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Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here with a festive classic for you.

In this one, we're talking turkey.

That is the history and modern traditions around consuming this large bird around

American Thanksgiving and other holidays and beyond.

Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. It might come in fourth on the list of America's

top protein choices, but one day out of the year, nothing else will do. Every Thanksgiving day,

chicken, beef, and pork all step aside and make room for their poultry compadre, the turkey.

For turkeys, however, Thanksgiving isn't such a blessing. It's estimated that in 2017,

a whopping 45 million turkeys were consumed for the occasion. Some suffering the fate of being stuffed

not only with stuffing, but also with a duck and chicken to create that poultry profusion

called the Turducken. There are a couple competing origin stories for the Thanksgiving feast,

including a couple meals shared between Native Americans and European colonists stretching back to the 1600s, but it wasn't

an official American holiday until President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed November 26, 1863,

a National Day of Giving Thanks.

Before that, thanksgivings, days spent in prayer thanking God for some fortuitous event or another,

were periodically celebrated by New England

colonists, but not anything like the level of the national Thanksgiving festivities we see

today. Presidents following Lincoln annually proclaimed the holiday the last Thursday in November

until 1942, when Franklin D. Roosevelt switched it to the fourth Thursday in November, not necessarily the last,

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