Today, Explained - Talk turkey to me

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

How this big, lean bird became the staple of the most American of meals. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Adriene Hill and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo of the National Thanksgiving turkey by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here.  Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's a finicky driver. I think he gets a horrendous reputation. the turkey overnight in a paint bucket. You guys, I love Thanksgiving. I'm what you would call a professional guest. I show up to my cousin's house with a side dish, my sparkling personality, and a to-go container. Because I'm leaving here with something.

Of course, the centerpiece for most Thanksgiving is the turkey. And if you're unsure of what you're doing, Taking on that bird can feel daunting. That turkey is so lucky. I've never seen such a beautiful turkey. But friends, this time, it's going to go great. Because this week, unexplained it to me, we'll cover it all. Why we eat turkey, how not to feel disgusting afterwards,

and what it takes to make a turkey they'll talk about for years to come. To start, we got a professional chef. My name is Hamill Whaley, and I'm a chef, a chef, a recipe development. a video creator, and an author. And he's worked on some pretty high-profile Thanksgivings. So I worked at this restaurant that was along the parade route for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Oh, my gosh. We're not talking about Santa Claus. It's Kool-Aid Man, presented by Kraft Foods.

Well, he's left his pineapple under the sea and has traded it for flying high above the parade. There he is, it's SpongeBob SquarePants. So for their one year, I had to cook almost 80, turkeys. 80? Yeah, 80 turkeys. 80 turkeys. And that's not even counting the sides and the mash and the stuffing.

And that was a light year. The year prior, I think it was they needed 160 turkeys. Yeah, can you walk me through what that's like? Like, is there a point where you're just like, oh, my gosh, how do I manage this? Let me pull a bear and lock myself in the freezer. And just a lot of crying yourself to sleep at three in the morning. Yes, sure. But it's all about planning.

Just like Thanksgiving at home, Thanksgiving in a restaurant is all about planning. Yeah, if this is someone's first time doing the turkey or they're trying to redeem themselves from a turkey fail from a prior year, what are some tips they can use to do this successfully? Write a very solid game plan. Take a piece of paper. Write out everything you need to make, write out approximately how much time it's going to take, write out if it needs to go into the oven, if so, at what temp, and how long. And from there, you kind of are building a puzzle. So things come out hot at the same time, and you're not stuck waiting for potatoes. There's nothing worse than just waiting for potatoes, because I feel like often at home, when we're just

having dinner, we're waiting for potatoes. And when it comes to your turkey, low and slow is your friend. So you want to cook it in a really, really low oven until the different parts of your turkey are at the temp that you're looking for. And then you're going to pull. it out, crank your oven up, and then you're going to glaze your bird, or you're going to baste it in some butter, and then throw it back into the oven so that skin is nice and crisp. Okay, I think people discount turkey a lot. It gets a bad rap. You know, people think it's dry, flavorless. Are they just not doing it right? Like, do you have a case for the turkey? I do. Who does not love a turkey club? People are eating turkey clubs year-round, and no one's

complaining. So I do think turkey is a difficult meat to cook because it is so lean, which means the margin for error is quite small. But if you take the necessary precautions, if you're brining your turkey, which I 100% suggest that you do, you can wet brine, which means you put it in like a salted solution for a certain amount of time, or you can dry brown brine, which is a lot easier because you can just take your turkey, shower it in some salt, throw it into your fridge uncovered for up to two, three days. And then that guarantees that your turkey will be seasoned. You have a bigger buffer for moistness and tenderness.

And it's just turkey needs all the help it can get. Okay, start early and have a plan. But what if things go sideways and you're stuck in the kitchen with a mess? Who are you going to call? Butterball turkey talk line. This is Gwen. Can I help you? Butterball, as in the company that says it sells about a third of all Thanksgiving turkeys. Don't panic. We're here to help you. What's the problem or the issue or what is your question? Because I know that we can help you solve it. Gwen Carlyle is a food scientist and she's been on the line every Thanksgiving for the last 13 years.

The wildest call I think I've gotten is these people put their turkey in the sink and they dinner. realized that the sink stopper got stuck under the wing of the turkey. So they roasted the turkey with the sink stopper under the wing and they called me to see if it was safe to eat. How in the world? This is actually a really funny call. The whole family was on like speakerphone and I was talking to, you know, the whole family. I mean, we get calls about can I thought my turkey in a hot tub. Somebody left their turkey outside in a snowbank. It snowed and then they couldn't find it. We have 50 people here on Thanksgiving Day, um, just, ready and waiting to answer anything they can throw away at us. So we do our best.

What do people get wrong about cooking a turkey every single year? Like what are the greatest hits of turkey issues? Well, our number one question that we get every year is. So, turns out, I have no idea how to thaw this giant turkey. Thawing is a very important prep step in the process of getting your turkey. ready to go into the oven. We recommend thawing it in your refrigerator on a pan with paper towels, like a sided pan to catch any of the drippings or something if it comes out of the package. Thaw about four pounds every day that you hold that turkey. So if you have a 20 pound turkey, you're looking at like five days. They can do a cold water thaw method, and that's just keeping

the turkey in the packaging, submergent cold water, change it every half hour, and that'll thaw one pound every half hour. And that's just a quick thaw method that can help you finish your turkey, to get it thawed or get it started and kickstart it because sometimes it take a while to get moving. Hi, hi. So I've been cooking this forever and it's still not done yet. What do we do? And I'm like, well, then, okay, let's get our meat thermometer out. Why don't you check it while I'm here? Tell me what temperature it is. And then they might be surprised that either it is done or it's got some more time to cook. But these are the types of things that we try to problem solve with people so that whatever they think they're panicking about is actually a solvable problem. What do you recommend for people who call at the 11th hour who are like,

It's Thanksgiving morning and everyone's here and my turkey is ruined. Everything is ruined. First off, you know, we wanted to be lovely and perfect and all these things. But odds are, you know, your turkey is fine. If it's not exactly what you envisioned or it's not this, you know, Norman Rockwell painting of a turkey, that doesn't mean it's not delicious. There are some great turkeys that I've made that they just, you know, they weren't the most beautiful turkey, but they're fine.

I think just don't panic. People want that Norman Rockwell painting of a turkey. But how did it become such a Thanksgiving staple in the first place? Why this particular protein has such a hold on us. That's up next. Support for Explain It to Me comes from Givewell. Cuts to Foreign Aid keep showing up in the headlines, raising real concerns about people's well-being

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Quince.com slash explain it. We're back. It's Explained it to me. I'm J-Q. So now we know how to successfully get the turkey. onto the table, unfrozen. But what's up with our national obsession with this bird? And does big turkey have something to do with it? To find out, I call Troy Bickham. I'm a professor of history and director of the Melbourne Glasscock Center for Humanities

Research at Texas A&M University. Okay, so we know that Thanksgiving didn't happen the way a lot of us might have learned that it did in school as a kid. You know, the story isn't accurate in a lot of ways, including the food that was eaten, Did the pilgrims actually have a huge turkey in the middle of their table? No. So that's the short answer. The long answer is, we don't know, really.

We have two eyewitness accounts describing Thanksgiving, and they were not interested in describing the food. So the only thing we know for certain that they ate was venison. So because the Wampanoa brought a number of deer with them. And that would have been a big deal for them and that would be worth noting in their diaries primarily because venison was kind of royal food or the food of the aristocracy in England. So to have something like that was a super luxury.

When did turkey become a staple of Thanksgiving? Like why aren't we all eating venison this time of year? Turkey's cheap is the main reason. It's a big festival bird. Pretty much any major feast or festivals, particularly that time of year, when they're in abundance, if you're sort of in the forest of Maine, you can see them all over the place. It would have been something relatively cheap and easy to put on the table. Every agricultural society has a harvest festival.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about the Inca, the Maya, the ancient Israelites, or whoever. They all have harvest festivals. And that harvest festival sort of percolates in different parts of the country. There are different thanksgivings on different days as the U.S. expands west. Different states have different days for Thanksgiving. And it doesn't become a national holiday, really until about the time of the Civil War. And that's largely the work of Sarah Hale. She's primarily known as Mary had a little lamb.

Oh. And so, yeah. Like she wrote it? Yeah, she wrote it. She was a children's writer. And she was the editor of Goetys, which was a ladies magazine, that was very wildly distributed. sort of the Readers Digest for Women of the Day.

And so she and a number of people in the early 19th century were kind of looking around for days to celebrate traditional family values, right? So the idea that Americans were Christian, family-oriented, and also the idea of Thanksgiving be a holiday of unity because the country's increasingly divided. It now needs national recognition and authoritative fixation only to become permanently an American custom in India. institution. It starts a letter-writing campaign. Women start writing in to their congressmen,

to try to make it a national holiday. It doesn't really get going. Until the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signs it into 1863. To set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father who dwelleth in the heavens. That's really when Thanksgiving, the way that we might imagine it today, really starts. Really takes off, like I said, after the Civil War. And that's the same time. It's not until 1870 that Christmas and the 4th of July become national holidays too. So Thanksgiving's first. And by that time, the turkey had become the major celebration bird. It placed itself really well. So you could read a newspaper, so you're in Charleston in 1870,

and you have this holiday Thanksgiving, you're not familiar with it. So you read in the newspaper, and it's sort of, you know, what do I do? The turkey must be wisely chosen, well-cooked, and properly. served. And so there's packed full recipes for people from New England saying this is how you make stuffing. Soak baker's bread in water and milk for 15 minutes or until soft. And so people start reading about these other kind of common experiences. The same thing with the Fourth of July, Christmas, everything else. It's about nationalism. And it times itself really well because it's also about the same time that we start seeing the industrialization of food production. And so once that's in, And it's kind of over because the companies take over very quickly, the idea of promoting turkeys.

Flavorful golden brown turkey is the crowning glory of your holiday dinner table. Thanksgiving is no time to fool around. This year, better buy butterball. Or you could get a turkey of a turkey. And side dishes really took off during the Great Depression because meat was more expensive, right? So what do you do? Well, you know, let's all have a pumpkin pie. Let's get out potatoes, all the different kinds of casseroles.

Although stuffing becomes a, like beforehand there was stuffing. It wasn't unusual to have stuffing. But it really takes off during the Great Depression because bread's cheap. And you kind of, you don't want to stretch it out as much as possible. Libby's wants to sell its condensed milk. And so in the early 20th century, it starts promoting pumpkin pie recipes. Then it buys a pumpkin pie canning company. and then it promotes the pumpkin.

That's very American. Like, okay, let's make a supply chain to support this holiday. Absolutely. And then Macy's jumps in with its Thanksgiving Day parade because it's trying to kick off shopping. The Macy's 56th annual Thanksgiving Day parade. A holiday treat for children everywhere. So, like, when is Christmas start? Well, you know, now it starts sometime in July.

But back then, Christmas was, you know, marked by the Macy's Day parade, and it's like, okay, it's gotten shot. Why do you think this glamorized image of a full golden turkey on Thanksgiving has lasted this long? I don't know. I mean, it looks good. I was looking at some data. And from according to the Food and Drug Administration and the government statistics, about a fifth of our turkeys are eaten, fifth of turkey is eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Wow. It's, I have to admit, when you put, when someone pulls out this enormous, I think of that Norman Rockwell picture of Thanksgiving, it's this enormous bird,

comes rolling out, puts them out. It's pretty impressive. And it takes on the flavor of stuff, and plus you get all the side dishes. It's also an adaptable holiday. I think that's what makes it work. It's a bunch of people getting together and bringing food and breaking bread

with each other once a year. I mean, it doesn't have a religious connotation. They've tried, it doesn't really stick with it. Any culture can be grateful to eat for family or friends or whatever it's in your life and then fall asleep and watch football, I guess, or whatever it is we do. Ah, yes, the great Thanksgiving tradition

of falling asleep in front of the TV. But there's something about this quintessentially American ritual that always leaves you feeling kind of gross. What if I told you that it's possible to have a Thanksgiving without feeling terrible afterwards? That's next. Support for Explain It to Me comes from AG1. Just because it's the holiday season doesn't necessarily mean you're taking it easy.

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And honestly, for me, it's just an easy way to make sure I'm getting the right vitamins, minerals, and probiotics I need. It feels like a small and easy, good decision I'm making for myself every morning. Head to drinkag1.com slash explain it to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.com slash explain it. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-Doo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-free at O-D-O-D-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. It's explained it to me, I'm JQ, and it's great to know the history.

But when it comes down to it, what are we really here for on Thanksgiving? Eating. You have some turkey and some sweet potatoes, a couple rolls, a second slice of pie, maybe a little bit more wine, and pretty soon you're waking up from a nap. feeling not good. Time to call the doctor. Dr. Trisha Pesricha, I'm a gastroenterologist, and I run a laboratory at Harvard Medical School studying the gut brain connection. And on Thanksgiving, you may find her working a shift at the hospital. The classic thing we see is maybe four or five hours after dinner time, like getting close to

midnight, early in the morning, people coming in with food stuck in their throats, like stuck in their esophagus. It's like, oh my gosh, from what? From the turkey. And so then we end up doing like endoscopies at midnight to kind of help get some of that food out. But so lesson learned here for everyone who's listening is to chew really carefully. People often eat a lot of salt, like high salt foods on Thanksgiving and they can have a heart attack, they can have heart failure. That tends to show up on Thanksgiving. You know, you never know what you're going to get. But, you know, I hope everybody has a healthy and safe holiday and enjoys foods that they like, but maybe like slowly and in moderation. Yeah. So I want to figure out how to get the most out of the day. So let's start at the

beginning. You know, what are things you can do early in the day to set yourself up for success? What is our Thanksgiving warm up? Oh, I love it. Well, you know, yeah, first you have to decide, are you a family that turkey trotts together or not? And I'll say like the argument in favor of a turkey trot is that doing a small workout like that, like even if you're somebody who's going to walk the whole 5K, like, it will actually set you up for success, digestive-wise, the rest of the day. And that's because any form of exercise primes the GI system. It gets the colon to start contracting. You're going to get things moving.

You're also going to release some endorphins, endocannabinoids. Those can really buffer you emotionally later in the day as family stress kind of builds up. So I do think that, like, if you're a turkey trotter, props to you. If you're not a turkey trotter, I tend to tell people that the best way to approach Thanksgiving is not to starve yourself all day so that when the big meal is upon you, you can eat as much as you want. That actually backfires.

The more hungry you are, the more quickly you eat, because you're like so hungry, let me get all of this food in, and you end up feeling like suddenly super, super bloated, super, super ill because it takes about 20 minutes

for food to reach your small bowel and then signal to your brain that you're full. So if you scarf all your food down, you're going to like really overshoot what you should be eating in that moment. I actually like like the approach. My family does this. We graze.

Like we kind of start the appetizer, start eating like early in the afternoon. And I think the slow graze, the sheep approach actually helps so that by the time you get to Thanksgiving dinner itself, you're not like totally starved. Okay, so my official title

as family taste tester is actually a very smart idea. 100, I mean, whoever is taste tester on Thanksgiving has like won the family lottery. So say now I'm at the buffet, you know, the aunt's uncle's little cousin, whoever, they're behind me waiting in line, just as hungry as I am. I'm building my plate. What's the game plan? What should I be putting on my plate? Yes. Well, okay, I will say it all depends on your goals here. Okay. So there's like one group of people who

will say, Thanksgiving Day, I'm going to eat what I want in the quantities that I want and don't get in my way. And to those people, I say, you know what? it's a holiday, enjoy yourself, live your best life. If your goal is to not feel ill afterwards, which is like common to all of us, then what I would say is to put an appropriate amount of vegetables and protein on your plate and eat those things first. And by appropriate amount, I mean, at least half the plate should be filled with those things. In real life, we usually want to center the protein and the veggies on the plate and like the carbohydrate is like a fourth of that plate, you don't have to go so hardcore, but at least half of it. And the reason why is that

eating those vegetables, eating that protein first, is going to help you feel full sooner. And you're actually going to spike your blood sugar a little bit less than if you ate the exact same thing, but in a different order. Like, you ate the pasta first, you ate the biscuit first. Your blood sugar is going to spike a lot more than if you did it the other way around. Okay, so save the mac and cheese and the sweet potatoes for last then? Think of that as like part of the treat, you know? And actually, this has been shown in several studies. Why do you think we all are bloated? We've eaten everything we can possibly eat, yet we so often have room for dessert. Well, yeah. Right? Like somehow we're like, oh, wait, yeah, no, that part of my stomach is still empty. We can still do it. Well, it's because

you can become satiated and full to just certain types of sensory experiences. So if your whole plate is savory, your body is still going to be willing to crave something sweet. But if you incorporate something sweet into your plate early on, like part of the dinner, like, Maybe you take the cranberry sauce. You actually might say, I don't need two slices of pie after this. I'll be, like, totally fine with just a few bites. Again, unless what you want in life is two slices of that pie, because it's your favorite pie in the world, I'm not going to rip that from your hands on a holiday.

Earlier in this episode, we focused on turkey. You know, some people skip it. We got our vegetarians. We got our people who think it's overrated. But a lot of us load up on it. Is there such a thing as too much turkey? Well, you know, there was this older. thinking or this like maybe old wives tale that turkey can make you really sleepy and that's because

it contains these compounds called tryptophanes that's kind of been debunked the reason people feel sleepy after a big thanksgiving meal is because of all the simple carbs that we're loading up on like we're eating a ton of pasta we're eating a ton of biscuits and like gravy and all these things so i don't think turkey is the issue if that's the majority of your meal and it means that you're eating like a little bit less of the chocolate pecan pie i think that's perfectly healthy although again That's my favorite thing in the world is chocolate pecan pie, second only to corn pudding. So I don't deny myself those things on Thanksgiving. Okay, aside from the turkey, another thing that is plentiful at Thanksgiving tends to be alcohol.

You know, wine at dinner, beer with the football game, maybe a little bit of whiskey when you're playing dominoes or spades with your cousins. How does drinking on Thanksgiving affect how you feel after that meal? Alcohol delays how quickly your stomach can empty food into your small bowel. So if you're priming your stomach to already be sluggish and then you're walking into the biggest meal of your life, you are setting yourself up for failure. So I would try to avoid the alcohol beforehand. If you want to have a glass of something, go for it maybe a little bit after the meal or after you've eaten. Really the best thing you can do to help speed up your stomach is go for a short walk after the meal. And that, I think, whether you're a turkey trot family or not, going for the post-meal walk, like, is the best way to get your stomach moving, get things moving, keep your blood sugar down.

And it really helps you deep bloat. Like, all of your intestinal gas will start to dissipate if you go for even just like a 10, 15-minute walk. Oh, okay. So, like, if you overindulge at the meal, is that what you should do? Yes. But the other thing I will tell people is that, like, my family tradition is we like to watch planes, trains, and automobiles after dinner, obviously. You're the guy who tried to get my cab. I knew I knew you, yeah.

If you sit up straight, you are able to expel gas more efficiently than if you're lying down. So at very least, don't lie down right after the meal. If you can't go for the walk, at least have some good posture in your chair or on the couch. Thanksgiving is kind of like the Olympics of eating. Do you think the way we're eating on Thanksgiving is holding us back at all? Do we need to adjust that? As a society, I wonder. You know, I think Thanksgiving is, like, actually, like, what brings the best of us out.

There's been so many studies about how we are becoming more disconnected and lonely, and one key to happiness and longevity is just having a meal with family. Thanksgiving is, like, one time where we all do that really consistently, so I don't want to break Thanksgiving at all. I just want people to not feel sick and gassy afterwards, and I think there's small tweaks we can make to so that that part doesn't happen. Happy Thanksgiving. You too.

I want to go watch like Steve Martin now. By the way, you know, when you're telling these little stories, here's a good idea. Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener. That's it for Explain It to Me This Week. Pro tip from my kitchen to yours, spatchcock your turkey. We're off next week for the holiday. In the meantime, we'd love to know what do you want us to explain about the world we live in?

Give us a call at 1-800-618-8-55 or send an email to AskVox at Vox.com. Also, if you love this podcast and other Vox content, we're having a sale. When you become a Vox member, you get a ton of perks, like ad-free podcasts, special newsletters, and access to our brand-new Patreon. Head to Vox.com slash members today to join and get 30% off. This episode was produced by Ariana Spur. It was edited by Ginny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Adrian Lilly. I'm your host, John Flynn Hill.

Thank you so much for listening. I'm thankful for you. Bye. I'm having at least one turkey club with my leftovers. But depending on how much I have leftover, I can get a little saucy. I can get a little crazy. There's nothing wrong with like a little turkey pot pie. There's nothing wrong with a little turkey pot pie.

There's nothing wrong with a little. little turkey fajitas, let me tell you. I did that last year for the first time. Oh, that would have never crossed my mind. Dark meat, slice it up nice and thin, some onions, some peppers, your favorite taco seasoning, dust that all on top. Give it a nice sear on a hot cast iron with a little bit of oil into some tortillas with all the fixings. It is fantastic.