Millions of people across the United States and its territories will be digging into their Thanksgiving dinners within the next few hours.
There are plenty of families who will opt for a nontraditional meal. Many Latin families will probably be having ham or roasted pork; I’d imagine there’s someone out there having a Domino’s Meat Feast. But for the most part, Americans will be eating turkey. An enormous amount of turkey.
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Thanks to the US Department of Agriculture’s legion of turkey-counting nerds and statisticians, we know that an estimated 46 million turkeys are eaten every year during Thanksgiving meals. That number represents 21 percent of the 216.5 million turkeys produced in the United States every year.
That 216.5 million is, obviously, an enormous amount of turkeys. As of 2023, some of the biggest turkey-producing states in the US are Missouri, with 17 million turkeys produced a year; Indiana with 20 million a year; Arkansas, at 27 million turkeys a year; and North Carolina, which produces 29 million birds a year. But the number one turkey producer in the United States by a wide margin is Minnesota, which pumps out a whopping 38.5 million turkeys every year. So if you’re eating turkey, there’s a very good chance it came from Minnesota.
As for maybe the most important metric – prices – the average cost of a turkey between 2019 and 2024 has bounced around a little bit, what with all that worldwide post-pandemic inflation going on. In 2019, the average per-pound cost for turkey was $0.89. That then jumped up to $1.07 in 2020, $1.23 in 2021, and then $1.55 in 2022. It went down to $1.40 in 2023 and now, n 2024, we’re finally back down to under a dollar, at an average of $0.94 per pound.
