This time of year, it seems that a lot of turkeys go to food pantries and other charities. Workplaces that give out a bird offer to donate it instead, grocery stores and other businesses have places where you can buy a turkey for donation, etc. I’m guessing that a lot of birds wind up somewhere in the charitable stream.
I also know that turkeys are kind of a pain in the ass. I mean, in a way not really – season it, maybe slap it in a bag, toss it in the oven and wait – but the whole thawing process, it’s fairly time and space consuming and something about it makes it clear why most people cook it maybe once or twice a year. If the holidays didn’t exist, how often would most families actually purchase and cook a turkey? On the plus side, you get a lot of food out of and the more enterprising can make the carcass into soup for even more goodness.
Does anyone here involved in charity know anything on the topic? Are turkeys sought after? Are people saying “Hot damn, a frozen 12lb turkey, now we can eat for a week”? Would they rather just get 12lbs of dried macaroni & cheese? Something about it just makes me feel as though it’s more of a feel-good gesture for the giver than a real boon for the recipient.
The goal is not to sustain the recipient but to elevate them in giving. By providing the bird you are also providing and allowing them to share in the thanksgiving day experience. In that you are letting them know that even though this may be currently outside their price range, this is part of what humans do and they should not be denied that. It is to show true human kindness for someone in a position to recognize it, receive it and plants a seed that hopefully they will one day be able to give back to humanity many times over.
Buying them the 12 lbs of mac and cheese would go to sustain them, not to elevate them. It is treating them to a minimum standard which will go to their sense of self worth and is not really that helpful in the human condition IMHO.
I recognize this but it’s only really useful if they intend to use the bird in the Thanksgiving Day Experience with all the effort and preparation that entails, right? Otherwise an equivalent amount of non-Thanksgiving Day Experience food would be much more useful. But I understand why, in theory at least, the local grocery is inviting you to donate a turkey versus a sack of lentils. But I also know that enticing people to donate is more effective when they can project a happy emotional ideal onto it: picturing an impoverished family setting out the traditional holiday meal or a kid opening that doll you hand selected. Cash would serve the charity better but people don’t get the warm fuzzies from imagining a shelter purchasing bulk infant diapers.
But then I’ve never been in that position thus the question: Are people seeking these birds for the sake of the traditional holiday meal? Has anyone ever gone to a charity to get a bird because you wanted one for a traditional holiday meal?
I think people exaggerate the difficulty of cooking a turkey. We live near a turkey farm, so we buy a freshly killed turkey every so often. Sure, presenting a beautiful masterpiece on Thanksgiving is nice, but throwing a turkey in the oven and eating the results for several days is pretty easy.
I love turkey, and I cook it a lot more often than once or twice a year. But I like to cook.
But yes, I think people donate turkeys at Thanksgiving because turkeys are traditional at Thanksgiving. Thawing it is a long but not very labor-intensive process, and cooking it and carving it up is not that onerous either. Especially considering that you are making several meals at once.
But I always buy two when they go on sale. I currently have a 23-lb. bird in the freezer waiting for Christmas or New Year’s or maybe next weekend. Because I paid IIRC $0.93 a pound for it, and not only turkey, but turkey sandwiches and turkey soup and turkey tetrazinni and stir fry. And that’s a lot of protein for not a lot of money.
As someone who gets a turkey from a charity every Thanksgiving (and a ham at Christmas), yes we do look forward to it, and no we wouldn’t rather have mac n cheese. Meat is what’s expensive. Turkey is yummy and festive.
High quality protein is hard to come by for people who are food insecure. The donations that do come tend to be canned goods, so lots of carbs and sodium, very little protein and vitamin “C”. Now and then there will be cans of tuna, but meat is generally in tiny scrids as part of a canned soup.
The occasional protein boost is much craved and anticipated.
A bigger problem is ovens and pans. Many people in poverty don’t have the infrastructure available to make use of such a large bird. It’s great when churches and restaurants donate kitchen space to cook them the morning of. If that isn’t available, I always try to make sure that we provide a large aluminum roasting pan.
Sounds as though you’re talking from experience on the distribution side?
I thought about the oven/pans thing as well but wasn’t sure if I was selling people short by assuming “food bank” meant they were poverty-stricken without cooking basics versus people who are just just struggling due to unemployment but otherwise have an unremarkable home/apartment.
Anyway, sounds like the first hand experience is 2-for-2 on it being a definite positive which is nice and not quite the white elephant type donation I feared.
Aside from the actually homeless, in my city, even the poor have working ovens more often than not. They use them for heat, so that bill (gas or electric) is prioritized over other bills.
And yes, most of them are glad of a turkey. It’s actually not hard to get enough calories (poor folks have higher obesity rates here), what’s difficult to afford are good healthy calories, and foods you loved as a kid. So for both reasons, turkeys and hams are looked forward to.
I can’t tell you how hard I cried one year when I had nothing, and a church brought me fixings for a whole traditional Christmas dinner. It wasn’t the food as food. We weren’t literally going hungry, thanks to the food pantry. It was that I was going to be able to cook my boy a real Christmas dinner, even if the stuffing was Stove Top and the mashed potatoes came out of a box. And that little 10 pound turkey? Looked like a Norman Rockwell painting when I was done with it. And we had real gravy, and a real Christmas.
That’s because poor folks weren’t necessarily always poor. And they can’t always get out of the contract for cable, or cell phones and such. They are stuck struggling to keep up with the obligations they took on when everything was better, and which at that time may have seemed quite reasonable.
But it’s also true that it’s easy to suddenly have the electricity turned off the day before Thanksgiving. These things can be very hard to keep up with, especially getting things paid on the day they are due. The money comes in when it comes, and one is constantly juggling, and payin gas much as possible, hoping it will be enough. It’s impossible to know when the gate will come down.
