“If you choose to demand cranberries for your SoCal Thanksgiving, the market will certainly deliver. But when you give thanks for your meal, you’ll be giving them to a place far away.”
November 2005 | Feature
Sustaining the Spirit of Thanks
For an authentic harvest festival, feast on local flavors
by Andi McDaniel
This year, I’ll pass on the cranberry sauce. You know the stuff. Jiggly. Red. Comes from a can? Thanks to the boom in the natural foods industry, I’ve got more righteous things to eat for Thanksgiving.
Don’t want pesticides in your pecan pie? Buy organic! Concerned about mistreated turkeys? Buy free-range! Too much guilt in your green beans? Say 30 Hail Mary’s and pass the rutabagas!
But even the most pure, natural, organic and free-roaming Thanksgiving meal—while perhaps better for your conscience—isn’t necessarily best for nature. Undoubtedly this Thanksgiving, grocery stores will be overflowing with counterculture substitutes for the traditional dishes. But before you spend four bucks on biodynamic bean dip, consider having a truly natural Thanksgiving: base your menu on what’s growing around you.
Was the First Thanksgiving organic?
One of the more famous pilgrims, Edward Wilson, wrote of the First Thanksgiving:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labor.
Contrary to what we learned in third grade, the fruits of their labor were not sweet potatoes. It’s likely that they weren’t cranberries, either—or even the archetypal turkey. When the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims sat down to dinner in Plymouth, Mass. back in 1621, they most likely ate locally caught and gathered lobster, shellfish, duck or goose, and okay, maybe some pumpkins and corn. But for the most part, their meal looked nothing like what we eat today. Instead, it was a reflection of their surroundings. They feasted on what was there, what was abundant. For them, giving thanks meant celebrating with the tastes of the season.
So, if the traditional Thanksgiving foods aren’t even actually, well, traditional, then why are we going out of our way to find organic alternatives for them, even if it means having them shipped from Central America?
Organic Or Else
While, as we all know, organic farming is immeasurably better for the environment than conventional farming, it doesn’t mean your food isn’t taking its toll.
Brian Halweil, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, and author of Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, points out that organic food often travels as far as conventional food from farm to table. The organic industry has become increasingly consolidated, and organic food suppliers generally ship produce from wherever production is based, regardless of whether the same items are being grown locally. With the fuel it takes to ship food across country, and the resulting pollution, your organically grown rutabaga might not be so righteous after all.
Besides, organic cranberries trucked in from the East coast may maintain much of their flavor, but their story will be lost along the highway. You may know that they were grown without pesticides, but you won’t know the farmers who grew them—you won’t see their calloused hands, and they won’t get to share their best recipes and good advice.
The good news is that in all likelihood, the pilgrims never meant to enshrine their fateful meal in generations of recipe lore. For all we know, they may have hated the taste of pumpkin and totally overcooked the bird. While no historian is exactly sure what they ate that fateful eve, we do know why they ate what they ate—and in such large proportions: it’s what was handy. Yes, it’s as simple as that—the Wampanoag and the pilgrims ate poultry and pumpkins because that’s what nature had to offer.
So, this season, what does nature have to offer us? Proponents of a globalized food system would have you believe that we’re no longer limited by nature—we’ve got a world of ingredients at our fingertips. And seemingly, we do. If you choose to demand cranberries for your SoCal Thanksgiving, the market will certainly deliver. But when you give thanks for your meal, you’ll be giving them to a place far away.
A New Kind of Thanksgiving
With the ominous state of the environment today—from global warming to loss of biodiversity—it couldn’t be a more appropriate time to pay attention to nature’s limitations. And how better to practice new eating habits than by staging the ultimate Slow Food meal?
This Thanksgiving, instead of demanding more than nature has to offer, let’s take what’s locally abundant. We can’t recreate that original meal, but there’s no better way to revive the original sentiment. And in each region of the country, Thanksgiving will be its own unique celebration of a place’s distinct flavor—the fruits of its labor.
Evan Kleiman, chef/owner of Angeli Caffe and host of the weekly radio show Good Food on KCRW, calls Thanksgiving, “a time to look at the bounty that’s around you. And for us, in Southern California, that’s quite a bounty!” For Southern California, making Thanksgiving a local-foods-only event is hardly a stretch. In late November, farmers’ markets are teeming with sweet potatoes, purple cabbages, beets and countless varieties of kale. Not to mention goat cheeses, mushrooms, honey and meats. And then there are the “autumn” foods that midwesterners only dream of: pomegranates and persimmons. One of Kleiman’s favorite Thanksgiving dishes is persimmon salad with pomegranate seeds, tossed together with olive oil, salt and a splash of sherry vinegar.
Not unlike the forests near Plymouth, LA farmers’ markets demand their own rituals of hunting and gathering. Instead of sending “four men on fowling,” grab your Great Aunt Melba and a canvas bag, and walk the four blocks from your apartment. Or, if that’s too tame for you, take your family foraging for wild edibles.
The fruits and vegetables you’ll find, whether they’re your favorites or you have no idea what to do with them, will come with a story. It’ll be a story about the land, the local economy, and the people who are inseparable from the fruits they bear. If it’s a good story, maybe your relatives will listen. And before you know it, it’ll be a tradition.
A frequent contributor to Ode, Utne and WLT, Andi McDaniel is a dedicated localvore with a nagging cranberry sauce habit.
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