Do We Need The Turkey for a Successful Thanksgiving Meal? Three Quarters of Americans Says No

The turkey is the centerpiece of one of America's most treasured holidays but does it need to be?

Get our free mobile app

Does the turkey carry the respect we think it does with Thanksgiving diners? Pound for pound, hour for hour, is the turkey worth the effort? According to a new poll from SWNS, the answer is no. The company asked 2,005 Americans if they would be OK with an "all-sides" Thanksgiving and 74% said  yes.

The study also revealed:

• Mashed potatoes were most with 46% of Americans choosing it as the best side, which just edged out stuffing at 43%
• Apple Pie was the favorite Thanksgiving dessert
• 86% of American families have a special recipe for at least one side dish.

I've been calling for Thanksgiving reform for years! This has been one of the things that has bothered me for a long time. Thanksgiving is a near perfect holiday with a few flaws and the turkey is one of them.

I call it the dirty bird, it's ugly, it takes forever to cook, you have to stick a sack in the "cavity", everyone argues over the best way to prepare it, it's never as juicy as you would like it to be and we lose like 43 Americans a year to fried turkey tragedies.

Think what would happen if we could abandoned the time we spend on the turkey. It's a minimum of 50 hours from concept to completion. You gotta go find one, pick the best, bring it home and cook it for a day and then you spend 4 hours arguing about it. You get that fifty hours back, and use it on something better like learning a new dance move or cooking three years worth of mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving.

Let's kill the turkey, put stuffing at the middle of the table, stop bringing so many desserts especially those peanut butter cookies with the giant Hershey's kiss in the middle (bad ratio of chocolate to peanut butter), turn the volume on the NFL games up, send anyone home who disagrees and now we have a holiday.

Thanksgiving reform 2021, demand it in your house for the perfect holiday. Happy stuffing day y'all.