A Letter to the Turkey

Dear Wight's Farm Fresh Young Turkey from West Ogden, Utah,

This year will be my first preparing a Thanksgiving Turkey completely on my own ~ from Liberty Heights Fresh in Sugarhouse where I picked you up, to my parent's home in Sandy, you will have come a ways from Ogden where you were raised.

I do not know exactly the kind of life you lived. Apparently the owners of the farm where you were raised make about $100,000 a year and have been raising turkeys since 1974. I read two blog posts, one with an adorable little blond-haired girl playing with some baby turkeys, which say that your feed was made daily by hand by a farmer and his family. They say they never added anything weird to your food, and they let you out into the great outdoors to run around after you were about 7 weeks old.

Although I don't believe you had any sort of turkey spirit or soul that is still living someplace in the universe now, I do want to say “thank you” for the food that I am about to eat. It means a lot to me that no added growth hormones or antibiotics were added to your turkey body, and that you were able to run around with your turkey brothers and sisters in the sunshine for just over four months before you were killed so that I could buy you for just under $40. It would have been such a miserable four months if you had to be cooped up someplace with so many other turkeys that you couldn't move around comfortably. I'm very glad you didn't have to go through that kind of misery so that I could enjoy eating you.

Sometime this coming year, I will be going to Wights Family Farm in West Ogden, which is only about 45 minutes away from my home, so that I can see where you were raised. Preferably, I would like to go there sometime in the next month, because more turkeys are being raised there in preparation for more winter holidays in December.

When I was growing up, I always thought turkey meat tasted dry and bland and I never ate more than a few bites of it. However, these farmers at Wights sure know how to raise their turkeys as healthily and happily as possible. Because last year when I bought a turkey from your farmers, I could not stop eating more, and more, and more. The meat was soft, and tender, and juicy, and flavorful in every way I thought only the meat of a cow could taste.

I have always been the type of girl who savors the taste of meat when prepared to my liking. However, after finding out how many animals are treated while they are alive so that I can enjoy this savoury diet, I was so distressed that I could not eat the meat of any animal for quite some time. Eventually, however, my human body began to crave this sort of savoury diet once more, and in order to align my biological desires with my ethical principles, I began to research where and how I could find meat that was prepared by more compassionate humans. And last year, around the time of Thanksgiving, this search led me to Liberty Heights Fresh and Wights Family Farm!

So once again, I would like to express my gratitude to the farmers of such a venture as Wights, because I trust that my human body will be treated right as I consume the meat of animals who were treated right.

Someday I too will die, and I don't know of anyone who will eat me directly, but if what Mufasa told Simba was true, my body will turn into grass, and other animals (specifically antelopes) will eat that grass. Whenever that happens, I will have been able to run around in the great outdoors with my human brothers and sisters for a lot longer than four months, but I hope that, as was the case for you, there won't be any added growth hormones or antibiotics in my body either, that might contaminate this earth and/or those who live on it after me.

I love this earth very much, and am grateful that the natural cycle of life on this earth is one that provides the type of bountiful harvests we are gathering to celebrate today!

In Gratitude,


Elaine Ball
Certified Humanist Minister