Bet you didn't know to give thanks to researchers at Cornell University for the big, meaty turkey on your table this Thanksgiving.

That's right, cross breeding back in the 1950s created the most popular variety of turkey in the United States, the Broad-breasted White.

Cross breeding and commercialization of production have made the turkey the cheapest meat on the market. Back in 1623 the conditions were a little different: A law passed that year made death the penalty for stealing a turkey worth more than 12 pence.

You eat turkey every Thanksgiving, but what do you really know about the only bird that receives a presidential pardon each November?

Probably not nearly as much as food historian Andrew F. Smith. He does a commendable job of debunking everything we thought we knew about turkey and the holiday it has been permanently intertwined with in his new book, "The Turkey: An American Story."

asap talked turkey — first recorded use of the phrase: 1824 — with Smith. Here are some of his favorite facts about turkey that you could use to impress your Thanksgiving guests.

The Turkey:

•  "What was amazing to me in the historical part to it was the turkey was diversely perceived by Native Americans — I thought every Native American ate turkeys. And the answer was a large number of groups refused to do so. They had a hierarchy of birds, eagles were at the top and turkey was at the bottom. And many of them thought the turkey was a cowardly bird and wouldn't eat it because they were afraid they'd become cowardly, or they didn't eat it because it ate insects."
  
•  "Turkeys are omnivores. They eat everything. I was surprised at that. They eat worms in particular. They like insects. They eat grass during winter."
  
• "They travel extensively. They travel miles in a day — 10, 20 miles. They can fly 55 miles an hour. I didn't know that. They're not very aerodynamic. They fly in kind of like a straight line. They can't fly very far, but they can fly for a mile or so."
  
• "Up until the 1930s it looked as if they would have been exterminated from the wild. An estimated 30,000 turkeys survived at that point, and it's one of the great success stories of the environmental movement, of an animal that had been in the wild and was largely exterminated from most of the states. And today, wild turkeys are in 49 of the 50 states — all except Alaska. There's an estimated six million-plus wild turkeys today."

On Thanksgiving:

•  "That's a whole myth. It's all folklore. It's a nice story and I loved it, but when I first started writing the book I was really looking for documentation because it sounded so good. But there was no first Thanksgiving or at least not a first Thanksgiving as we think of it. There were certainly days of Thanksgiving — thousands of them throughout the colonies, not just in New England — but they were religious days and people spent it in church and would not have engaged in such frivolous activity such as preparing a huge feast for family members. That was not on the agenda for early Thanksgivings."
  
• "What we think of as Thanksgiving today developed in the late 18th Century, early 19th Century. It was indeed a product of New England, but had nothing to do with the Pilgrims. There was no mention of the Pilgrims until mid-19th Century."

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Howie Rumberg is an asap reporter based in New York.

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