If you came here today looking for the last of the Star Wars posts, my apologies. As I suspected - and mentioned last week - I simply haven't had time to put together the Revenge of the Sith/Return of the Jedi post given the holiday week.
This week's post is going to be a bit shorter - at least compared to the last few - and I figured that I would focus on two of things that are likely to come up in a lot of conversations this week. Those two things are Twinkies and turkey.
If you haven't heard that Twinkies might be going away you might want to stop reading for a moment to spend some time on Google to catch up. It got me to thinking about how many Twinkies might be eaten in an average year. Given the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, that then got me thinking about how much turkey Americans eat on Thanksgiving.
This post, then, makes for a bit of trivia to talk about around the table while waiting for all that turkey. That bit of trivia will come as the answer to the question:
Are there more calories in the world's annual consumption of Twinkies, or in Americans' single-day Thanksgiving consumption of turkey?
To answer this question it requires pulling some data down from the internet, some data that has the potential to be fairly unreliable. To that end I have tried to verify numbers that I've found with as many sources as possible, or come to a reasonable number that seems to be the average of those that I've found.
The first bit of information that we need is the number of Twinkies consumed each year. It seems that the internet is in fairly good agreement that the number of Twinkies sold each year is somewhere 500 million. This doesn't mean that 500 million Twinkies are consumed - just sold - but this is a good number to start with.
Twinkies are also pretty easy to pin down calorically - there are 150 in each individual Twinkie.
That means that the calories consumed via Twinkies over the course of a year comes to right around 75 billion calories.
75,000,000,000 calories.
Now that you know that, feel free to speculate on the over/under for turkey.
Like I said, there's a little less consensus on the exact amount of turkey eaten on a given Thanksgiving, but it looks like there's some agreement that the number of pounds eaten last year was somewhere around 650 million.
Calories are trickier, as different parts of a turkey are drastically different in terms of fat content and thus caloric density. The most calorically dense part of turkey would be dark meat, skin on, which clocks in at right around 1,000 calories per pound. If everyone was eating only dark meat skin on turkey, this would be be an even 650 billion calories.
650,000,000,000 calories is almost an order of magnitude higher than that calories in Twinkies, but it's also the case that this is the absolute worst case scenario. There's also a lot of meat on a turkey that's a lot less calorically dense.
The meat with the least calories is skinless white meat, which is only around 600 calories a pound. If everyone was eating skinless white meat on Thanksgiving, that would be 390 billion calories.
350,000,000,000 calories is quite a bit less than the 650 billion from all dark meat, but still five times as many calories as a year's worth of Twinkies.
If we assume that a bird is an even mix of meat that averages somewhere around 800 calories we'd come up with 520,000,000,000 calories, probably the safest estimate we can make without digging quite a bit deeper for better numbers.
There's also the fair point that I'm having trouble distinguishing whether or not the numbers I'm finding are taking into account the meat that is eaten or the weight of the bird. If things were a little closer I'd worry about this, but even if we say that half of every bird is bone and other inedible bits we're still well above the annual number for Twinkies.
So, Americans on Thanksgiving will consume more calories in turkey alone than the entire world will consume in Twinkies over the course of a year. Keep in mind that this is only turkey - when's the last time you had a Thanksgiving dinner that had nothing aside from turkey? I'm betting the calories from everything else on the plate at least double this amount, if not more.
Anyway, feel free to use this knowledge to create some conversation at the dinner table, or have people take sides on it, issue some bets, take a house rake, and earn yourself some easy money.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
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