Yesterday was the penultimate farmer's market of the season in Rhinebeck. Next weekend Lisa will be coming down to the city, so this was my last chance to get a hold of the Hudson Valley's natural bounty at the source. I decided I'd finally take a chance on the local game bird farmers. Thanksgiving is coming up, and I could use the practice.

A few words about turkeys, then. The turkeys that you and I grew up with are Frankensteinish creations. Their gargantuan breast muscles are the products of decades of selective breeding and chemically induced gigantism, and the birds who grow them have lost their ancestors' ability of flight. The result is more white meat for the American family that likes to think of itself as health-conscious while it scarfs down portions the size of a small country, and the gradual disappearance from the national consciousness of Ben Franklin's favorite bird, the American wild turkey.

It is perhaps the singular triumph of man as predator that he makes his prey dependent on him for its survival. The shrink-wrapped meat puppet you'll probably serve to your family this Thanksgiving was barely able to move, let alone fend for itself, while it was alive. This dependence, of course, gives the farmer control over his livestock - control over what it eats, how it grows, and what its children (if it has any) will look like. This control allows the Butterballs of the world to progress ever closer to the platonic ideal of the American turkey market: a twenty-pound breast teetering atop two spindly legs. Remember, any food and energy the turkey's body expends growing leg meat is less food and energy going towards growing breast meat. It's this rationale that recently led genetic researchers to applaud the engineering of a featherless chicken.

Of course, the tradeoff for all this progress is flavor. The wild turkey that the Founding Fathers were familiar with looked and tasted nothing like the bloated beasts we carve up every November. Turkey is a game bird. It forages. It walks. It flies when it has to. It eats what it finds in the wild. A wild turkey looks nothing like the shoe-leather-covered protein balloons you see in most holiday photo spreads. Its breast, in comparison, looks downright sunken. Its legs are meaty and make up a larger proportion of its total weight. It is bonier, to be sure, almost as bony as a goose. And its meat, even the white meat, is darker, gamier, like a true game bird should be.

There are some farmers - a small but growing number - who use their control over the lower rungs of the food chain to preserve the variety and richness of our culinary experience. This is often thankless work, and so it needs all the enouragement and support those of us who really care about our food can offer. The game farmers had wild turkeys for sale yesterday, and I bought one. Buying a wild turkey is an undertaking. Your frozen Butterball may cost you as little as $0.69 per pound for up to thirty pounds of bird; a wild turkey will cost at least $4.00 per pound, and they are smaller than their engineered cousins by an order of magnitude. I got a six-pound bird for about twenty-five bucks; I suppose if they grew them big enough I could get a forty-pound frozen Butterball popsicle for that much. But if this is what you feed your family at one of your only meals together over the course of a year, it should be something special.

Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe the market knows more than I do about what makes good food good. Maybe I should just buy an SUV and shop at Sam's Club or Costco and ignore the slow extinction of one of this country's native food treasures. Maybe it's OK to trade five pounds of provocative, unfamiliar food for forty pounds of pedestrian, inoffensive food. But I'm going to find out for sure. I'm going to see what I've been missing. My first wild turkey is brining in my fridge right now.