Thanksgiving, Or How To Eat American Politics
I’m delighted to have a piece”Thanksgiving, or how to eat American politics,” in the Ideas section of Sunday’s Boston Globe.
On Thursday, almost nine out of ten Americans will gather around Thanksgiving dinner—some version of the traditional family-style meal of roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pie. And once again the accepted wisdom about how the Thanksgiving meal took root and what it means will be rolled out.
This story is as much a tradition as the meal itself. Even if we doubt the schoolroom version of an unbroken tradition going back to a founding feast shared by Native Americans and Pilgrims, it is still easy to think of Thanksgiving as a celebration of the bounty of the New World, an American custom whose origins are lost in the mists of time.
But food—what we eat and why we eat it—is rarely as simple as the tales we tell about it. In the case of Thanksgiving, a closer look at the history of the dishes we set out and how they came together on our tables suggests a different story.
Thanksgiving as we know it today—a holiday that brings family and nation together over roast turkey—took shape 150 ago. And although it is certainly built on American culinary traditions, the meal we’ll eat on Thursday is also built around a political principle. It is a deliberate, small-r republican contrast to the haute cuisine that for millennia had been served at events of state.
You can read the rest of the piece by opening the following interactive link, which should give you access even if you are not a subscriber.
Congratulations! wonderful post and wonderful article.
Wonderful article! Totally put things in perspective.