Caveny Farm
On his farm in downstate Illinois, a few miles south of Champaign, John Caveny is tending to his menagerie of rare breeds, among them endangered varieties of lamb, duck, and goose. He has a turkey flock of just under 500 bleating bourbon reds, their backs beautifully feathered in brown and white, their purple heads wrinkled like prunes. Few people have heard of bourbon reds, just as few people know that their Thanksgiving turkey is a broad-breasted white. But though Caveny charges over $4 a pound for his turkeys–four times as much as a supermarket bird–he’ll sell out.
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His success stems from a movement started a few years ago by Slow Food, the international food organization, to promote heritage turkeys, breeds that predate the rise of industrialized agriculture and are too something–too tricky to raise or too feisty, for example–to be suitable for factory farming. The logic of Slow Food is cannily counterintuitive: the more consumers eat heritage breeds, the more farmers will raise them, and voila–the more stable the endangered lines. As Patrick Martins, the head of Slow Food USA, puts it, “We must eat them to save them.” So far the birds are being eaten at least. “They’re tender, tasty, and naturally juicy,” Caveny says. Half of his customers are repeats.
Even factoring in the greater cost–and clearly nothing beats the broad-breasted white for low-cost protein–it seems shameful to trick families into cheerlessly buying the only turkey that they thought existed. Every year, says Charles Bassett of the livestock conservancy, the organization calls the White House, proposing to have the president select a turkey that actually resembles what Benjamin Franklin wanted to be the national bird. “They’d look a lot different than that industrial white the president selects,” he says.
