Price, Politics, and the Thanksgiving Meal

The Political Background to the Thanksgiving Meal

When Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, he, and the promoters of the holiday, were arguing for an inclusive meal that everyone could afford, and that could bring the country together. It took a while as the South as a whole did not participate until after Reconstruction.  When I first arrived in the United States, however, I was astonished at the power of the holiday, at the efforts that Americans would make to return home or to include those who had nowhere to go.

It’s easy to forget what a radical, though not unprecedented idea, such a political meal was.In an effort to understand this, three years ago, I published an article entitled Thanksgiving, Or How to Eat American Politics in the Boston Globe. The meal was designed as a deliberate repudiation of the formal meals of aristocracies, of state dinners, of fine restaurants.  All these were described as French, high French cuisine. They  excluded whole swathes of society: most women; all children; and everyone not wealthy enough to have the dress, the education, and the money that gave access to these traditional political gatherings.

By contrast, the Thanksgiving meal, with its plebeian vegetables, its sturdy pies, its rib-sticking dressing, and as the years wore on, increasingly inexpensive turkey was an ample meal made accessible by its relative ease of preparation and its affordable price.

The Price of the Thanksgiving Meal According to the American Farm Bureau

And so it remains. I had been completely blind to the fact that every year since 1986 the American Farm Bureau has been estimating the cost of a Thanksgiving meal.  This year, thanks to a tweet by Gulf Coast Food,  an interesting research group at the University of Houston, I finally twigged.

Photograph Mark Miller. Licensed under CC 4.0 International.

Here are the relevant sentences from the American Farm Bureau’s announcement.

“WASHINGTON, D.C., November 17, 2016 – The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 31st annual informal price survey of classic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table indicates the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $49.87. . . The AFBF survey shopping list includes turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a veggie tray, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve a family of 10 with plenty for leftovers.”

The American Farm Bureau Understates the Price

Now the figure of around $5.00 a diner is rather an underestimate.  It only counts the cost of the ingredients, not some of the other costs. Let’s just stick to costs at the consumption end.

• The cost of energy to store the ingredients in the refrigerator and to cook the meal. The refrigerator in particular is an energy hog.  Cooking, by contrast, is so inexpensive in America that no one hesitates to turn on the oven to roast a few vegetables. Off the historical scale.
• The cost of the cooking utensils.  Even if you use a foil pan for the turkey and the least expensive supermarket saucepans, without an investment in utensils, no meal gets cooked.
• The cost of the serving dishes and utensils. Again, it may be paper plates, even plastic knives and forks. No one, though, just digs in to a communal bowl.
• The cost of the additional ingredients: cooking oil, salt, sugar for the pie and the cranberries and the coffee, and so on. And perhaps, just perhaps, that bloody mary before the meal. Or the wine with it.
• The labor of the (usually) woman who shops, stores, cooks, serves, and cleans up.  (30-35% in restaurants)
• The cost of the space–kitchen, area to eat. Not everyone has this, and space and kitchens have a cost.

Even So, Has There Ever Been a More Affordable Feast Than Thanksgiving?

Even so, if you count in all those extras, you are probably talking about being able to put the meal on the table for about $100 (though obviously you can spend much, much more if you have the means). That is, about $10 a person for participating in the national feast day.  Or, if working for the minimum wage, an hour and a half will buy you into the feast, three hours will buy you and your child or elderly parent in to the feast.

For an indication of just how inexpensive American food is today, in 1950, a working class French person had to work for 38 minutes to buy a loaf of bread, an hour to buy a stick of butter, and an hour to buy a quarter pound of meat.*

Jump forward to 2002, and a working class American had to work 13 minutes for a loaf of bread while a working class Argentinian had to work an hour, over four times as long.*

Often American food is called “cheap,” inviting the listener to supply the “and nasty” to complete the phrase.  And so some of it is.

Not all “cheap” food is nasty, though. I like to use other, less pejorative words such as “inexpensive” or “affordable.”  Cranberries, sweet potatoes, and turkey are not nasty.  They are affordable. They are tasty.  And they allow an entire nation to participate in the national feast.

Happy Thanksgiving!

*See the distinguished food and social historian, Peter Scholliers, in the American Historical Association’s recent introduction to food history, Paul Freedman et al, eds.  Food in Time and Place p.346.

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