How Much Turkey Do Americans Eat, Anyway??

So “the Totally Awesome Book of Useless Information” by Noel Botham (2012) is a bother. Some of the information is worse than useless; it’s just wrong. A good example is on page 38, where it’s printed that “It is estimated that Americans eat 10 million tons of turkey on Thanksgiving Day.” I did the arithmetic. There are 2000 pounds in a ton, so he’s claiming that Americans eat 2000 x 10,000,000 = 20,000,000,000 pounds of turkey on Thanksgiving Day. That’s 20 billion with a B! Now, according to Worldometers (worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/) on Saturday, November 22, 2025, at 11:35 am, the population of the United States was 348,010,531. I divided 20 billion by 348,010,531 and got 57.5 pounds of turkey (rounded to the nearest half pound) for every man, woman, and child in the country to consume on Thanksgiving Day. That’s an awesome amount of bird. And that doesn’t include the dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, rolls, gravy, pumpkin pies, pecan pies, and whatever else people stuff themselves with. Sounds like someone had ingested a few too many amino acids when compiling “the Totally Awesome Book of Useless Information.”

But the question remains: how much turkey do Americans eat on Thanksgiving Day? Well, according to a survey cited by the National Turkey Federation (https://www.eatturkey.org/2025/11/04/94-of-americans-plan-to-celebrate-thanksgiving-and-turkey-remains-the-star-of-the-table/), Americans were expected to consume 30,000,000 turkeys on Thanksgiving in 2025. The survey found that 94% of Americans planned to celebrate Thanksgiving, and of those, 87% planned to eat turkey. How many pounds of turkey does that amount to? If Americans buy their turkey rations rationally (a big if, I know), they’ll purchase 1.25-1.5 pounds per person to be fed. That allows plenty for leftovers. The total weight then works out to:

(348,010,531)(0.94)(0.87)(1.5) = 426,904,518 pounds. Give or take a few.

Again using the numbers from the survey, what then would be the weight of the average sized turkey purchased at a grocery store or butcher?

So: (426,904,518)/30,000,000 = 14.23 pounds/turkey. This result agrees fairly well with other published numbers, especially for hens, which are thought to taste better than toms.