Some Chicago diners had a harrowing experience last month when they ordered from the famed Addison Grill. After waiting hours to grab a table, they wound up leaving with a handful of injuries from the restaurant’s Thanksgiving-themed dinner, including two women who got sliced up by knives and a man who was hit in the face by a fork. Addison chef Greg Pohl also left with a broken wrist and a deep cut on his hand that required a four-hour stop in the emergency room. It all ended on Thanksgiving Day, when Pohl tweeted that the restaurant would close — not to take care of anything, but so they could reopen the following Monday. It may not have been the perfect end, but a prime example of how to treat an emergency.
But what can we do to make sure that tragedy like this doesn’t occur again? Turkeys can be very perishable, but many farmers are growing them in large sheds just for Thanksgiving — a foolproof way to ensure that anyone who gets a chance to visit, even just once, can safely feast on one. However, just this year an estimated 13 million turkeys in the United States were wasted. That’s more than ever before — twice the previous record in 2014. Further, last Thanksgiving night, the Journal of Meat and Food Science broke down the 20 million pounds of turkeys people would have consumed if they had gotten to each dinner table earlier. In a perfect world, we would be eating these crispy, golden beauties at home. It’s a shame that we can’t have such a meal right here.