Disneyland is a great theme park. It’s full of great rides. It’s legitimately a cool space. And there’s a lot of crazy and good food. One of the park’s biggest sellers (both parks actually) are the enormous turkey legs you can buy and gnaw on as you wander from ride to ride. Disney sells 1.6 million of those bad boys every year. That’s 800,000 turkeys folks. That’s a lot of turkey. Or not. Because it may not be turkey at all. There are some people out there who are convinced that the turkey is actually emu.
Zachary Levi stopped by Conan to promote his new show with Disney — Tangled: The Series — and exposed his love for all things built by Mickey. Then Levi dropped his food bomb on a very shocked Conan. Levi claims that people who work at the theme park have told him that the turkey legs are actually made of emu. Conan’s reaction was pricelessly incredulous with a high-pitched, “No they’re not!”
But Levi was sure of it. Levi recalled his curiosity about why the turkey legs tasted “more like ham” than turkey and Levi’s contacts on the inside turned him onto the “secret.” Conan remained dismissive and called the faux food switcheroo an “urban myth.” However this isn’t the first time Disney has been accused of slinging emu and calling it turkey.
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So we did some digging. The New York Times (not fake news) did a piece on the rise of the Disney turkey leg and cites that the legs are salt cured before they’re roasted with hickory smoke — which is basically how ham is made. The 1.5 pound legs come from toms (male turkeys) which are much larger than their female counterparts, which you usually see on a Thanksgiving table. Any turkey under 16 pounds will be a female according to The LA Times.
This urban legend, as Conan calls it, goes back at least as far as 2010 when question about the legs were raised on Theme Park Insider. Recently, The Orlando Sentinel was having none of it and ran a story comparing a turkey to an emu to show exactly how ridiculous the whole rumor is. Emus are much larger than turkeys by almost 100 pounds. The Sentinel even got confirmation from the exec chef at Disney World, Robert Adams. Adams said “we hear that all the time. They’re real turkeys. It’s what they are.”
Then again, restaurants are allowed to call langoustines lobster in the United States to keep prices as low as possible. So it wouldn’t be that outside of the realm of reason to think that Disney’s selling some other bird and calling it turkey. But, emu? Come on.
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(Via Team Coco)
