Don Day: “Let’s talk turkey for a while”

Published February 7, 2022

You’ll rarely ever see them in a supermarket. And when you do, they’re almost always frozen and imported. Yet this is the country where they had their beginnings. Meleagris gallopavo, the wild turkey, is native to Mexico. And when the Spanish arrived here, turkeys had already been domesticated.

So how’d they get the name “turkey”? Well, my best guess is that the world’s most active merchants of the time, the Turks, who had introduced the guinea fowl to Western Europe, soon became involved in the distribution of the rival bird there.

So why isn’t the turkey more popular in Mexico? Why is it that about the only time you’ll see the full carcasses is in December? It’s certainly not that poultry isn’t popular; 60% of the meat consumed in Mexico is poultry. And that’s despite it being more expensive than pork.

Well, turkey actually is quite popular. In 2019, Mexico imported 400,000,000 pounds of turkey from the U.S. alone.  But this turkey just doesn’t look like turkey.

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