Eat To Live: Gobbling good turkey

Eat To Live: Gobbling good turkey
By JULIA WATSON
UPI Food Writer Link to full article below

While you are going about your daily business, mass-market producers will be readying their turkeys for the Thanksgiving feast.

Once killed, most likely with a cut across the throat, the birds will be plunged into a tank of scalding water. Their soaking feathers will be plucked by machine. Then, while they are still hot, they will be gutted. Finally they get blast-chilled to cool them quickly.

The whole process will take abut 20 minutes.

What you will have, ready for your Thanksgiving table, is a creature with a breast Mae West would have admired. In life, it would have been so unnaturally top heavy it would barely have been able to walk, even had it lived in space generous enough to permit it a stroll.

It would have achieved its Victoria's Secret physique in a mere eight weeks or so of growth, having been conceived through artificial insemination. The modern butterball's large breast makes mating naturally such an awkward event a high proportion of eggs are not fertile.

Intensively farmed, these fleshy balloons will have been kept healthy with medication. Once they have been slaughtered, they will have needed saline and oil injections to render them tender enough to eat.

Read the full article: http://www.upi.com/ConsumerHealthDaily/view.php?StoryID=20051116-105509-5386r