David Dodwell

Tofurkey for Thanksgiving and mock roast suckling pig? How the world can eat less meat

Given global warming and the emergence of pseudo meats, more of us should be replacing the Thanksgiving turkey with meatless alternatives

Meanwhile, China’s meat prices have surged in pork crisis: a chance for pseudo-meat makers to enter the world’s biggest meat-eating market. But it won’t be easy

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US President Donald Trump pardons a turkey named “Butter” in a Thanksgiving ceremony on November 26, with farmer Wellie Jackson, who raised the bird, and First Lady Melania Trump. Photo: EPA-EFE

David Dodwell

Published: 1:00am, 30 Nov 2019Updated: 1:33am, 30 Nov 2019

Think of Thanksgiving and it is hard not to think of guilty, self-indulgent excess. Its image was distilled by New Englander Sarah Josepha Hale, who described the feast in detail in her 1827 novel Northwood: turkey flanked by a loin of pork and a leg of mutton, a chicken pie, mounts of stuffing and cranberry sauce, plum pudding, pumpkin pie, ale and cider.

For a feast first indulged in 1621 when the Pilgrim Puritans, less than a year off the Mayflower, partied on wildfowl and venison for three days with 90 native Indians from the Wampanoag tribe, no celebration so symbolises the gratitude Americans share for the God-given abundance they had found – even though Abraham Lincoln did not proclaim it a national holiday until more than 240 years later.

As an English kid who did not grow up with Thanksgiving, I never fully appreciated its scale and symbolism – even though we had the Harvest Festival at the local church, and many communities worldwide have festivals to celebrate the safe completion of the year’s harvest. In China too, mooncakes and the Mid-Autumn Festival were as much about a safe harvest as poems about the moon.

But amid the Thanksgiving excesses of this past week, I could not help but think about the global warming imperative to eat less meat, which is linked to the cultish emergence of pseudo-meats such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, and the pork crisis in China caused by African swine fever.

I have long been saddened by the reduction of chicken to what can be a 46-day industrial process from hatching to table-ready meat. Turkeys do not fare better.