Posts Tagged ‘Thanksgiving’
Using Food to Change the Thanksgiving Narrative
For many of us, our associations with Thanksgiving are mostly about food. Cranberries, pumpkin pies, stuffing and all those other things that turns the food media world into a seasonal frenzy of recipes and roundups. It’s a holiday where we’re encouraged to gather with our friends and family and be thankful, showing gratitude for what’s on the table and the people we share it with.
These are admirable ideals, however when we talk about Thanksgiving, share iconic recipes, gather around the table, we avoid the harsh reality of a holiday with a dark past, one of slavery, plague and massacres. At its core, Thanksgiving is a story of genocide, and instead of facing that reality, it’s a holiday that we have chosen to mythologize, erasing real stories and people along the way. Instead of the truth, the false narrative around Thanksgiving allows us to focus on the easy stuff, in the form of “10 Best Pie Crusts” and “25 Creative Stuffing Ideas You Never Thought Of.
“Food media at large still won’t touch the imperialist implications of Thanksgiving with a ten foot pole bc it’s more profitable to pub stuffing listicles,” wrote Racist Sandwich a few weeks ago on Twitter.
I thought about that comment a lot, pondering the importance and weight of food media in addressing cultural history as well as today’s realities. Food is an excellent lens for looking at important topics like gender, race and culture, and in that sense, the food hype over Thanksgiving seems like a massively missed opportunity to highlight the true story and its modern day implications. Avoiding the conversation about the true roots of Thanksgiving means perpetuating the injustice.
A Menu For When You’re Just Not Sure About Turkey
If there’s one thing I don’t like about Thanksgiving it’s the stress that goes into making the holiday “perfect.” Hint: it’s about being with friends and family, being grateful and in the process hopefully eating some delicious food. But too often we’re hung up on what has to be served.
Over on Foodie Underground, a story of why turkey will not be served in my family anytime soon inspired a full turkey-free Thanksgiving menu, complete with eight vegetarian, partly vegan, mostly gluten free recipes to get you from appetizer to dessert.
I could barely get past positioning the wings under the heavy carcass in the roasting rack. I am not a vegetarian, but I rarely prepare meat and quite frankly I was almost convinced that the thing was going to get pissed that I wasn’t treating it well, come back to life and start pecking at my face. Thanksgiving stress level successfully upped a notch.
Foodie Underground: Are You Abnormal?
For Thanksgiving I found myself staying in a yurt near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There was a small propane stove and no running water, but Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving and so we made a concerted effort to eat well.
The stuffing used locally baked pumpkin bread, the sweet potatoes were organic and made without a Cuisinart in sight, and I hand-chopped a cranberry relish. After not finding anything but absurdly cheap, huge frozen birds that surely came from the mass farms of nightmares, we accepted the fact that we would be without the Thanksgiving staple. Fine in our books, as no one was interested in eating “a depressed, fake bird,” as one friend put it. Fortunately, an organic, free-range, local bird was scored at the last minute.
Sitting in our woodstove-outfitted yurt filling ourselves with the bounty of a day of cooking felt perfectly normal. We were, after all, celebrating the most traditional of American holidays.
But apparently the scene was far from normal.
Read the rest here.
Friday Photo: The Thanskgiving Plate
I can’t believe I haven’t updated since last Friday… I’ll make up for it next week. But here’s my favorite photo from last night’s wonderful dinner at my parents’ house. Hope everyone else had a lot of good things to eat, drink and be thankful for.
