The Processed Turkey

Since the last post concerned food – albeit a yummy bread recipe, it has prompted me to tell you about my not so yummy experiences with the Christmas Turkey, because cooking it revealed something which was not known to me.

After collecting the 10lb bird from the store two days before Christmas, we kept it cool in the frig. After completing the necessary preparations before cooking we put it in the oven on Christmas day to cook according to the instructions on the plastic cover.

Removing it from the oven after the appropriate amount of cooking time, it seemed a little on the tough side and my husband felt that it needed another half hour. We gave it another half hour and it was still on the toughish side but we decided to eat it anyway.

I think this last Christmas was the first time I didn’t enjoy my turkey – it was tough, it certainly didn’t have the succulent turkey flavour, and we had no idea what the problem was.

Neither one of us wanted to have cold turkey the following day, so the next best thing was to boil it all up and make a soup. What a mistake! An awful smell pervaded the kitchen and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was a smell I had experienced once before with some turkey legs cooked for the dog – for want of a better description, I detected a definite smell of stale bleach. Before I finished cooking the soup, the entire content was thrown out and that was the end of our turkey.

A few days later I was in the store that supplied us with the turkey, and I felt, after some cogitation, that I had to mention the turkey and I did. The meat manager was most sympathetic and glad that I reported it. He would get in touch with the suppliers.

A week later the suppliers were in touch with us, and admitted to my husband that just before they are finally packaged, the birds are bleached and rinsed and occasionally one slips through the rinsing stage. In our case, the bird that missed the rinsing stage was our turkey!

We were reimbursed by the company concerned but to me it was one more nail in the coffin of processed food. Yuk!