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Timing a Turkey

These days cooking a turkey requires little skill, because they often come with a handy pop-up timer already inserted in the top.

A turkey is finished cooking when the inside temperature reaches about 85 degrees Celsius. That’s the temperature at which the timer pops up to let you know the meat is ready. It’s an ideal device for an unskilled chef like me because it requires no judgment. When the red cap pops up, it’s done!

The pop-up turkey timer involves a little red plastic stick which is held in a blob of soft metal alloy, similar to solder. Many metal alloys melt at low temperature. They are usually made from mixtures of metals like bismuth, lead or tin. Their melting temperature can be adjusted by changing the percentage of one or more of the components. When the blob of soft metal alloy in the tip of the timer turns to liquid, at about 85 degrees Celsius, it frees the end of the red stick that is held in the solid metal. A spring makes the red stick pop up, and lets you know the turkey is ready.

Incidentally, you can reuse these timers by dipping the tip into boiling water, remelting the metal, and then pushing the pop up stick back into the metal. When it cools, the timer is ready to use again.

So next time you cook a turkey, you can impress your guests by explaining how the pop-up timer works.

The pop-up turkey timer is one of many ingenious little devices that make life easier for us. Fertile minds and nimble fingers have been at work more than ever in the last century or so simplifying things, making procedures (like cooking turkeys) “idiot-proof,” and generally freeing us from having to focus on details.

With the development of many handy gadgets has come a certain level of expectation. We assume that life shouldn’t be too demanding, or too boring, or too unpleasant. Many of us can get away with this for a significant amount of time, but eventually we hit the wall. We make the unpleasant discovery that relationships place enormous demands on us, that life is full of potentially mind-numbing routine, and that, especially as we age, our bodies would gladly settle for simple freedom from pain.

My purpose for raising this is not to decry the development and use of the kind of contraptions I’ve been talking about. I have my fair share of “toys and gismos.” Nor do I want to depress you by referring to the downside of life on Earth. What I want to highlight is the false expectation that all of our problems can be dealt with simply and quickly by applying a new technological solution. Many of the real issues run much deeper. Many of the answers transcend science and technology.

When things go wrong, or we are distressed, we often expect things to be “fixed” to relieve our negative circumstances. Thankfully, in western culture in particular, this is possible in many instances. Every day, scientists, inventors, and medical researchers find ways of improving life for us. At some point things catch up with us that we “just have to deal with,” but we seem to instinctively turn to others for help along the way.

There are some problems and issues that really do seem so big for us that they can never be dealt with. Deep seated feelings of guilt or remorse over things we’ve done – the unsettled feeling that our life is meaningless and absurd – the nagging sense that we are, in fact, accountable for our actions – these things can overwhelm us. Science may be able to anaesthetize our feelings, but it can’t deal with the issues.

Enter: the spiritual realm. Many have found that through a relationship with God, their inner tension can be resolved. He didn’t make us to be miserable and alienated. He made us for joy and a relationship with Himself.

David Humphreys and Ron Hughes