This is in today’s Metro. You can buy a whole, 12 pound turkey for 40 cents per pound, or just under 5 bucks.
But wait! What’s more is that the store is “reducing prices” on canned vegetables, cranberry sauce, stuffing, dinner rolls, and a five pound bag of red potatoes PLUS a pumpkin cake in order to keep the cost of feeding eight people under $20.
The local turkeys we’ve sourced range in price from around $6/lb to $9.50/lb. So a 12 pound turkey at those rates (say, $8/lb) is more like $100. That’s a pretty massive discrepancy. Something is so wrong here.
Part of the reason this continues to work is because there is such a disconnect. Even when its about food safety, there is a spike in concern and people stop eating said food, but then things go back, slowly in terms of spinach, but much quicker in terms of pork.
The swine flu epidemic and epicenter being near a Smithfield pork farm in Mexico did not cause a mass boycott all pork products, though some people did omit it from their diets.
When money is tight, things just get harder. Maybe it would be easier if on the turkey label it read: ___ lbs. of fossil fuels were used to feed, transport & butcher this bird. ___ lbs of waste were created. ____ of antibiotics were injected into its feed. Sort of like the images on the sides of other country’s packs of cigarettes.
Turkey’s from Natick Community Organic Farm are $4.50/pound. You have to be able to pick up your turkey on November 17th, they won’t hold them for you, they don’t have the freezer space. I’ve listed a link below.
http://www.natickfarm.org/Pages/Turkeys.html
So wrong. So very, very wrong.