By DEE-ANN DURBIN

AP – For the turkey industry, this Thanksgiving is a guessing game.

Millions of Americans are expected to have scaled-down celebrations amid the pandemic, heeding official warnings against travel and large indoor gatherings. That leaves anxious turkey farmers and grocers scrambling to predict what people will want on their holiday tables.

Kroger — the nation’s largest grocery chain — said its research shows 43% of shoppers plan to celebrate Thanksgiving only with those in their immediate household. It has purchased more turkeys than usual — in all sizes — but it’s also predicting an increase in demand for alternatives, including ham, pork roast and seafood. Kroger also expects to see more demand for plant-based meats, like a vegan roast stuffed with mushrooms and squash.

Walmart says it will still carry plenty of whole turkeys, but it will also have 30% more turkey breasts in its stores to accommodate shoppers who don’t want to cook a whole bird.

It’s not always easy to pivot. Angela Wilson, the owner of Avedano’s Holly Park Market in San Francisco, ordered turkeys last year for this Thanksgiving. She can’t cancel the order, so they’re still coming in.

But Wilson said this Thanksgiving might be busier than in the past, since customers who usually go out of town will be staying home. She’s also stocking up on smaller birds like quail and game hen.

Some farmers are making tweaks based on what they think customers will be looking for. Dede Boies raises heritage breed turkeys at Root Down Farm in Pescadero, California. The turkeys she sells for Thanksgiving were born in May, so she has spent months thinking about how the coronavirus might impact the holidays.

Boies decided to harvest some turkeys early this year. It’s a gamble, because the birds gain a lot of fat and flavor in their final few weeks, but she figures customers will want smaller birds. She’s also offering more chickens and ducks.

“We’ve invested so much time and energy and love into these birds, and the whole point is that they go and they are celebrated with people for these great meals. We’re just really hoping that still happens,” Boies said.

Butterball — which typically sells 30% of America’s 40 million Thanksgiving turkeys — said it’s expecting more gatherings, but it’s not convinced people will want smaller turkeys. Its research shows that 75% of consumers plan to serve the same size turkey or a larger turkey than they did last year.

Butterball says about half its turkeys will be in the 10-16 lb. range and half will be in the 16-24 lb. range, the same as usual. Anyone looking for a specific size should plan to shop early, said Rebecca Welch, senior brand manager for seasonal at Butterball.

“Don’t be afraid to go big,” she said. “It’s just as easy to cook a large turkey as it is a smaller one, and it means more leftovers.”

Nancy Johnson Horn of Queens, New York, usually shares a big turkey with her in-laws, her parents and her own family of five. But Horn, who writes The Mama Maven blog, said that gathering won’t happen this year because her kids are attending school in-person and she is worried about spreading the virus.

“As much as it hurts me, I will have to cook myself this year,” she said. She’s not sure what will be on the menu. She’s only cooked a whole turkey once in her life and she’s never made mashed potatoes.

This Thanksgiving comes at an already tenuous time for the $4.3 billion U.S. turkey industry. Thanks to better technology for carving breast meat, per capita consumption of turkey nearly doubled over the 1980s, peaking at 14.4 pounds per person in 1996, according to Mark Jordan, executive director of LEAP Market Analytics in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

But interest in turkey has been steadily falling, thanks in part to price increases five years ago when flocks were hit by bird flu. Annual consumption is now around 12 pounds, Jordan said.

Turkey sales have even been falling at Thanksgiving as consumers explore alternatives, according to Nielsen data. Last November, Americans spent $643 million on turkey, down 3.5% from the previous year. They spent $1.9 billion on beef, which was up 4%. And they spent $12 million — or more than double the prior year — on alternatives like plant-based meat.

Jordan thinks the uncertainty about Thanksgiving demand will hurt groceries hardest. If they discount turkeys, they can sell them but it will hurt profits. If they keep prices high and consumers pass, they’ll be stuck with a lot of turkeys.

“I don’t see many ways that they win this holiday season,” Jordan said.

The uncertainty may well see a repeat at Christmas — both in the U.S. and beyond.

Christmas turkeys are a staple in Britain, where turkey farmers are also bracing for slimmed-down festivities after the government told people not to meet in groups of more than six.

Richard Calcott raises 2,000 Christmas turkeys each year at Calcott Turkeys in Tamworth, England. He bought his turkey chicks — known as poults — in February and March, and it was too late to switch to a smaller breed when pandemic restrictions took hold.

He has tweaked their diets to reduce the weight of each turkey by around 2.2 pounds by the time they’re ready for market. Still, Calcott said he continues to get some orders for larger birds.

“It’s been a very difficult year for a lot of people this year,” he said. “Christmas will be a good time to get families back together.”

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AP Video Journalist Haven Daley contributed from San Francisco. AP Writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this story.

By REBECCA SANTANA and KEVIN McGILL

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Zeta sped across the Southeast on Thursday, leaving a trail of damage and more than 2.5 million homes and businesses without power in Atlanta and beyond after pounding New Orleans with winds and water that splintered homes and were blamed for at least three deaths.

A Category 2 hurricane when it hit the southeastern Louisiana coast Wednesday, Zeta was still a tropical storm late Thursday morning with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (85 kph) about 100 miles (155 kilometers) northeast of Asheville, North Carolina — unusual even in a region accustomed to hurricanes and their aftermath.

Hundreds of schools canceled classes or planned to open late across from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas, and widespread power outages occurred across six states from Louisiana to the south Atlantic seaboard. Some places could be in the dark for days.

The latest punch from a record hurricane season left people shaken. Will Arute said it sounded like a bomb went off when part of a large oak snapped outside his home in New Orleans, and part of the tree crashed into his car and a corner of his home.

“I did not anticipate this to happen. It was pretty intense along the eye wall when it went through here,” he said.

Mackenzie Umanzor did not prepare much because the last hurricane to threaten her home a few weeks ago in D’Iberville, Mississippi, did little damage. Zeta blew open doors that she had tried to barricade, leaving her with a cut hand, and the top of her shed came loose.

“You could hear the tin roof waving in the wind. … It was just rattling. And there was a couple of snaps, lots of cracks of branches and trees falling,” she said. “It was pretty scary.”

Officials said life-threatening conditions would last into the day, with Zeta crossing the mid-Atlantic states as a tropical storm before moving offshore around Delaware and southern New Jersey.

Leslie Richardson, 58, drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater in Biloxi, Mississippi, after taking video of the raging storm, Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer said. Richardson and another man exited a floating car and desperately clung to a tree before his strength “just gave out,” Switzer said. About 25 miles (40 kilometers) west in Long Beach, a large boat was washed up on the beachfront highway.

A 55-year-old man was electrocuted by a downed power line in New Orleans, a Louisiana coroner said. In Georgia, authorities said a man was killed when high winds caused a tree to fall onto a mobile home in Cherokee County.

Morning rush hour happened despite major power failures in Atlanta, but commuters had to dodge downed trees and navigate their way past signals with no power. Trees blocked lanes on two interstates, the Georgia Department of Transportation said.

Northwest of Atlanta in Marietta, many stoplights were out and police directed traffic at a busy intersection. One residential street was covered by mix of campaign signs, amber and gold leaves, and limbs tossed by the storm. A few streets away, Billy Murdock was out picking up branches in his yard.

“These big old trees, they were swaying. It bothers you,” Murdock said. “It’s the worst storm I’ve been through in Atlanta.”

The storm raged onshore Wednesday afternoon in the small village of Cocodrie, Louisiana, as a strong Category 2 and then moved swiftly across the New Orleans area. The morning after in New Orleans’ French Quarter, the wind was blowing lightly as a few people walked to work and some residents swept leaves in front of their houses.

Waveland Mayor Mike Smith told WLOX-TV that his Mississippi Gulf Coast city, which was part of the area most heavily damaged by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, had taken what might be the worst hit since then from Zeta.

Among the many trees blown down was one that fell on Smith’s own house. “It was my next-door neighbor’s and he wanted to give it to me, apparently,” Smith said.

In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards was expected to tour the coastal regions hardest hit by the storm Thursday.

Zeta left much of New Orleans and the surrounding area without power as 200 falling trees and more limbs pulled down utility lines. Signs outside bars and restaurants swayed back and forth in the wind and palm trees along Canal Street whipped furiously as the storm passed.

Along coastal Louisiana, there were reports of some trailers flipped over, a gas station destroyed, and downed power lines and trees.

Zeta is the 27th named storm of a historically busy Atlantic hurricane season — with more than a month left to go. It set a new record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental U.S. in a single season, well beyond the nine storms that hit in 1916. This extraordinarily busy season has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing wetter, stronger and more destructive storms.

On Tuesday, Zeta raked across Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, toppling trees and briefly cutting power to more than 300,000 people but causing no deaths.

It then regained strength over the Gulf of Mexico along a path slightly to the east of those of Hurricane Laura, which was blamed for at least 27 deaths in Louisiana in August, and Hurricane Delta, which exacerbated Laura’s damage in the same area weeks later.

The deteriorating weather prompted early voting sites to close for hours in the western Florida Panhandle. One voter in Mississippi worried about how long felled trees and debris might block roads.

Thursday was the last day to request an absentee ballot or vote by absentee in person in Alabama, and power was out across parts of the state including heavily populated Mobile on the coast. Mobile County tweeted that the absentee voting office still would be open for normal business hours, but other county offices ewre closed. Voters, some holding umbrellas, waited outside the county courthouse in Birmingham to cast ballots.

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Plaisance reported from Laffite, Louisiana. Associated Press contributors include Gerald Herbert in New Orleans; Jay Reeves, in Birmingham, Alabama; Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland; Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia; Sophia Tulp and Jeff Amy in Atlanta; and Gabriel Alcocer in Cancun, Mexico.