I took this photo at the petting zoo in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. This is one ugly creature. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have cooked inside its own body cavity, worrying all the time that you’ve cooked it long enough to kill all the bacteria that would otherwise give you food poisoning. In popular usage, we use the word “turkey” to imply losers and failures. Yet we still delight in eating them. Is the ritual of devouring these ugly beasts a symbolic re-enactment of our colonial past? The way we respond to losers and failures? I’m a descendant of the Puritan settlers who invented this ritual; it’s kind of important to me that I think this one through. It eats at me.