Rootless: The Economics of Turkey, the Bird

Wild turkeys, Highway 36, Kansas. July 2016.

As a rule, the winter holiday season doesn't evoke much merriment in me. Rather, it is a season to be borne in stoic resignation.

I'm not one of the folks who gets depressed around this time, luckily. 

Nope - it's the unrelenting Christmas songs, congested parking, congested stores, and shortened tempers among people who seek prime parking spaces, that make me sigh in deep martyr mode.  I am inconvenienced.

The imposition on my selfish little world doesn't cease until the end of the first week following New Year's, with that final flurry of hustle-bustle prompted by gift returns, hence long lines at the customer service counters.

Except!

Turkey goes on radical sale in advance of the feast days! Hallelujah, I sing! I can buy a big ol' turkey for a bedazzling price, throw it in the oven, pull off the meat, make soup if I want, and feed on the meat for many days.

Until this year, that is.

This year, with the purchase of my first turkey of the season, I saw that my heretofore satisfying ROI on holiday turkey purchases was over.

First: The bird spit and sputtered all over my oven walls while cooking, which meant I had to invest unanticipated time and labor into cleaning the oven.

Second: It used to be the time and labor I invested in pulling the meat off the carcass were offset by my ability to make soup from the carcass. Only .... I released my large cooking pot to the wild in my last move.

Third: Is this all the meat I got from that deceptively plump bird?

In the forseeable future, then, I'll stick to my usual plat of boneless, skinless chicken breasts that I roast en masse in my oven.
 

A bread oven outside Rustavi, Caucasus Georgia. August 2011.

Although the price for skinless, boneless chicken is about 188% higher than the holiday-turkey-on-sale, the opportunity costs of the sale-turkey exceed the financial savings by far.  Not to mention I'm paying for the turkey carcass, which I do not consume.

Bread oven (tone) and fireplace in Tbilisi, Caucasus Georgia. April 2012.

Evidently, no topic is too banal for me to write about.

Here is my article on the economics of laundry.

In a lukewarm effort to raise the level of discourse on the topic, here is a more erudite article on the economics of holiday turkey.