1980_11 The Daily Collegian November 1980

              THE DAILY COLLEGIAN
Friday, November 21,1980
Armstrong's American Journal
The business of raising gobblers
ago, Benjamin Franklin so admired the American turkey, he nomin¬
ated it as America's national bird Ben's bid lost out to the Bald Eagle, the
splendid creature that we' ve since nearly succeeded in exterminating
The turkey, by contrast, has grown enormously in number Were Franklin
alive today, however, it is unlikely he would recognize the turkey
Franklin's ideal was the wild turkey, a bird that still provides sport for
hunters and lends its name to a deservedly famous bourbon
The modern holiday turkey, however, is a breed apart Hatched from
genetically engineered eggs, raised on a diet of chemicals, butchered by
machine, preserved with still more chemicals and marketed by giant agri¬
business corporations, the commercial turkey is an assembly line product of
the technological age Like many technological wonders, it may also endan¬
ger human health in ways that are not yet fully understood.
Until the mid-1960s, most turkeys were raised by small independent
farmers Today, the independent poultry grower is going the way of the
nickel candy bar
The big names in turkey growing include red-meat packers and process¬
ors like Swift, dairy giants like Land O' Lakes and well-known purveyors of
foodstuffs like Creyhound, which owns Armour Meats, another big turkey
a comparatively cheap.
producer
Turkey has come into its own in recent years l_ . -—,-—, -»_-, waa*>,
good-tasting alternative to beef and pork. Low in cholesterol and saturated
fats and high in protein, it is becoming a year-round favorite.
Americans will eat 10 pounds of turkey per person this year, about a
pound more than in 1978 That's some 200million birds.
Turkey tycoons credit their success to scientific breeding. The laboratory
wizards who brought you the square tomato have not neglected the turijey.
Says Ken Klippen of the National Turkey Federation, an industry group,
"Turkey growing is now an exact science. We've bred the birds to be docile
and easy to harvest."
America's well-advertised passion for convenience foods is another fac¬
tor Where once there were only whole turkeys that took hours to prepare,
now there are turkey hot dogs, turkey "ham*, turkey "pastrami* and readily
available bundles of more conventional turkey products like wings and
drumsticks.
The business of raising gobblers is highly specialized. Few turkeys, for
example, are born where they grow up and die. Instead, eggs are laid by a
few breeder flocks —nearly 90 percent of them in California, for some
reason—and shipped throughout the nation to commercial hatcheries. The
new arrivals spend their lives on huge turkey ranches that may hold more
than a million birds.
Turkeys an usually raised in flocks of several thousand in large barns
with concrete floors. They are separated by sex and kept in climate-control¬
led environments under artificial light.
Klippen claims the turkeys like it that way. "They experience less stress
than if they were outside having to fight and forage for their food." The
birds are fed a diet laced with antibiotics to ward off disease and, often¬
times, hormones to induce growth.
Most turkeys are killed with an electric knife drawn across their throats as
they hang upside-down from hooks Their feathers are loosened by dipping
the dead birds into a hot.solution that usually contains chlorine added to
control bacteria and increase shelf life
Many turkeys are also injected with vegetable oil to make them juicier
Those that are frozen can take on up to a quarter of their weight in water.
The modern turkey is then ready for the table
Corporate producers are understandably enthusiastic about the expand¬
ing market they control But smaller growers, some of them advocates of
natural or organic techniques, are less enamoured of this brave new world of
turkey technology
One of them is Leslie Thoelecke, an independent poultry grower in
Sonoma. California According to Thoelecke, eating turkey could be hazard¬
ous to your health
"The antibiotics that most growers put into turkey feed build up in the
turkeys, then they build up in us when we eat them," he said. "That in turn
can make people resistant to certain drugs that they may need later to fight
diseases of their own "
Thoelecke also claims that formaldehyde is sometimes coupled with chlor¬
ine in processing turkeys, although the large commercial growers deny it.
As for hormones, Thoelecke is simply aghast, arguing that they are prob¬
able cancer-causing agents.
Large growers generally downplay the use of hormones when they are
quizzed about them, but Thoelecke claims that federal investigators—who
spotcheck the millions of mass-produced turkeys—routinely find dangerous
levels of hormones in turkey meat
To Thoelecke, the only safe way to raise turkeys is to do it organically—
"without hormones or antibiotics and without chemicals in the processing."
Thoelecke also advocates letting the birds eat and exercise out of doors,
which he says improves their muscle tone and ultimately their taste.
There are no legal standards for organic turkeys, Thoelecke allows, but he
figures his working guidelines are sufficient to produce a natural bird.
"There an very few truly organic turkeys because raising turkeys in a natur¬
al way is hard work. You have to watch them really closely. And a lot of
growers don' t want to do that. They let the drugs do the work for them.*
But Thoelecke believes the extra work pays off with the superior taste of
the natural bird "The chemicals used in processing strip away the flavor.
And the drugs ruin the texture. Most commercial turkeys taste like mush.'
That may not seem like a disadvantage in an age when American children
prefer Tang to orange juice, and a cookbook duplicating the secret recipes of
Kentucky Fried Chicken and Big Macs can sell thousands of copies, but
Thoelecke insists quality will win out. *
With evident satisfaction, he tells of i taste test conducted in 1977 by New
West magazine in which consumers were asked to choose between scientifi¬
cally programmed turkeys and naturally grown birds.
"They picked the organic turkeys," he reports "One hundred percent of
them."
Are you listening, Ben?
THE DAILY COLLEGIAN
Most know nothing about chess
Game is
mysterious.
profound
Chess is considered a sport in many
countries including the Soviet Union
where Anatoly Karpov, the young
world champion of chess, has twice
been named sportsman of the year
over athletes in other realms of sport.
For a break from the standard sports
fare we invited Mr. Fitzgerald,
a graduate of the CSUF journalism
department and a Category 1 chess¬
player, to contribute an article about
By Michael Fitzgerald
MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST BE
HUMBLE FOR A MINUTE AND
LISTEN
The first thing you must realize:
you don't know anything about chess.
Oh, you think you do, you learned
some of the rules once-think you
know them all? Know about the cap¬
ture en passanti Of course not!
You're just like all the restl You don't
even know all the rules.
The game that you dismissed as
boring ("I don't have the patience for
this game," you said) wasn't even
chess; it was 80 percent of that which
you need to know before you can
ruly understand the game.
Because chess Is more than the
-.urn of the rules. In a way it's like
Frankenstien's monster, with the rule
analogous to the monster's limbs.
You sewed the monster together,
hut didn't infuse it with life.
The vitality, that spark that gives
chess its mysterious and profound
allure, is an understanding of the
theory and not merely the rules of
the game.
named Wilheim Stein-
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CSUF STUDENT MARTIN GREER PLAYS CHESS
The game Is considered a sport In many countries
Photo by Greg Trett
itz perceived the true nature of the
game in the mid-1900's and immedi¬
ately skyrocketed to the world cham¬
pionship over his colleagues who were
brilliant, but who knew only to attack,
attack, attack.   All could out-attack
Steinitz any day of the week, but
somehow. . well, after a while they
just couldn't beat him any longer
Steinitz held the key, the knowledge.
For 26 years he was the world cham-
See Chess page 13
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