Happy Thanksgiving Week!

Before we dive into our suggestions for your holiday menu, we thought we'd post a few factoids about the belly-swelling feast we Americans will be celebrating this Thursday. Special thanks to Discovery (for the video above) and the U.S. Census Bureau for their "Facts for Features" Thanksgiving data.

•  242 million turkeys were expected to be raised in the United States in 2010. This number is actually down two percent from the number raised during 2009 (which together weighed 7.1 billion pounds and were valued at $3.6 billion).
• Where do all these turkeys come from? 47 million from Minnesota, 31 million from North Carolina, 28 million from Arkansas, 17.5 million from Missouri, 16 million from Indiana, and 15.5 million from Virginia. And that only accounts for about two-thirds of this years U.S. turkey production.
• Last year (2009). 1.9 billion pounds of sweet potatoes were produced in the U.S.
• 2.2 billion bushels of wheat were produced in the U.S. in 2010, mostly from North Dakota and Kansas.
• We trade turkeys. $7.3 million big ones worth of U.S. imports of live turkeys from January through July of 2010 — 99.1 percent from Canada.
• In 2007, the average American consumed 13.8 pounds of turkey.