The Science (and Chaos) Behind Turkeys, Pumpkins, and Thanksgiving

Subscribe and stuff your brain before you stuff your turkey. 🦃🥧

In this Wildly Curious Thanksgiving special, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole serve up the surprisingly scientific and hilariously human history of America’s favorite feast. From how pumpkins nearly went extinct after the Ice Age to why turkeys were almost wiped out (and then made a comeback), this episode is a buffet of weird facts, origin stories, and seasonal science.

🍂 How mastodons helped evolve pumpkins
 🦃 Why Benjamin Franklin thought turkeys were “more respectable” than eagles
 🥧 The secret history of pumpkin pie (and the rise of pumpkin spice)
 🇺🇸 How Thanksgiving became a national holiday—and a marketing goldmine

It’s history, biology, and nostalgia all rolled into one big, slightly chaotic, pumpkin-scented audio pie.

🎧 Listen in for the laughs, the learning, and the reminder to use your pumpkins wisely.

Transcript

Katy: We're talking turkeys and pumpkins. 'cause this week is Thanksgiving,

Laura: hooray. At least press Americans.

Katy: Yeah. Everybody else now would just be entertained with, or, yeah, another

Laura: Traditional

Katy: Another week for you. All

Laura: Right.

Katy: Okay, so Laura and I, we divided up this episode. Laura's gonna talk about pumpkins. I'm gonna talk about turkeys, but we're gonna, we're gonna,

Laura: Yeah,

Katy: we're gonna divide it to talk about alive and dead or how we use them afterwards. So Laura, do you wanna go, go first on your, the living.

So we'll talk about living

Laura: pumpkins. Okay.

Katy: You living pumpkins? Yes. As opposed to those dead

Laura: Really quick, I just found this good quote that I thought that we should start this with. When I was doing my research and, these people, wherever I found this, I'm so sorry, I can't even remember. But it says it's, , so Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

And, , I didn't know that at the time that Confederacy saw it as a way to push the Yankee agenda. I'm not joking, [00:01:00] and because some editorialist in Virginia said that of gave a, gave an explanation of a Yankee Thanksgiving. He said this is an annual custom of that people here to, for celebrated with devout ablations to themselves of pumpkin pie and roast Turkey.

So from two Yankees, we're gonna talk about pumpkin pie and roast Turkey.

Katy: Yeah, you wanna be like, you guys all realize you're white, right? And like you came, you came here. This isn't even your land. Come on guys.

Laura: So yes, so Pumpkins pumpkin pie is we're gonna talk about that part later. But first, the living pumpkin

Katy: Okay.

Laura: yeah, we

Katy: And I'm not a fan of pumpkin. I'm not one of those people who can do

Laura: I can do pumpkin almost everything except for pumpkin pie. I don't like

Katy: I watched. I watched my roommate in college. She was determined. She was like, I'm gonna eat a whole pumpkin pie. She almost threw up. She couldn't eat a whole pumpkin pie, right?

Laura: okay, so pumpkin is sort of a catchall term, which I never thought about, but Yeah, totally. People are just like, oh, [00:02:00] look, it's a pumpkin, but it's, they look very different from each other. There's lots of varieties of this. It's really just, it's a shape of any Gord that people have, BR. Which does not sound right, but we mean, we mean breeding Gord to Gord.

Katy: Although I can guarantee

Laura: a hundred percent. A hundred percent. The innards of that pumpkin. F So the word pumpkin was fierce, used as a word in 1647 when referring to food of poor settlers in the new world. People were like those poor suckers over there eating pumpkins.

Katy: in pumpkins. Yeah. What an insult. You pumpkin

Laura: Yeah. Geez. But where do pumpkins come from, and why are they so popular today? Well, all plants have clues to their evolutionary history, like plants with flowers and seeds evolve alongside the animals that pollinate and disperse them. So this, what is it, genus? Yes. Genus is the Kirk Kuta, which is the genus of pumpkin, and it's no exception.

It also tells a story of its evolution, so the hard outer [00:03:00] texture, the bitter flavor, and the slight toxicity of the OG pumpkin. Evolve to be eaten and have it seeds spread by really big megafauna back in the ice age. So we're like, imagine like mastodons and ground sloths. Okay. Because they were the only things that could handle that hard outer layer of a pumpkin, just cracking it.

We've seen elephants eat pumpkins, you know what I mean?

Katy: Oh, oh yeah. And it pops it, yeah.

Laura: they were even harder then and they were bitter and slightly toxic. So it needed a big animal to be able to eat it in order to not kill it.

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: so they actually found seeds in Mastodon poo from 30,000 years ago. That's crazy.

Katy: That's crazy.

Laura: like pumpkins only since then. But the world change and humans came into the picture, and I think we've talked about this before about how the place to scene extinction is maybe the only human induced extinction until now. There was some weather stuff happening, but there was also people, and it was, it's pretty direct correlation of

Katy: factor. Yeah.

Laura: So all these giant megafauna started dying off [00:04:00] and when they died. Species of cita started going extinct because there was nothing to spread the seeds, nothing was eating them. And actually this is where humans stepped in and began domesticating the pumpkin. So yes, we almost killed it off, but then we were like, actually we should save that thing.

Katy: Yeah. Forget saving Mastodons. Let's save the pumpkin. 

Laura: just a Gord.

So humans started to domesticate the pumpkin. And I mean, there's some debate about it, but the genus of plant has, this genus of plant has been domesticated at least six separate times through history. So , people were like, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. So we're talking at least 7,500 years ago in Mexico based on seeds that they have found in civilization, like, archeology stuff.

So about 7,500 years ago, which means there was a couple, there could have been a couple thousand years there of extinction happening, right? Like,

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: So we started breeding it and like many indigenous crops, what we have today is not [00:05:00] what the original species was like before domestication to think of corn, right?

Like corn was just grass. People were like, these have good seeds. Let's, let's up the seed size.

Katy: up the seeds here. Here we go. Oh yeah.

Laura: Up the seeds and the sugar content and all of that. And now we have corn, but that's not what maize and things were like originally. Same with the, with pumpkins. So like I had said before, it was really hard outer shell bitter and slightly toxic.

It's not like that today. Early people probably first started using them because of the really strong outer shell like I was saying, and they would use them as containers. If they were like, oh, like I don't have to

Katy: yeah, makes sense. Yeah.

Laura: And then,

Katy: people still do that with what is it, bird's Nest gourds and things like that. 'cause they're great for

Laura: They're waterproof and everything, like it's just a perfectly made water bottle.

Indigenous people also dried out the pulp from the inside to create a fibrous material. So if you've ever scooped out a pumpkin, it's pretty like stringy. Okay. So if you dry that, you can then weave that into mats.

Katy: Just never thought about

Laura: about me neither. I [00:06:00] would've touched it and been like, no, this is, this is gooey.

I wouldn't have thought, I would've been like dried.

Katy: this is icky, like,

Laura: The dried pumpkin flesh, so the meaty part of the pumpkin can be grounded into flour. Which I don't know if it actually gives it like a pumpkin flavor, but, so those were all the original uses of pumpkin, like textile, , a vessel.

And then just flour, not even actually the pumpkin, because the pumpkin tasted so bad. Whenever, they were like, I'm not eating

Katy: every other

Laura: Yeah, yeah. So they then they started to begin to selectively grow varieties that tasted better, thus changing the wild versions for a tastier domesticated version that was also a lot larger.

So again, it's the same where we've talked, I know we've talked about this before too, with like hot peppers, how we've selected them to get larger, but like their original ones were like teeny tiny ones. 

Katy: Mm-hmm. 

Laura: with the pumpkin and I, I mean, it's really the ideal. Crop for this time of year because they, they over winter really well.

They don't rot very easily. Like I have a, I have a, I have a pumpkin on my [00:07:00] porch that I haven't carved, and it's still totally fine.

Katy: No. Yeah, they're, yeah. Perfectly

Laura: And every part of the pumpkin can be used or consumed, including its seeds. There's no part of the pumpkin that cannot be used. that's the natural history of the pumpkin, how we almost offed it, but then we saved it and turned it into what it

Katy: We almost stopped it. Okay. So this is, that's all you

Laura: Yeah,

Katy: Okay. So this is crazy because there's a ton of overlap between pumpkins and

Laura: I figured because I feel like it's this part of the world. There's, it was a lot changing.

Katy: Yeah, but it's like freaky. Similar. Okay. Okay. , All right, so before, Turkey showed up on anyone's dinner table. They were just out in the wild, right?

So let's see here. Turkeys go by the scientific name, Riss Gala, Pavo, uh, um, and it's, they're 100% North American

Laura: yeah. Same with the pumpkins. Well, they think it's either, it's somewhere between North and Central, they think.

Katy: Yes.

Laura: an American,[00:08:00] 

Katy: Yeah. American, yeah. Of the Americas. So North America, it is their home turf. They evolved from there, adapted and were thriving well, long before Americans showed up and was like, this is delicious. In the US we have five subspecies, which I didn't know 

Laura: I only knew 

Katy: Five subspecies of wild turkeys, and if you include the Mexican subspecies, that one indigenous people's first domesticated.

That makes six. Yeah. That makes six. I had no clue.

Laura: I didn't know.

Katy: So turkeys fall into the bird family vicinity, I'm assuming, which includes the pheasants, the grouse, and the chickens. So. Exactly, so everybody calls 'em like big chicken. Well, they are. They are essentially big forest chickens. Their closest living relative is oscillated Turkey, which you need to look this up.

It legit looks like a peacock Turkey, O-C-E-L-L-A-T-E-D, but it looks like a peacock Turkey, and it's from the Yuan Peninsula [00:09:00] down in Central America. So Turkey ancestors started to show up on the fossil records around 23 million years ago. But the modern Turkey, the one we, you know, that we would actually recognize evolved around, literally around the same time as the pumpkins were here, right alongside Mammoth and giant slots, which is hilarious to think about like

Laura: because they are just little

Katy: the it.

Yeah. But it's just crazy. 'cause again, it's like the whole timeline thing that you, you learn and you put stuff and you start stacking it all together. And I'm like, there were Turkey like around

mammoths, like that's 

Laura: didn't we talk a one episode about how they think the mastodons held on up above Russia into like when there were human beings and we

Katy: yes. Significantly significant longer. Yeah. So the average size adult for our non-American folks, the average males weigh 11 to 24 pounds in the wild ish. Females are smaller vision. They can nearly three see 360 degrees around [00:10:00] them. Their color perception is very well off, way, better than humans.

Speed, they can burst into flight at 55 miles an hour and run up to 20 miles an hour. So they're not, they're definitely not slow. They're just like shaped like they

Laura: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They look like they'd be heavy and unwieldy, but they can get off the ground.

Katy: Yeah, they definitely can. As everyone knows, like the signature of the males, they gobble. Plus there's Yelps, purrs, clucks, and other sounds used for communication dominance, cording, the General Turkey drama that you see.

Laura: drama because

Katy: 'cause I mean, but their social behavior too. Like I know that turkeys, they're one of the few that are like.

F because they live in very strict, dominant hierarchies that compared to other birds that are normally just oh, it's a flock. No, they have

Laura: a pecking order. Yeah. 

Katy: no, literally a pecking order. So turkeys are opportunistic, omnivores, they eat seeds, berries, nuts, especially acorns. Insects, which is super important.

Small reptiles, and yes, the [00:11:00] occasional frog, if they have the chance, again, opportunistic.

Laura: dinosaur.

Katy: Yeah, right. Their seed dispersers, tick eaters, which is super important and general like Floris cleanup crew, that keeps the site nutrient cycle going. So there are very. Yeah, so some more of the history about them away from the natural history.

Turkeys were first domesticated around 800 to 1000 CE in central Mexico by indigenous cultures who literally knew exactly what they were doing because they weren't just like an accidental, I don't know, like the pumpkin, like they were intentionally bred for meat, for feathers, for bones. They had for

Laura: Yeah. 'cause

Katy: they had a, a.

Yeah. And Nick, yeah, definitely can't, but they were bred for a very particular purpose and every bit of that bird was used and the domesticated turkeys didn't stay local for very long. When Spanish explorers arrived in the early 15 hundreds, they brought turkeys back to Europe and [00:12:00] Europeans absolutely loved them, and they quickly became a luxury food.

Pretty much. I immediately.

Laura: Oh, I forgot to mention that was too like it. Same thing happened with the pumpkin. When Europeans came, they brought it back and pumpkins became really big in France. Yeah.

Katy: Yeah. Yeah. It just, yeah, people grasp, grasp onto them. Well, whenever the Europeans took them back. Okay. It obviously it spread, you know, mostly 'cause it was the Spanish that were over there, so they kind of stuck around Spain for a little bit. However, okay, so this is, I never thought about the Turkey and why, like the name of it and why It makes absolutely no sense 'cause they're from here.

So I always, I always just assumed that maybe there were some, I don't know other name, other meaning behind the name rather than like, oh, it's also the name of a

Laura: never thought about how it was the same as a country.

Katy: Yeah, so neither did I never made that connection. So when Europeans, when they Spanish brought them over, but then whenever the vast majority of Europeans, when they got really popular as far as like the domesticated [00:13:00] turkeys, they came through the trade routes run by the ottoman merchants.

So they assumed that the birds came from the country of Turkey. So they called him a Turkey foul, which eventually became Turkey. Yep. But the.

Laura: foul.

Katy: Yes, exactly, exactly. Again, all before all this naming chaos, I said about how they used it for the meat, the bones, the feathers, all of that. Again, they used it for food of course. 'cause why wouldn't you? Clothing ceremonial garments, rituals and offering and there's even art.

And I tried to look up some stuff because they were like, oh yeah, there's even some art depicting. I'm like, I wanna see this fricking art depicting turkeys because they are pretty smart, a lot smarter than people give 'em credit for.

Laura: look so dumb.

Katy: They look so dumb. And so I was like, I would love to see some of that ancient artwork because they do look so dumb.

So you definitely see turkeys appear through Maya, Aztec, and Pian, I think is how you say it, and other indigenous artistic traditions depending on the culture. Turkey lot. This was another thing I [00:14:00] was like, what? To them, turkeys symbolize fertility, abundance, nurturing behavior, and sometimes even like trickster quality.

I was like fertility, ah, yes, fertility. The Turkey. That's not what

Laura: lay a lot of eggs,

Katy: Yeah, but that's, I was

Laura: like there's a lot of other animals that I would think about as being more fertile.

Katy: no. Right.

Laura: Guess something with eggs and tricksters. Turkeys are kinda, I wouldn't trust a

Turkey.

Katy: Yeah. Yeah. 

Laura: can quote me on that one. Don't trust, I wouldn't trust a Turkey.

Katy: Right. So the famous big Thanksgiving right in 1621, the quote unquote first Thanksgiving,

So this is that meal. We're talking about the meal.

Laura: This is our segue , into the dead. Into the dead parts.

Katy: Yeah, this could be, yeah, this can just be the segue into the death. So there is no, actually no historical record that a Turkey was actually served well. What?

Laura: like what I was reading too, 'cause yours, it came like when I'm looking up, mine, turkeys came up with pumpkins, you know what I mean? [00:15:00] So they were saying that I mean obviously where it came from is down south

first. Thanksgiving is up in New England. They did eventually get

Katy: Well, they, the turkeys were in North Amer, the turkeys were in North America. Some wandered down. They domesticated it in Central America more, but yes, it so it, so it definitely was everywhere in North America too. But it's like they weren't

Laura: version.

Katy: Correct. Correct. So they were still 

Laura: think I was reading that at the first Thanksgiving, like it's possible that they could have gotten traded turkeys,

Katy: Yeah, they said maybe, but they were saying the deer, no. What was definitely recorded was the deer by the Wang gang, tribe waterfowl, a various waterfowl and maybe some wild Turkey, but it was never, it's never been mentioned. Never recorded, nothing. So we, and we all know that Benjamin Franklin had a Turkey obsession, , because we all, I feel like you have to bring him up [00:16:00] because people will say oh, the symbol of America is a bald eagle.

But Benjamin Franklin didn't wanna there. Benjamin Franklin

Laura: well apparently.

Katy: never act actually tried to do

Laura: Yeah. 'cause apparently like we've all heard that Benjamin Franklin was like, well it should be the Turkey. But apparently that's debunk. He just said it should be anything other than the

Katy: Other than the bald eagle. Yeah. And at the, in the same breath though, he also really liked Turkey. So he was like very outspoken that he liked turkeys apparently because he thought that they were intelligent, industrious, which is quite a word to describe a Turkey. And he did say whenever he was questioned at one point that they were a much more respectable bird than the bald eagle.

And because he said because of the bald eagle and how they're scavengers and everything, he said that bald eagles had bad moral character, which is also

Laura: yeah, yeah. That's so anthropomorphic bad moral character for that bird.

Katy: Yeah. Geez. So even though the turkeys weren't in the first Thanksgiving by the 18 hundreds, [00:17:00] turkeys were definitely everywhere in North America.

They were abundant, local, and perfect for fall meals because November is a great time to hunt them. And so that's what actually started. Turkeys being harvest at. The feast for Thanksgiving. Not because of symbolism, but because involved. They were easy to find. They didn't migrate. They were still a bird.

Easy to find, let, they fed a big family because of how big they were, and pretty much every community you could had 'em like nearby in the woods and

Laura: why I was wondering. I was like, why was it Turkey and not chicken? But I guess because of the size

Katy: Yeah, yeah. The size of it. Yeah. You could feed. Yeah, you could.

Laura: kind of Turkey. You can't just go out and shoot a chicken.

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: I mean, you could,

Katy: I mean, you could, yeah. So whenever Sarah Joseph Hale, the writer, editor, and all around just, I don't, I don't know what she actually did, but she spent decades lobbying for Thanksgiving to come become a national holiday. And in her writings is where we first conce the [00:18:00] consistency described with Thanksgiving, with a specific menu that included Turkey stuffing cranberry sauce and apple pie.

So whenever Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, Hale's menu basically became the menu for Thanksgiving. And so that's how we had it

Okay, so the last thing I'll say about 'em, 'cause I also did not know this, so because they became so popular and because they could feed so many people, they actually, by the early 19 hundreds, the Wild Turkey was almost extinct.

Laura: to think about.

Katy: Yeah. I didn't, I had no idea. So they were down to roughly 30,000 birds across the entire United States, which is so small considering. That how abundant they are now. And so obviously two big things caused the crash, the overhunting, and then the massive habitat loss that started to happen, during that time.

And so that's whenever wildlife agencies, biologists and hunters pulled together was like, okay, we need to fix this. And they started. Launching [00:19:00] coordinated efforts to protect their habitats hunting regulations, which they did the same with deer. And then that's what led to the quote unquote, what I found on many sources, called it as the modern day Turkey boom.

Which I was like,

Laura: Modern day Turkey, boom. Well, and I guess it's also not including like, you know, those are wild turkeys that you can't go out and hunt. That's not like the domesticated industry that we have today

Katy: Correct. Yeah, correct. So today the Wild Turkeys number over 7 million across 49 states. They're every, in every state except for Alaska. And they're considered one of the most, one of the most successful wildlife recoveries in US history because it was just so crazy successful. And again, this does matter because they are a substance for good food.

They are good seed dispersers, and they take care of a lot of freaking

Laura: Yeah. 7 million Birds is a lot of

Katy: No. Right. For cleaning up ticks. Yeah.

Laura: actually, I'm always surprised at the wildlife in Rockville where I work and we just saw, like this year for the first time, I saw two female turkeys just running through the [00:20:00] graveyard, like that's right next to the nature center, just taking off.

It's like there's turkeys here. This is like the suburbs. It's not somewhere you usually think of seeing turkeys.

Katy: Yeah. I'll say through the

Laura: And I saw one on my way south on two 70, which is like a six lane highway, just a Biff Turkey. One flew over my car and I was like, holy. 'cause they're huge, you know what I mean? And they're not that high off the ground.

They're like just enough to clear a semi, you know, like.

Katy: Jeez. Poor dirt's.

Laura: well, as you had said, the original Thanksgiving menu, you said apple pie, but it should have been pumpkin pie and it really was pumpkin. Pumpkin pie and thanksgiving have been together for a very long time. But going back even further, as with many indigenous foods originally uses and recipes were overlooked or forgotten for a really long time.

Like when Europeans came, they were like, okay, whatever. You know, eat your pumpkins.

Katy: Y. Yeah. You poor people.

Laura: but pumpkins have been a staple in colonial and American [00:21:00] food since Europeans first came here and started writing recipes in 1670. So since 1670, we have had pumpkin recipes. Of course, they were there before then because of indigenous peoples, we just didn't care about them.

The most popular dish for pumpkins today is pumpkin pie. So how did pumpkin pie become a

Katy: Is it still pumpkin pie or is it pumpkin spice latte, and we've just not considered it a

Laura: point. I will bring that up at the

Katy: Okay. Okay.

Laura: So the, the OG sweet pumpkin recipe sounds actually kind of awesome. I almost wanna try it. So first you scoop out a pumpkin, like you just take an entire pumpkin, you scoop it out, fill it with ginger, spiced milk, sometimes apple add honey and cook it by the fire.

You just put the pumpkin. And it just basically turns into custard like

Katy: Yeah, that Okay. See that I could get

Laura: yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Eventually this evolved. So that was like the OG pump, pumpkin custard pie thing. There was really no pie until later. Eventually, [00:22:00] pastries came into the picture, and was first, and was published in the very first American cookbook.

So there was not an American cookbook written by an American until 1796. And

in, right? Yeah, that's a really long time. But in there was pumpkin pie with pastry.

Katy: That's 

Laura: It started to become trendy in the 18 hundreds when it went from being just like a. It wasn't really sweet before it was spiced, but then it started becoming more of like a sweet treat and like more of an indulgent pastry thing, and that's when it started to become trendy and a huge change came in the early 19 hundreds when canned pumpkin became available.

This was a game changer.

Nobody wants to have to prepare pumpkin from scratch, you 

Katy: yeah, 

Laura: so like the canning industry changed everything and then everybody could make pumpkin pie. Nobody is making pumpkin pie these days without using canned pumpkin. I mean, I would 

Katy: Oh, 

Laura: know somebody who is, because that sounds 

Katy: Yeah. Okay. 

Laura: but I don't know anyone.

Katy: Let me go out and just cut off [00:23:00] my, you know, pumpkin , from the vine and Yeah. Whip it up.

Laura: up and, around the same time as canning became a thing, commercial bakeries also started to become large and could pump out huge quantities of pies, cakes, bread, et cetera. So people weren't even making their own very much. At that point. Before then, people were making the pumpkin pie at home for the holidays.

But then they started just buying them. And then frozen pumpkin pies came about in the 1960s when freezer stuff took off.

Katy: Yeah. In the home. Yeah, in the home. And it became like a

common commonplace. 

Laura: pie. This is what I usually do for Justin 'cause he likes them. So I would just get a frozen one and cut it up. But other popular pumpkin foods do include pumpkin bread, which is my favorite.

Pumpkin muffy. Pumpkin muffs. Pumpkin muffins. Pumpkin muffins. , Also love pumpkin cookies. Pumpkin soup and pumpkin seeds. They did like a poll of every state in America, and most of it was pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread. , Only one state was [00:24:00] pumpkin seeds. I was like, oh, you pour, that's the best you can do with pumpkin.

I mean, I like pumpkin seeds, but geez.

Katy: Geez. Yeah.

Laura: The only thing absolutely for no, for me is pumpkin soup. That sounds disgusting.

Katy: Yeah. No,

Laura: pumpkin,

Katy: I don't like pumpkin normally and having it warm like that would just.

Laura: one time had, and like I'm sure it's great for some people, so one time for Thanksgiving we went to a fancy restaurant and my brother and I, I don't know, we were probably like middle schoolers.

We were so upset because it was like. They just had to ruin Thanksgiving for us because instead of mashed potatoes with like sweet potatoes and then,

Katy: oh. Yeah. That's always 

Laura: had squash soup, which I thought tasted like actual vomit. But it was just like one thing after another. There was like nuts and things and we were like, this is garbage.

I just want my plain white, like, you know. But, uh, zoo, you had brought up the pumpkin spice latte. So pumpkins, pumpkin pie. Spice was originally just a blend of [00:25:00] spices that included cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, all spice. Those four, a couple added in a few more that was developed in the 1930s for convenience of cooking in general.

So that people could use that canned pumpkin and then use their little jar of spices so they didn't have to buy individual. All those homemakers were buying that pumpkin spice and lattes did not happen until 2003 with Starbucks. I know it seems like it's been around longer than that, but yeah, we were with

Katy: Yeah. Even if it wasn't around in Starbucks, like it seemed like it, it, I thought it was around.

Laura: Pumpkin, apparently. Yeah. Pumpkin's a place. What do they, there was like a, there's like an acronym for it in everything. But basically it's a cultural icon there. Nothing

Katy: I mean, now it is. Yeah.

Laura: like pumpkin spice and literally everything, which almost never has pumpkin in it. Although Starbucks apparently did put pumpkin in their stuff for a while, which also gross.

, But the actual, like the pumpkin spice stuff can be anything. It's just the, is not the pumpkin.

Katy: Yeah, and see, I can't [00:26:00] do that. I can't do like the smell like I am, I'm definitely more of like apple pie, the cinnamon apple smell, like all my candles for the quote unquote Christmas candles and stuff, or all the apple stuff. It's not the pumpkin.

Laura: I do like the flavor of pumpkin spice stuff, but I definitely think the superior flavor is apple and then

Katy: The superior flavor.

Laura: on the winter flavors because I want mint all the time.

Katy: Yes. Yes. Right?

Laura: oh, so last but not least, really any pumpkin foods or even drinks like pumpkin beer is a thing, are more about the nostalgia than the flavor. It reminds us like, I never thought about this, but you know, they're like, there's nothing as American as pumpkin pie there, because it reminds us of our roots and the good old days. It makes people think of being back on the farm and making pumpkin pie. There's like children's nursery rhymes with pumpkin pie in them from a long time ago.

Like it is part of our cultural identity is pumpkin [00:27:00] pie. And anything else that comes with being American. So

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: It's yes, people do the flavor, but really it's the nostalgia. We just have to keep in mind not to be too wasteful about pumpkins because more than half of what is grown is thrown away.

Katy: I, that's believable. I mean, we're 

Laura: of Halloween. 

Katy: is huge. Yeah. Well, America is huge. Food wasters with everything.

Laura: Yeah, so with between Halloween and Thanksgiving, use your pumpkins. Enjoy your pumpkins, but try not to buy more than what you need and try and buy locally.

Katy: Yeah.

Laura: that is the history of both living and dead pumpkins. Okay,

Katy: Okay. Well that's actually a perfect segue into my dead turkeys. So we, because talking about like the nostalgia part of it, that's. Basically what it is with Turkey as as well. So I kind of gave an overview earlier about turkeys. They were big, they were everywhere. They were seasonal, easy to find.

And unlike cows or chickens, you didn't need to keep a Turkey [00:28:00] alive for eggs or milk or anything. So eating one didn't disturb like the whole household economy. And what one thing, how it relies on another. How it relies on another. So farmers, cooks, and anyone feeding a crowd. Turkey just made sense because it was easy.

You didn't need to keep 'em around. So it wasn't like a chicken where it's yes, you need egg. You need the egg. So it's ah, when do we kill this chicken? You know what I mean? Because if it's producing eggs, you're counting on that. Turkey doesn't really give you much. So they're like, it's, it's for its meat.

Remember I talked earlier about the turkeys that did just people domesticated in Mexico a thousand plus years ago. Those domesticated birds are ancestors. Are the modern domestic Turkey the one that's in our grocery stores 

Laura: And comes in like a

Katy: the domestic.

Laura: different breeds and stuff.

Katy: Mm-hmm. And the domestic Turkey was bred specifically to be larger, slower, less agile and bred specifically for meat production.

So unfortunately, 'cause it's tastes great, but unfortunately because [00:29:00] the poor birds, like they're not wild turkeys even close anymore. Once Thanksgiving became a national holiday in, like I said, 1863 and Norman Rockwell paintings made the holiday meal look like a national duty. That's something like we had to do here in America.

The demand for Turkey rose very, very quickly, and by the 20th century, Turkey production shifted to commercial farming. Standardizing the goal became more bigger birds, more breast meat, selective breeding, large scale farming

Laura: Which more breast meat? No, thank you. I 

Katy: Yeah. dark

meat all 

Laura: a hundred percent. Especially for Turkey, which is dry. So

Katy: Yeah. It's so dry. And I know you could listen, you can slap all the gravy you want on that thing, but it's still

Laura: At its core, it's dry. Yeah.

Katy: Yeah, it's just dry. Like why do that whenever you get outta the dark meat?

Laura: a hundred percent.

Katy: So then why this Turkey then stuck becoming the main dish. It's tradition because of all those Norman Rockwell paintings.

They're like, well, we gotta have the Turkey, because that's the [00:30:00] American thing thing to do.

Laura: just like the novelty, like it's not chicken. We eat chicken all the time. Right. It's not, if it's not this, it's like Christmas goose, you know what I mean? Like it's gotta be

Katy: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, and it is, , it's symbolic now, besides the tradition, it's, it's a symbol. They're like, oh, Turkey, Thanksgiving. That's just what it is, and it is still practical.

So whenever you get, relative to the amount of meat you get, it's still a pretty cheap meal whenever you're feeding a large number of people. And marketing. So the poultry industry leaned heavily into Thanksgiving and it worked to market. Hey, everybody should go ahead and eat a 

Laura: of Turkey, 

Katy: right?

So on one side we have the wild Turkey, which they're fast, loud, clever conservation success story. And on the other side we have the domestic Turkey. Which is basically just the one that shows up in November and can keep the American tradition, how they, how we see it as shaped by farming culture and a whole lot of basically [00:31:00] strategic storytelling, marketing.

Yeah. Right. So again, like anything with food traditions, especially here in America, it's definitely a mix of history, convenience, just the storytelling and whatever is the quote unquote way. It's always been 

Laura: I do think it's kind of cool though that both are, which is another reason why we chose these two in particular, but like they are American foods. Not even, they are , their species is from here. We have domesticated them. They're a human product in all senses of the word. Like, you know, like it's just kind of interesting.

Katy: Yeah. Isn't the hot dog for me here too? Like I know not the hot dog itself.

Laura: I don't know.

Katy: Yeah, German immigrant. Yeah. From Coney 

Laura: it's gotta be something with sausages. Yeah.

Katy: Yeah. Right. Well, Germans, I mean, who does Asha best shit. Yeah. I mean it's, I was, I was gonna say, yeah, Turkey and pumpkin pies. I was American as a hot dog and I was. And I was.

Laura: And that still 

Katy: right. Yeah. All right. Still stands. Whew. Back check.[00:32:00] 

All right, guys, well, how everybody in America here who's traveling, you guys have safe travels this week, and we're push, hopefully you guys listen to this on, on your drive or

wherever you guys are flying or whatnot

Laura: time.

Katy: Yep. Yep. All right, guys. , Next week. Oh, Laura, birth the baby. , And then we had some technology issues last week, so that's why we didn't pump out a mini episode.

So the next week we'll actually start the mini episodes and then we'll get back on track. So. Laura's gotta run. 'cause she has two babies now.

Laura: both who want attention,

Katy: She's just juggling babies over there

Laura: babies Podcast, you know

Katy: Yeah, whatever. All right guys. Go check us out on Patreon, go see our social media channels and we'll talk to you 

Laura: Bye everybody.