Notes on a Tofu Turkey

I have a friend in Topanga named Arlo who is an unemployed actor and an animal activist and who each Thanksgiving lobbies me to preach mercy for the unfortunate turkey.

“Arlo,” I said to him the other day, “don’t bug me about brutality to turkeys. I have a cold and a sore throat and am not in the mood to be merciful to anyone. Ask my wife.”

“If you’re feeling lousy today,” Arlo replied testily, “imagine how the bird feels.”

We’ve had this argument before. He says turkeys spend their lives in plots of land so small they can hardly move, and I say so do the Japanese and it sure as hell hasn’t hurt them any.

Then he says, “Yes, but the Japanese aren’t eaten at Thanksgiving” and I say, “Leave me alone, Arlo.”

It is not that I am without compassion. God knows, I would not want to be a turkey myself. It’s just that I suspect Arlo is more interested in furthering his own acting career than he is in prolonging the life of the turkey.

That is why I will not use his real name. I do not want to be a party to a man climbing to the top over the bodies of dead turkeys. There are no free lunches, Arlo.

However, he is not the only one who has lobbied me to encourage a new attitude toward turkeys. A growing number of others have begun to suggest that the bird has suffered enough, which leads me to believe that saving the turkey has all the earmarks of a national cause.

While I can empathize with the cause, I am reluctant to support anything likely to cost me one of the few animals I am allowed to eat.

Due to years of excess I am supposed to watch my cholesterol, and several well-fed physicians have suggested I watch it by limiting my ingestion of red meat and eating more turkey.

In other words, it’s either me or the turkey, and I wouldn’t bet on the bird in this case if I were you.

“Why the poor turkey?” Arlo moaned over a beer at Bruno’s Dead Dog Saloon as we discussed the ramifications of Thanksgiving.

“Because,” I said, “the Indians did not sit down with the white man and feast on dolphin.”

“You think that’s funny?” he demanded.

“I think it’s somewhat amusing,” I said. “Imagine all the dressing you could stuff into a dolphin.”

Arlo leaned across the table toward me and said in a gravelly voice, “Any man willing to wipe out an entire species to fatten his own behind ought to be taken out and shot.”

I thought for a moment and then said, “George C. Scott!”

Arlo smiled and said, “I’m getting that one down pretty good.”

I was kidding about the dolphin. I don’t believe in eating animals threatened with extinction.

Had I been around in the era the dinosaurs were dying, I would not have sat down to a meal of tyrannosaurus, though tyrannosaurus, lacking my compassion, might have sat down to a meal of me.

Translating that principle into current epiphanies, I similarly will not dine on white rhinos, humpback whales, bald eagles or the beautiful Komodo dragon.

“I’ll tell you something else,” I said to Arlo. “I will never eat anything live.”

“You couldn’t eat a live turkey anyhow.”

I’m not talking about turkeys. In Rome one summer a friend named Giorgio took us to dinner and ordered clams. He suggested I squeeze lemon on them. When I did, they cringed.

“My God,” I said, “they’re alive.”

“Right,” Giorgio said proudly.

When he left the table for a moment, my wife said, “Eat them or you’ll hurt his feelings.”

“I’m not eating anything that cringes,” I said, thereby establishing a principle from which I have never varied. I put the clams in my pocket and said they were delicious.

“That doesn’t exactly make you a humanitarian,” Arlo said. “Did you return the clams to their natural habitat?”

“Sort of. I dumped them into the Fontana di Trevi. Hence the song, Three clams in a fountain . . . .”

Arlo groaned.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’m a man who loves all living things.”

“Sauteed with mushrooms and onions.”

“No, I mean it. So I’ve come up with a substitute for eating live animals during the Thanksgiving season. Arlo, go forth and create the tofu turkey.”

The last I saw of him he was heading out the door saying, “You know, that might work,” in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon.”

Maybe he’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, enjoy your turkey. Try to forget that it was raised under circumstances more crowded than Tokyo, though if it makes a takeover bid on the cranberry industry, you’ll know it hasn’t suffered a bit.