Minnesota is the nation’s leading producer of turkey.
Minnesota Monitor tells you what all the turkey labels mean. Free-range, cage-free, organic, fresh, etc.
My boss’s wife drove all the way to Rochester for a fresh turkey. Which was frozen when she picked it up. They said it was “fresh frozen.”
In the end, the best way to know how your bird was raised is to know the person who raised it. To get to know a turkey farmer, search the Minnesota Department of Agriculture directory of Minnesota organic farmers or the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association.
I’m all for healthier meat, but the taste is gonna be in how you cook it (or how much gravy you slather on it) anyway. So if I were in charge of obtaining and cooking the turkey, I’d love to hit my local turkey grower, but it’s not worth a drive to Rochester for me.
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Having grown up on a turkey farm (an eaten turkey pretty much as fresh as is possible), I can say that the taste is definitely not entirely in how you cook it or the gravy (most of the flavor of which comes from the bird anyway). There’s a HUGE difference between the flavor of a genuinely fresh turkey and the frozen stuff in the big bin at Cub.