Why Do We Eat Turkey on Thanksgiving?

Watch this story

The full episode is on YouTube, about ten minutes long.

Updated: November 14, 2026

Picture a Thanksgiving table, anywhere in America. There is gravy, there is stuffing, there is pie, and right in the middle, golden and enormous, sits a roast turkey. It is the star of the show, the bird we plan the whole meal around. Every year, Americans eat about 46 million of them on this one day. So here is a simple question, and the answer is stranger than you think. Why turkey? Why this bird, on this day, every single year?

The short answer is that the Pilgrims probably did not do it. The long answer involves a magazine editor with a 17 year campaign for a missing holiday, a president in the middle of a civil war, a founding father who thought eagles were thieves, and a bird that nearly vanished from the earth entirely. The turkey on your table is not a Pilgrim tradition. It is a 19th century invention, and it took 200 years to get there.

The 1621 feast

Let us start in the autumn of 1621, at Plymouth, in what is now Massachusetts. About 50 English colonists had survived their first terrible winter, with help from their Wampanoag neighbours, and their first harvest had come in. Governor William Bradford sent four men out hunting, and the Wampanoag leader Massasoit arrived with about 90 men. They feasted together for three days. That is the meal we call the first Thanksgiving, a harvest party with games and military drills as much as a dinner.

Now, here is the twist. Winslow never uses the word turkey. Not once. His letter just says fowl, and fowl could mean a dozen different birds. Governor Bradford, writing later about that same autumn, did say there was a great store of wild turkeys around Plymouth, and they took many. So turkeys were around, and one may well have ended up in a pot. But turkey was never the star of that feast, just one bird among many, and nobody wrote it down as the main event.

Sarah Hale and Lincoln

If the Pilgrims did not crown the turkey, who did? Meet Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer from New Hampshire, a widow with five children, the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb, and from 1837 the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely read women's magazine in America. Hale loved Thanksgiving. She had grown up with it as a New England harvest festival, and she thought the whole country should celebrate it together, on the same day, every year.

Then Hale went after the holiday itself. For 17 years she wrote letters to governors and to five different presidents, asking for a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November, a festival of unity for a country splitting apart. Four presidents said no, or said nothing. Then, on September 28, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, she wrote to Abraham Lincoln. Five days later, on October 3, Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving for the last Thursday in November.

Why the turkey won

So why did the turkey win the starring role? It was the right bird in the right place. The wild turkey is native to North America, and it had lived here for millions of years. Indigenous peoples in Mexico domesticated it about 2,000 years ago, and the tame bird travelled to Europe with Spanish ships, then spread through Europe and back to English farms. When Hale wrote her novel, the turkey was already a familiar farm bird, big, available, and proudly American.

The turkey also had a famous fan, or at least a famous joke in its favour. In January 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his daughter Sarah, and he called the bald eagle a bird of bad moral character, a thief that steals fish from other birds. The turkey, he said, was a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America. People love to say Franklin wanted the turkey as the national bird. He never did. The letter was a joke about another group's eagle badge, and the eagle had already been chosen for the Great Seal in 1782. But the joke stuck.

The modern numbers

And the modern numbers are enormous. About 88 percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and the National Turkey Federation puts the total at about 46 million birds on the one day, with another 22 million at Christmas. In 2024, American farmers raised more than 205 million turkeys. That is a lot of birds for a creature that was nearly extinct a century ago. The comeback is so complete that the turkey now gets a presidential pardon every year, a live bird presented at the White House since 1947, and formally spared by President George H. W. Bush in 1989.

So let us put the numbers together. In 1621, about 50 colonists and 90 Wampanoag guests feasted for three days on fowl, venison, corn, and shellfish. In 1827, Sarah Hale put a roast turkey at the head of the table in a novel. In 1863, Lincoln made Thanksgiving national. In 1941, Congress fixed the date. And today, about 46 million turkeys land on American tables on a single day. It was elected over 200 years, by a novelist, a president, and a lot of hungry families.