I love globalization! Here’s the penultimate paragraph from a very interesting essay by John Bemelmans Marciano in today’s Los Angeles Times:
First Thanksgivings aside, these local birds just wouldn’t do, and the English began importing turkeys to America. This preference carries over to the present day, and the bird Americans sit down to eat every Thanksgiving is not the northern wild turkey Meleagris americana but the Aztec land chicken Meleagris mexicana [which the Spanish, in the 16th century, had brought to Spain from Mexico]. And so Ben Franklin’s preferred symbol of America — and the only creature that can annually count on a presidential pardon — is not a native Yank at all but a Mexican bird that immigrated to the United States via two transatlantic crossings.
Happy Gobble-Gobble everyone!
