What price a good turkey?

Discount supermarkets are selling turkeys at very low prices but many consumers are willing to pay considerably more for the organic Irish variety, writes CONOR POPE

DESPITE THE fact that many of us have mixed feelings about turkey – just count how often you’ll hear (or say) “I don’t really like it, it’s very dry” over the next couple of weeks – it’ll still be eaten by 94 per cent of Irish people in the days ahead, with all but the most resolute toeing the Christmas party line.

The omnipresent nature of the bird on dinner tables across the country prompts the good people at Safefood to run what should be blindingly obvious campaigns every year reminding us of the dangers of eating undercooked turkey. In truth their statistics always reflect badly on us.

This year we learned that one-in-five people who cook a turkey will risk food poisoning because they think they can tell whether or not the bird is cooked based entirely on its look and smell – you can’t – and only 8 per cent calculate the cooking time of a turkey properly.

It is not, however, the safety but the price of the turkey that will occupy most minds this year. With times hard and people looking for ways to cut the cost of Christmas without stripping it of its joy, more people are peering curiously into the freezers of their local discount supermarkets and wondering if the €7 turkeys buried within could really become the centrepiece of the most talked-about and stressed-about meal of the year.

Last Christmas we spent an impressive €13 million on 2 million kgs of turkey. With food prices falling and supermarkets drawing people in with low prices, the nation could, collectively, save itself around €10 million over the next four weeks simply by making the switch from the locally-sourced, free range or organic turkey of yesteryear.

Lidl is selling frozen, self-basted 4.4kg French turkeys for €10.99 (€2.50 a kg) while 1kg of basted frozen stuffed turkey breast joint – from Brazil – is €6.99. If neither of these options sound entirely delicious – and many consumers may baulk at the notion of inviting a Brazilian turkey to their Christmas table – the store will also be selling 1.8kg fresh Irish turkey crowns, which come with Bord Bia quality assurance, for €19.99 from December 21st. Its nearest competitor, Aldi, has frozen turkey crowns weighing in at between 1.8kg and 2.4kg for €9.99 and, from Sunday, will be selling Monaghan-grown turkey crowns for €10.99 a kilo.

But should consumers really aim to source the cheapest meat deals out there or support their local butchers who struggle to keep their prices in line with the big boys? And what hope does the organic turkey sector have in such a challenging marketplace?

Quite a bit of hope, apparently. We carried out an – admittedly entirely unscientific – straw poll of Twitter users last week, asking would they be prepared to pay between 50 and 70 per cent more for a free range or organic turkey this year despite the gloomy economic times. Some 76 per cent of respondents said they would unquestionably pay more. A further 12 per cent said that price was the single most important factor while the same percentage said we were mad to be buying turkeys at all and weren’t geese much nicer (short answer, no).

“Give me free range. Don’t want to eat a swollen, ill bird. Even the thought makes me sick. Less but better quality for me,” said one respondent. “I’d pay! But then again, I’d remortgage my house and sell my husband for good food,” said another. “I’d spend the extra money for a special meal. I can taste the difference in free range texture,” came a third.

In the “no” camp one person said that in “today’s recession the cheaper the better” while a fellow naysayer said they’d be “happy if the first light my turkey saw was the light in my oven”.

Nigel Cobbe set up the website Simply Sourced – www.simplysourced.net – in July. He sources meat from a small number of producers who follow the basic principles of ethical farming and ships it countrywide. He is facing into his first Christmas in the trade and he told Price Watch last week that his free range turkeys were, er, flying out the door.

His fowl from a turkey farm in Armagh sells for €9.50 per kg – over four times what the frozen birds cost in Lidl. “I would have thought that maybe this year, with money tighter, people would be looking to spend less on their Christmas dinner but actually quite the opposite has happened,” he says. “People are looking towards Christmas as an opportunity to re-group and maybe to re-establish values from before the boom and, from what I can see, people are putting a real effort into putting a quality meal on their tables this Christmas and are placing more emphasis on that then on making sure they have the latest gadgets.”

Pat Whelan, who also runs an online meat business (www.jameswhelanbutchers.com) along with a more traditional butchers in Clonmel, agrees. He specialises in organic meat and, while he says it is too early to say how business will be this Christmas, he has ordered the same amount of organic and free range turkeys as last year.

“I remember the worst of the recessions in the 1980s and even then people always found enough to make their Christmas dinner special. The turkey is the centrepiece and I think people are still prepared to spend a little more. I don’t believe a difference of €20 or €30 between a free range organic turkey and a commercially produced one is going to phase too many people.”

He is unconvinced that the cheapest of the smaller turkeys being sold by the big supermarkets offer real value for money. “When you buy a smaller turkey, a much higher proportion of what you’re buying is bone – the bone structure of a 141b turkey and an 8lb turkey is almost identical – so the cheaper small turkey is actually bad value compared with the bigger more expensive one. In relative terms the extra weight you are buying in the bigger turkey is pure meat.”

He says that the organic birds he sells are “vastly superior” to commercially produced and slaughtered turkeys, not just because of the way they live, but the way they die. Turkeys which are intensively produced live less time, eat less well and are electrocuted before being immediately plucked and packaged.

Whelan dry plucks his turkeys and lets them hang for six days before they are sold allowing enzymes to break down the meat’s fibres. “It is about how you handle the meat. It deserves respect. A lot of producers don’t treat food with respect. I am not in this to make a fortune, I am in this to make a living and I concentrate on supplying a good quality product.”

But back to Safefood and it’s fretting over cooking times – this year it is surfing the zeitgeist and has launched a free iPhone application which promises to help us calculate the optimal cooking time. It is also running a mobile phone service so you can text the word “stuffed” or “unstuffed” plus the weight of your turkey to 51500 to get an estimated cooking time for fan-assisted ovens. Alternatively, you could just sit down with a pen and paper and do some basic multiplication.