I'm ordering a pressure canner in a couple of days, it should be here well before Thanksgiving week. Me and the old lady are going to make a project of pressure canning as much turkey as we can over that week. I figure we can run about two turkeys a day through the process for a week or ten days.

I ran the numbers in my head on a boring drive to work the other day, and it came out to some ridiculous number that ended up being about enough protein to last two people for a year.

Two turkeys at 25lb each = 50lbs gross. After dressing out, 35lbs of meat total. Ten days would mean 350lbs of turkey meat. 350 pounds is 1400 four ounce portions, between two people is 700 portions each, or a little short of two years.

Well, I guess that's a little misleading. It's one four ounce serving of protein for two people for 700 days... which is still a lot.

Total cost: 19.50 for the two turkeys a day, so about $200 for the meat, and let's just double it for the sake of convenience and figure it at $400 for the Kit and Kaboodle.

$400 = 133 Mickey D's happy meals, or 700 4oz servings of turkey.

To much of a good thing. You will get so you can't stand the sight, smell or taste of turkey. A weeks work for the two of you so you count your labor as free? How about the wifes? Mine thinks she is worth more than ten bucks an hour. I don't argue with her about that as I like sleeping indoors.

I think I would stop after two turkeys and switch to beef and or pork. Higher cost for the meat but some variety in your diet. Of course next summer you can can up your garden vegetables. I tend to can vegetables and freeze meat but that means I expect the grid here to stay up quite a while.

When I was growing up in the sixtys the folks would butcher a cow and put the greater part of it in the freezer but the bones with quite a bit of meat attached were put into a large stock pot and boiled . When the meat fell off the bones they were picked out and the stock was canned in Qt. jars. You could open a jar into a pan and add veggies and have an excellent stew in an hour.

At the moment, the price of food although somewhat higher than it was a year ago remains unbelievably cheap. The problem right now is not buying it (at least if you are still employed), its storing it.

I can pick up a 10lb bag of rice right now for about $15, $1.50/lb. I have easily enough surplus income to buy 100 lbs a week of rice. If I set myself to buying this about the time I perceived the real problems we face (around a year ago), right now I would have around 5000 lbs of rice. Where would I put all that rice? Vacuum sealing it all gets tedious. If you do not seal it all up well, you will be awash in weevils and beetles rather than awash in rice.

I QUIT on the idea of storing up more food a few months ago when I surpassed the one year mark of food storage. Its just ridiculous after a while. If in one year we cannot find some way to make a go of it on the food production end, this is just an exercise in futility.

One of the things I am concerned about these days is just what I DO with all these bags of rice and beans carefully sealed up, along with the endless supply of Steaks I have and frozen and smoked fish. If the groceries still have food next year, I have to start rotating through all this stuff, but I don't eat rice and beans regularly enough to consume it all. I buy nice deli sandwiches and roasted chickens and the like for my typical daily meals.

A couple of thousand dollars these days will buy you plenty of food to last a year. What happens if you lose your job though, and you have to move out of your house or apartment or cabin? If you are on a completely paid off property and only have property taxes to worry about, theoretically you are somewhat safe to remain where you are, but I think few people are 100% out of debt to feel so secure. One of the things I worry about is just the sheer logistics of moving all my preps over to a friend of mine's house when TS REALLY HTF. Its a daunting proposition as it is, if I had gone and bought 5000 lbs of rice it would be even worse.

Anyhow, the moral of the story here is that at a certain point, the food storage thing gets very problematic. Anything more than a year, MAYBE two is just nuts. Beyond that, you need to plan for how yu might produce or acquire new food. If you can't you are a Zombie. You are dead but just don't know it yet.

Reverse Engineer

That sounds awesome, Ayoob -- good call. .39 still seems expensive to me -- but I think I'm still mentally back in the era when food wasn't 3 times what you thought it should cost.

Pressure canning has always been something I've avoided. How are you going to keep turkey from exploding everywhere?

I'm going to think about baseball.

Nothing wrong with cheap food. I put up some meat sauce using ground beef mixed with ground turkey. The flavor and texture is agreeable, although the turkey, for me, makes it a coma in a can.

I grew up on a turkey farm back in the 1950's and today, I raise Narrangansett turkeys.
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What's really interesting is how the "Franken-Bird" continues to evolve... weight-wise. Thanks to selective breeding, growth hormones, etc. etc., the weight of the average (commercial) turkey jumped an incredible 29% between 1989 and 2004.

Today’s commercial turkey is selected to efficiently produce meat at the lowest possible cost. A breed called the Large or Broad Breasted White was developed to meet the need for cost-effective production. This breed, which eventually replaced the Broad Breasted Bronze, was selected for greater size. The gains made in size and reducing cost have had consequences. One of these was the loss of the birds’ ability to reproduce naturally. Both the Broad Breasted White and the Broad Breasted Bronze turkey require artificial insemination to produce fertile eggs.

The average turkey in the store today is 13 weeks old. A turkey has to reach 23–24 weeks of age before they’ll start putting down fat. A commercial turkey puts weight on so fast, it cannot be allowed to grow that long. Because the commercial birds grow so big, they are processed for the stores at a younger age. You have to take them in at a really young age or you’d have a 35–40 pound tom for Thanksgiving. (Our Narrangansett Turkeys grow at a naturally slower rate... not reaching marketable size until 6 to 9 months, and 18 months for a big gobbler).

The meat distribution and texture is markedly different in a commercial vs. "heritage" turkey. In the commercial bird, breeding techniques have concentrated on developing massive breast size (hence the inability of commercial turkeys to mount and breed naturally). On the other hand, a heritage turkey develops meat/muscle in a natural fashion... building up the muscles that it uses the most. Since the heritage bird spends a considerable time free ranging, the bulk of the meat is in the legs and thighs (dark meat).

If you're ever a dinner guest at the White House and both commercial and heritage turkeys are served... grab a handful of breast meat from both birds and squeeze. The commercial meat has almost no body to it and will form into a wet ball of unrecognizeable tissue. The heritage meat is like grabbing a piece of tender steak. Chewy, but definitely not tough.

Anyway... Happy Thanksgiving in advance!

3 week old Narrangansetts...


Mature Toms...

Thank you for posting the above item, WyoDutch. Very informative.

Those are beautiful turx, WyoDutch. I have Royal Palm turkeys.

Those are very beautiful birds.

HOw much do you sell those for? You do raise them to sell?

You will get sick of it VERY quick. I wouldn't do it. MY brother makes a lot of jerkey/beefsticks/etc from venison. Last year he did over 50 deer and he won't go near the stuff, hasn't for years. He won't even eat the steaks or anything.

Too much of a good thing isn't good.

If you were using heritage turkeys, unlike the nutritionless disease-ridden kind you've quoted, it would cost from $2000 to $3000 for the meat - the healthy kind that is.

My family's had a heritage bird for the past four Thanksgivings, they're unbelievably delicious.

I just bought 4 approx 20lbs birds for 6.99 each
and a ham -20 lbs for about $35
right into the deep freezer!