The Local Food Report: Thanksgiving turkey

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is Turkey-Lurkey. He's a two-year-old American Heritage White turkey who lives at Miss Scarlett's Blue Ribbon Farm in Yarmouth Port. He got this big on bugs, and cranberries, and pumpkins, and a daily grain supplement. I don't know if the picture really conveys it, but he's huge.

He's also very lucky. Most of the turkeys Susan Knieriem raises—all of the other turkeys, in fact, besides Turkey-Lurkey's lady friend Henny-Penny—don't live beyond about 20 weeks. They arrive each year in July as tiny chicks, and the week before Thanksgiving or Christmas, depending on their holiday fate, they meet their end. They head off to a state-certified slaughter house, and come back without all those white feathers, ready for stuffing and roasting and carving and serving.

Of course, that's where people like you and me come in. Susan sells all her birds locally, to families like yours and mine, which means that those birds you see up there are showing up today, golden and crispy, on tables all over Cape Cod. It's pretty amazing, really: locally raised birds, eaten all together, on a single day in local homes.

At any rate, I'm guessing you have important things to do today—like stuff a bird and bake a pie and cream a pot of onions and hopefully also eventually stuff yourself—but I wanted us all, in this space, just for a moment, to be thankful for this.

So here's a Thanksgiving thank you—to Susan Knieriem for her local turkeys, and to all of our farmers and fishermen for feeding us so well—not just today, but all the year. Thank you everyone, and cheers.