I have raised free-range organic turkeys for Christmas in the past, and though they tasted bloody amazing and I know they had a good life (and just as important - a calm and quick death,) I have stopped doing them, much to the disappointment of all my friends and neighbours. The amount of time and effort that goes into looking after them is phenomenal, and good quality feed is not cheap. If you end up with male birds they grow well but they eat loads! They have to be slaughtered in a licensed abattoir, and for small scale producers as I was they charge a tenner a bird to kill, pluck, gut and finish each turkey. I am frankly amazed that anywhere manages to sell an oven-ready turkey for the same price as I paid just to have them killed!
With any meat you get what you pay for - any animal can be kept on the cheapest feed and in the smallest permitted spaces. It can be injected with drugs to result in quicker growth, and antibiotics to allow for less than favourable conditions (a practice that is leading to widespread antibiotic resistance.) To make it look bigger and shinier it is injected with water, meaning the meat is lacking in flavour and shrinks away to nothing when cooked. They are bred and killed all year round and then put in deep freeze, which is going to do nothing at all for the flavour either. And cheap beef is no more worthy than cheap turkey - they are both cheap and nasty.
I am often astounded that people will buy meat - especially a huge turkey for Christmas - and throw much of it away. I can't think of many families that need a 15lb turkey, but if you are going to get any kind of piece of meat that large you should make a few minutes on Boxing Day to at least strip off and save as much meat as possible.
Sorry to have my meat soapbox out in force tonight, but as a lifelong resolute carnivore I feel strongly about the way my food lives and dies.