It's the start of November, and that means the holiday season is fast approaching. Shorter days, sweet desserts and family dinners are on their way, but that doesn't mean there isn't a bit of time left for some learning. So today we're taking a familiar face and learning ten new facts about the giblets and meat that we've come to know as our Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
1) The domesticated turkey raised and reared for your Thanksgiving dinner is a descendent of native wild North American turkeys, who originally roamed most of Mexico and was first domesticated there thousands of years ago.
2) While not everyone in North America celebrates the holiday, once shared between pilgrims and Native Americans, turkey remains the preferred star of Thanksgiving dinner for 88 percent of all Americans, according to Gallop poll.
3) In the wild, turkeys are amazing fliers, but only for short distance sprints. Reaching up to 55 miles per hour at maximum speeds, they mostly use their powers of flight to evade predators and take shelter in trees when they're vulnerable at night.
4) While their wild counterparts are capable of taking to the sky, domesticated turkeys are often grown too large to take flight. With overdeveloped breasts, ideal for a hearty meal, the turkeys you eat are kept close-by courtesy of their limited range of motion keeping them ground-bound most of their lives.
5) Baby turkeys are called "poults", and while they may be cute from day one, they don't learn all of their turkey tricks like flying until they're roughly two weeks old.
6) Want to draw a more realistic turkey? You'll need much more than tracing your own five fingers. Mature turkeys have roughly 3,500 feathers at their peak, and they can range in color from pure white all the way to copper, green and red.
7) Just like their relatives the peacock, male turkeys are brazen showoffs, using their intricately pruned tail feathers as a means of attracting a suitable mate.
8) That "gobble, gobble" we know to be a typical turkey sound is not really the generally calling card of the species. Only male turkeys, better known as "Toms", are the gobblers of the bunch, while the hens cluck or chirp.
9) Turkey meat, aside from being supremely delicious, is rather low in fat while being high in protein. Dark meat is high in iron, zinc and B vitamins, while both dark and light meats are high in tryptophan. Tryptophan, commonly known as the sleepy ingredient, which makes you tired after a holiday meal, is also very helpful for short term memory retention so it's perfect for a finals week snack.
10) While most of the Northern world gets its annual fill of turkey at the Winter holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, it's a year-round delight and is also widely eaten during the summer when National Turkey Lover's Month comes round every June.
