What Thanksgiving Turkeys Represent About America’s Food-Insecure Future

The modern American turkey is the epitome of “get big or get out”

In the 1960s, my tiny, rural farming community in Washington State raised 100,000 Thanksgiving turkeys a year. This year, we raised less than a few dozen at most. I personally raised nine.

The turkey once supported thousands of family farms and rural, agrarian economies across the United States. But as the food and farming system focused on producing cheap food so U.S. consumers could spend their money (and build the economy) elsewhere, turkey production shifted from small family farms and regional production systems to just a few, massive producers.

Nixon’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) secretary Earl Butz, famously known for telling U.S. farmers to “get big or get out,” would likely herald today’s turkey production as a grand success.

But this week, we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinners in the midst of a global pandemic — a crisis that disrupted the food supply even in the United States, one of the world’s top agricultural producers. We now face a future that promises more of the same food disruptions: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for one, predicts that food security will be increasingly…