Today, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.

“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”

So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.

Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.

Inside this story

• Why Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, despite many of us not liking it very much!

• What life is like for a Thanksgiving turkey.

• What to eat instead of turkey, and why you might even see going turkey-free as more authentic to the values of Thanksgiving.

Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?

Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for........

© Vox