This Thanksgiving, nearly 50 million turkeys will wing their way onto America’s tables. Many will be packed with butter, some will be swaddled in bacon, a few will be deep-fried. But almost every single one will be a Broad Breasted White, a breed that has existed for barely 60 years. Americans don’t eat the Broad Breasted White because it is delicious. It is the turkey of choice because it is cheap, and because it is very white. Yet this bland bird has ousted almost every other strain to become America’s champion gobbler, leaving many more delicious contenders by the wayside.
Until the mid-19th century, American farmers gave little thought to how they bred their turkeys. The ones you had mated with the other ones you had, or perhaps the ones your neighbor had, or perhaps a tempting fowl from across the way. You might adjust a turkey’s feed for a more succulent supper—Andrew F. Smith, in his book The Turkey: An American Story, describes housewives force-feeding peppercorns to newly hatched chicks—but on the whole, beyond basic husbandry, you let them be.
Then came “hen fever.” In 1850s America, people began to wake up to the idea that by carefully crossing one bird breed with another, you might come up with a superior third—for show or for the dinner table. John C. Bennett, a doctor from Massachusetts, initiated the Exhibition of the New England Convention of Domestic Fowl Breeders and Fanciers. “All who have fine fowl” were invited to contribute, and dozens of exhibitors showed off their best birds. Poultry fancying, as it was called, seized the country. In his 1850 The Poultry Book, Bennett’s publishers describe him as “the first to set in motion this laudable excitement .... to him is due the credit of originating the interest which is now felt in respect to poultry.” The book sparked imitators and successors, as well as reams of agricultural magazines and journals.