thanksgiving follies

[calimac]

I could hardly believe this article when I saw it. It's largely a complaint against how everybody except the author prefers white meat over dark meat from their turkey. (Though at the end he affects to change his mind.)

Besides the fact that he ought to be saying, "Oh good, more dark meat for me," who prefers white meat? Everybody I've ever discussed the point with prefers dark meat. It's a regular complaint at Thanksgiving dinner - every year, it seems, the turkeys are being bred to produce more and more white meat, but who wants that much white meat? (My own preference is for about 3/4 dark and 1/4 white on my plate, just for variety, with lots of gravy to put some flavor on that tasteless white meat.)

I remember the turkeys of my youth as being less unbalanced, but what should I find in the letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto that they should already be complaining about turkeys with too much white meat, half a century ago! Of course, Julia Child, so not too representative of the general public, but, still ...

On the article, a sidebar link to another article promising to answer the question, "Is It Better To Wrap Your Leftovers in Aluminum Foil or Plastic Wrap?" I've never been quite certain which is more effective at keeping food fresh, and whether the type of food makes a difference. But no, the article doesn't talk about that, instead trying to make you feel Really Guilty by discussing the relative carbon footprint size of foil and plastic wrap manufacturing. Look, the ecological crisis we face is going to require action on such a massive and coordinated scale that the effect of one, or even multiple, decisions to take a couple pieces of one wrap over the other on the marginal difference between the environmental impact of an aluminum factory and that of a plastics factory is like bailing out from a hurricane with a teaspoon. If that. It's an insult to the intelligence even to raise the question.

How about, instead, a few words about how, if you wrap the food wrongly, you'll have to throw it out later, and how bad for the environment is that?

And a happy thanksgiving to all of you, too.

Comments

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

According to this completely unscientific survey, of those who answered directly:

48% prefer white turkey meat on Thanksgiving
40% prefer dark turkey meat
8% prefer no meat.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If I were to have laid odds on who among my readers would be most likely to produce a statistical response to this question, I could have put 48% on you, 40% on slothman, and 8% on anyone else.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Give me white meat, keep stinking dark meat.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Is that an allusion to "Give me fish now, and keep nasty chips"?

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

More or less, yes.

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

The problem with turkey (so I'm given to understand) is that if you cook it long enough so that the dark meat is properly done, the white meat dries out.

One could, I suppose, cook a turkey breast and some turkey legs separately, but that would be No Fun.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me of how dried out and nasty the breast meat of take-out chicken is, because it's been sitting under the heating pad for so long. I save it up for cutting up and putting in other dishes, because it's good for nothing else. I'm still startled at how tender and juicy the breast meat is of chicken I bake or broil myself and eat fresh from the oven.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I very much prefer white meat, but what I really want is something other than turkey, like a nice New York steak or a filet mignon.