Farmers are inherently suspicious of imaginary thinking. They deal with bushels in the bin, the Chicago price for corn and fixed delivery dates for fertilizer. I’m always surprised they listen to anything I say, because I am an artist, and even though I try to write truthfully about the farm community, I often walk a fine line between realism and complete fantasy.
Last month my Christmas musical came to the stage again, telling the story of two children who hide a turkey to save it from the church supper. The Last Christmas Turkey has been one of the more popular pieces I’ve written because it captures the way children use their imagination to help them through difficult periods in their lives. (It also has a guy in a turkey suit singing tragically under a spotlight in the style of Edith Piaf.)
In the story, the kids help the turkey learn to fly so that it can go off into the woods and join a flock of wild turkeys and live happily ever after. What makes the story relevant is the realistic struggle the family endures as they make their way in what seems to be a harsh, uncaring world. Ironically, the imaginary ending for the turkey is totally unrealistic. The hybrid White Rock turkey raised by the thousands in today’s industrial poultry barns grows three times as fast as the native American turkey that lives in the wild. It reaches 12-14 pounds in the space of ten weeks before Thanksgiving and up to 30 pounds for Christmas. It is the cheapest protein in the meat counter because it is the fastest method for converting vegetable protein to animal protein yet invented by modern science. But this man-made bird cannot handle such a growth rate. Once the turkey reaches its maximum weight it stalls and starts to go backwards, losing condition rapidly until it collapses with heart failure.
I know this because there have been several White Rock turkey pets in the family and in every case the experience ended in tears. My sister-in-law kept one in the house and let it sit on the couch with her every evening to watch television. The bird keeled over on the kitchen floor before his first birthday. We were given a turkey poult that went through the vaccination conveyor belt three times and came out very pink from the dye they used. The kids were thrilled, named her Candy Floss and fell in love with her but she eventually became enormous and broke her leg tripping over an apple. She stumped around on a splint I made for her for a few months after that but eventually she, too, lost condition and died.
So the idea of a hybrid turkey slimming down, learning to fly and joining a wild flock in the forest is pretty silly. But as a device for a Christmas musical, it works wonderfully. We just have to suspend our disbelief and imagine for a moment that a bird engineered by humans for one specific purpose might somehow escape its biological prison. My idea isn’t particularly original. It works brilliantly for other shows, like the movie Babe and Wallace and Gromit’s Chicken Run.
This is the paradox of modern agriculture. No matter what animal or plant species we decide to engineer and produce on an industrial scale, the results are always problematic. We get cheap food that comes at a high non-monetary cost. We know in our hearts that small scale is better, but the formula for making millions in agriculture remains the same: figure out some sort of biological lock on the corn plant or chicken so that it cannot reproduce itself. Then create a closed market, ramp up production and take over the world. One of the largest fortunes in agriculture was made in the broiler and egg business. Only two multi-national companies now control the genetics for laying hens and broiler chickens for the entire world market. Billions served every year.
One of the little kids at the show came up to me during intermission looking very distressed and asked tearfully if the turkey was going to be okay. His mother explained to me that he was vegan. I believe you should always tell children the facts of life, but in this case, I choked. I said, I really think he’s going to be okay, don’t you? Why don’t we go back in and find out? Call me a coward, but I decided the lad deserved a few more years of cozy illusion before he had to hear the brutal truth.