recently experienced a chicken wing shortage, causing Wingstop to add thigh meat to their menu to fill the gap, which they cleverly branded as “thighstop.”
Like chicken wings, turkey tails have layers of meat, fat, and skin that would seem ideal for frying or braising. Indeed, in Japan, grilled chicken tails, or bonjiri, are a prized part of the bird to eat at Izakayas. So why haven’t turkey tails caught on?
The reason is in part biological. The turkey tail isn’t technically the tail, but rather the gland that connects the tail feathers to the body. Since this gland contains the oil that turkeys use to preen themselves, turkey tails are super fatty, up to 75% fat by volume. This makes pork belly look like spa food in comparison, and makes turkey tails a hard sell for many.
The question of what to do with all this undesirable fatty tail meat has been an operations and marketing challenge for the US turkey industry ever since it took off after World War Two. Since selling them stateside was a nonstarter, a decision was made to ship them to American Samoa. This was a financial calculation that had the glean of a charitable act. Turkey producers profited off of a potential waste product while appearing to increase the availability of animal protein in American Samoa. The elephant in the room was the quality of all this turkey meat. If plantation owners were eating “high on the hog,” then exporting these turkey tails was all but forcing American Samoa to eat “low on the bird.”
Still, thanks to their sudden prevalence, turkey tails became a part of American Samoan cuisine over time. Today, they are often eaten as a party food, washed down with cold Budweiser, the way mainland Americans relate to chicken wings. According to Modern Farmer:
“By 2007, the average Samoan was consuming more than 44 pounds of turkey tails every year—a food that had been unknown there less than a century earlier. That’s nearly triple Americans’ annual per capita turkey consumption.”
However, not everyone found this new regional food to be cause for celebration. American Samoa has one of the highest documented rates of obesity in the world. 75% of adults in American Samoa are obese and high fat foods like turkey tails were quickly identified as a preventable source of all this weight gain. The fact that they were basically being dumped onto the American Samoan market did not help make the case that they were a healthy “part of this complete breakfast.”
When NPR asked the head of the poultry exporting council about the turkey tail situation in American Samoa, he claimed to be unaware the US was exporting turkey tails there in the first place. This speaks either to a very sad or very dishonest situation in the poultry industry. He then tried to explain it away by saying: "It was obviously as a result of Samoan demand, not the attempt of the U.S. industry to force other countries to take our turkey tail products."
Even if the ubiquity of turkey tails in American Samoa is unintentional, it’s still a cruel echo of the type of culinary and economic marginalization that the US has inflicted on non-white and Indigenous peoples for centuries. Consider frybread. Like turkey tails, Navajo frybread is a regional food that embodies the dark culinary legacy of American colonial expansion. Frybread has its origins in the white flour, refined sugar, and lard given to Navajos by the US government after removing them from their ancestral homelands in Arizona and making them relocate to New Mexico. Unsurprisingly, it is a complicated dish for Indigenous communities in the US Southwest. It’s simultaneously a painful reminder of forced displacement, a symbol of native resilience and perseverance, a unifying soul food of Indigenous diaspora, and a manifestation of the diabetes that plagues their communities to this day.
Thanksgiving has long been marketed as celebrating historically significant feast marking the peaceful coexistence between Indigenous communities and white settlers. However, any moderately curious student of history with a pulse knows by now that this is an idealistic fantasy. The real history of Thanksgiving was much darker and more complicated. The centrality of turkey as a symbol of this feel-good feast is particularly ironic given what has happened to the tails of all of these gratitude turkeys. Every year we feast in blissful ignorance on a large, plump bird, tan and lean enough to become a fitness influencer and seldom wonder where all the fatty tails went and who is eating them.
Attempting to assert their food sovereignty, American Samoa banned turkey tail imports from the United States in 2007, a victory as inspiring as it was short lived. They had to reverse the ban in 2013 in order to gain entry to the World Trade Organization. So today, turkey tails occupy a curious position in American Samoa, both a beloved regional dish, and also evidence of a disempowering and unhealthy relationship to the continental United States.
In this way, the state of turkey tails is a sweet and sour microcosm of the state of our union, where actual states take for granted many visible and invisible privileges that citizens of US territories will never enjoy. The plight of these territories is usually quite literally out of sight out of mind until the occasional hurricane and poorly timed paper towel photo op casts it in stark relief.
All Thanksgiving tales lead to Black Friday these days and this one is no different. In the spirit of gift recommendations, if you wish to understand the complex, fascinating, and dark history of US territories like American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Guam, you should read How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. The section on the Guano Islands Act alone is worth the price of admission— proof that calling the US an imperial power isn’t a batshit claim because the very real history of bird shit is stranger than fiction. If someone in your life can’t get enough addictively informative nonfiction, this is the book for them.
Turkey Tails are so hot right now
Real turkey tails may be more problematic than the Bo Burnham’s song of the same name, but thankfully there’s another turkey tail to get excited about this Thanksgiving.
If you follow health and wellness trends, you’ve probably heard a whole lot about mushrooms lately. They’re starting to show up everywhere, from heavily hyped coffee alternatives like MUD WTR and Four Sigmatic, to supplements, beverages, and more. Many of these mushrooms are referred to as “adaptogens,” a new age term that refers to their ability to help the body adapt to stress.
Trametes versicolor, also referred to as turkey tail mushrooms because of their appearance, are having a moment. That is, a moment for the yoga moms patrolling the aisles of Whole Foods— they have long been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Native American herbalism. In TCM, turkey tail mushrooms are called Yun Zhi and are believed to have anti-inflammatory properties. They are prescribed for everything from coughs to stomach issues.
The modern turkey tail hype isn’t just more nonsense for Goop wives or Huberman husbands, however. There is a small but growing body of scientific research that supports the efficacy of turkey tail mushrooms as medicine. They seem to act as nonspecific immune modulators, which means that they either stimulate or suppress the function of our immune system. In one clinical trial in 2012, breast cancer patients who took turkey tail supplements regained immune function faster after radiation compared to a control group that didn’t take these supplements. Other studies have found some promising evidence that these mushrooms may make chemotherapy more effective or even have anti-tumor properties. Even if turkey tails do help our immune systems work or recover better, the mechanism by which they do this remains unknown. An obvious but necessary caveat here is that I am not a cancer researcher. My internet sleuthing, what passes for “doing my own research” in the comments threads these days, is not equivalent to actual scientific inquiry.
Turkey tail mushrooms sit at the edge of an exciting frontier for now, part of the vanguard of fashionable fungii making friends and influencing people. While the jury is still out on if or how they work, it’s hard to deny their trendiness as emblematic of the mushroom mania sweeping across our nation. Thanks to movies like Fantastic Fungi and books like Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, the healing potential of mushrooms as both food and medicine is now more widely understood and heavily marketed than ever. While being a person in the United States may be getting worse than ever, there’s simply never been a better time to be a mushroom.
But what about the turkeys?
I suspect Ben Franklin was right, at least in spirit. Our actual national symbol may be a whimpering sneak thief stealing fame, vocals, and fish from greater birds, but the turkey embodies our true national identity. The story of the turkey reminds us how much Americans love a good symbol, whether it’s an intimidating-looking bird or a warm and fuzzy feast, and how we’ll never let the truth get in the way of celebrating our favorite national fixations and fantasies. The meaty reality underneath it all is that who gets to enjoy the choicest cuts of the American experience has always depended on when you arrived here, what you looked like, and if your claim to being American was recognized as legitimate by those in charge. The tale of both kinds of turkey tails shows us how the pursuit of profit, not happiness, is the most powerful American pursuit. We’re just as eager to profit off making some communities unwell as we are to profit off of making others feel healthy. This bird is anything but bland. It’s packed with meaning in the same way that turkey tails are packed with fat. The juiciest, meatiest, and least savory parts of our history, culture, and economy are all right here, though they’re not always easy to digest.
Recommended Reading:
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David Silverman
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for reading! If you’ve got thoughts or questions about what you just read, I’d love to hear them.
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