“Our birds live in harmony with the environment and we allow them plenty of room to roam,” says the producer, and this appears to be true, provided the bird is one of the few that has the good fortune to be raised on Diestel Ranch's showcase Sonora farm. Not so much if it's one of the far more numerous inmates at Diestel's avian Auschwitz just down the road. From slate-dot-com's account:

Located in Sonora, California, Diestel’s showcase farm gives every appearance of being a model operation. According to its brochure, as well as videos on the company’s website, healthy-looking turkeys roam shaded pastures in a natural setting. Yet, as investigators discovered, the birds roaming in Sonora may be at best a token sampling of Diestel’s overall turkey population. The main source of Diestel’s turkey output appears to be an industrial operation with 26 barns (housing about 10,000 birds each) located 3.5 miles down the highway in Jamestown, California.

Visits to Diestel’s Jamestown facility—conducted by Direct Action investigators over nine months (they just “walked right in”)—revealed horrific conditions, even by the standards of industrial agriculture...

OK, we already knew that Whole Foods Market (which has my regular custom, as they are a two-minute stroll from my kitchen) is a typically rapacious American corporation that markets to yuppie epicureans, so I'm not retiring to the fainting couch at this report. What's very, very interesting about the article, though, are the details about Global Animal Partnership, the purportedly independent outfit that monitors meat, poultry, fish producers all around this wicked world to identify humane and sustainable sources. GAP must have a fiercely dedicated staff, because in 2014 the outfit's entire payroll came to a modest $96,711, and its operating budget to not much more than the $300,000 paid to it by...(wait for it) Whole Foods Market.

Now, a suspicious person might suppose that Global Animal Partnership, though notionally independent, operates as a "beard" for WFM, certifying the chain's meats as humane, sustainable, yada-yada on the basis of cursory inspections, and not incidentally seeming to justify WFM in charging eighty or a hundred dollars to kindly, credulous customers for a Thanksgiving turkey effectively raised under the same unsentimental procedures that yielded the bird you can pick up at Safeway for fifteen bucks.

Late news/edit: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is on Global Animal Partnership's board of directors. Ha.

Nice work if you can get it. Happy Thanksgiving!

cordially, with cranberries,