MovieChat Forums > The Accidental Tourist (1989) Discussion > Thankgiving

Thankgiving

posted 18 years ago by xlilpunkxsktrx
7 replies | jump to latest

What was wrong with the turkey again? Why wouldnt they eat it?

::Erin::
[[Everyone Dies, Not Everyone Really Lives]]

[–] kimbo71 18 years ago

Rose cooked the turkey at 140 degrees overnight, not hot enough to kill the bacteria in a turkey. This was a popular idea in the 80's until people finally realized that they were getting sick. It was thought to keep the turkey moist.

[–] itamars2 18 years ago

Wasn't Macon made that up to make Julian running away from Rose?

[–] xlilpunkxsktrx 18 years ago

Well, Then did she do it on purpose? Or was it like an accident. Because Macon made it seem like shes done this before and was trying to like, poison them...?

::Erin::
[[Everyone Dies, Not Everyone Really Lives]]

[–] tuppens316 18 years ago

She was cooking the turkey a new way. She read about how people do it with beef, and decided to try it with turkey, to save energy. And it was stuffed. She raised the temperature at the end, but it wasn't really enough. And it's not that she had done it before, but the Leary's were very thrifty, so if something had sat a little too long, Rose would still consider it worth the risk. "Waste not, want not" kind of thing.

It happens pretty much the same way in the book. In fact, a lot of the movie is the same as the book. Very well adapted.

"I'm seeking the path to enlightenment. Anyone seen where I put the map?"

[–] mamccredz 17 years ago

The turkey did look awful. But I thought it was really, really sweet and a leap of faith that Julian ate the turkey. He really liked Rose and wanted to show her and her family that he was willing to take the risk of perhaps being sick. Perhaps that was one of the points to the scene? I don't know. Just thinking that for him to demonstrate - as an outsider - that he was willing to eat the turkey showed that he was kind of standing up for Rose.

By the way, who was the older woman in the Thanksgiving scene? There are the three brothers and Rose and for Julian to who pratically invited himself, but who is the older woman? It isn't their mother (as shown in a deleted scene on the DVD). Who was that?

[–] 77517 17 years ago

She's Mrs. Barrett, a neighbor. In the book, Rose helped a lot of the older neighbors and spent a lot of time with them.

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[–] jackboot 14 years ago

All the different food safety recommendations seem to agree on turkey being cooked to 165° in the breast and from 170° to 180° in the legs.

There is often cited the temperature of 145° as being a minimum to kill the majority of bacteria in meats, so Rose's turkey would have been risky, being cooked at 140°.