You might only need to drive a couple miles to the grocery store to snag your Thanksgiving turkey each year, but there’s a good chance that bird has already traveled hundreds of miles before it ends up on your dinner table.
According to software company Ndustrial’s “Turkey Tracker,” the average Thanksgiving turkey passes through three separate facilities, and hitches a ride on four different trucks on its typical 760-mile journey from the farm to the supermarket. In total, around 2,500 U.S. farms — primarily in the Midwest and along the East Coast — crank out roughly 46 million Thanksgiving turkeys each year.
That journey might start on a farm in North Carolina, where a single turkey is raised for 15 weeks on a diet of corn and soybeans, before it’s loaded onto a truck bound for a processing plant more than 60 miles away. That plant — with the capacity to slaughter 24,000 birds a day — then kills and packages the turkey, while setting aside unused parts of the bird for animal feed or composting. From there, the turkey is loaded onto a semi-truck with a refrigerated
trailer that stays at or below 40 degrees, and is moved to a regional cold storage facility as large as two full football fields. At the facility, the turkey is quickly frozen, and then moved into a zero-degree storage area. As it gets closer to the Thanksgiving season, the turkey gets loaded onto a refrigerated long-haul semi-truck, and taken across state lines to a distribution center, where it eventually gets picked up by another refrigerated truck before heading to a shelf at the grocery store.
The point of this exercise in turkey tracking? To highlight the environmental cost. Ndustrial estimates that, by using electric vehicles, emissions from the journey could be slashed by as much as 70%. Factoring in other green energy alternatives such as energy-efficient storage facilities, alternative fuels for cooling, and smaller delivery vehicles that consume less fuel, emissions could be cut by as much as 24,000 metric tons.
