Thanksgiving for 10 (plus leftovers) for....$48?!?

$48.90 to be exact, says the American Farm Bureau. This assumes, among other things, a Turkey cost of $1.36/lb. I had to laugh at Whole Foods yesterday when, late to ordering my bird, I was told the only thing they had left in the 14-16 lb range was the $5.49/lb option.

Here’s the breakdown

You need to live in fly-over country. Roadkill is a cheap source for the main dish.

Meijer’s advertising turkey for $0.37/lb

I assume it is actually turkey…


George

My WF has a good selection of medium size Turkeys for 1.99/lb. But you can easily find much cheaper at the big chain groceries. A bag of potatoes, some sweet potatoes, bag of cranberries, other misc., I can see being able to do it under $50 no problem if you shop well.

I think we spent half that in butter alone.

I think it could be done using the cheapest versions of the listed ingredients, but we are beyond that mark at the appetizers. Wine was not even mentioned.

We donate high multiples of that amount to food banks. It is shameful for a rich country to leave so many out of reach of an average holiday meal.

The corkscrew rental was more than that !

From China.

Turkey has traditionally been a loss leader in the grocery business but it’s changed a bit. The local Target has frozen turkeys at $1.34 for 10-14#. And that’ll be close to local grocery stores. The HyVee offered this:

“Flyover country” is pretty cheap compared to Long Island. Housing, reasonable property taxes, good public schools, etc. Food is cheap, meat is much better than a lot of the country and I can get prime rib cap at Costco or au bon canard at the co-op down the street. Produce is decent in season but things like tomatoes are more about beautiful color than flavor off-season. Fish is okay. Things like salmon, shrimp, cod and mussels that sell are really good, but not quite what you’d get at the source.

I’d say that food in the area is undergoing a bit of a craftsman renaissance. Cheese, milk, pork, chicken, potatoes, cider… these things were grown to market to mass buyers so quality was secondary to price/efficiency. Now there is an affluent and informed market for better products.

But to the point of this thread… yeah, you could easily have an awesome thanksgiving for that. Thanksgiving, if you aren’t a complete food snob, is a pretty cheap meal to produce. I do get it. We are a board of elitists looking for marginal gains over “pretty good” in a lot of things; wine chief among them, but food, cars, watches, audio gear, etc.

Much of Long Island is deemed locally accessible flyover country …more aptly described as commute-through country.

A lot of traditional Thanksgiving dishes use pretty inexpensive ingredients. Sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce. The expensive part is the Turkey but if you buy one of those big frozen birds at the grocery than can come in pretty reasonably as well. Speaking as someone who spent plenty of years economizing (and is happy it isn’t necessary now).

And some days I ask myself why I’m baking Bob Fleming’s Mama’s pecan pie tomorrow when Shop Rite sells completed pies for about 1/5 the cost of my ingredients. Of course I know the answer to that but the Shop Rite pies are not bad.

And yes, my food bank end of year donation went out yesterday.

I spent more than $48 just on cream and butter alone. Hell I spent more than that on coffee just for the weekend. Granted I’m hosting 15 people.

Every day that goes by I’m increasingly aware of how lucky I am to have as a basic those things that many view as an extravagance.

Inexpensive ingredients, under $100 at Whole Foods for a turkey dinner with all the fixings. It’s the high cost of labor that gets you!

I spend over half that budget on the turkey stock. But I made a ton of gravy plus froze some stock. Bones for the stock cost more than $1.36 a lb.