“A meal both more politically American and more philosophical than many of us give it credit for.”

An 1863 letter from Sarah Josepha Hale to Abraham Lincoln when her years-long campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday came to fruition

“I’ll be cooking my first turkey tomorrow,” proclaimed the middle-aged man in suburban south Austin as I stood in the checkout line at Costco yesterday, confident that he would meet with an encouraging response.

Years earlier, a Chinese student with just two months in the United States, had sashayed into the department office at the University of Hawaii, announcing that she would be cooking turkey for herself and her room mates.  How? she asked.  Faculty, secretaries and other students piled in, explaining practices new to he–defrosting, the buttons on the oven, and tests for doneness of a huge hunk of protein.

It’s so easy to forget what an oddity in world history the American Thanksgiving meal is. No professional cooks or chefs, no waiters or servants, just families and friends with their children, sitting around a table enjoying a plentiful, affordable meal.  No very sophisticated cooking skills, just an oven, and perhaps enough cash to buy the only tricky bits, the gravy and the pies.

Thus newly-single suburban men and newly-arrived Chinese young women equally feel they have the right, the means, and the capability to have a go at turkey and trimmings and participation in the United States.

The homely surroundings, the inexpensive, everyday ingredients, the inclusion of children in the meal were no accident. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, Sarah Hale, editor of the most popular woman’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, petitioned one president after another to make Thanksgiving a national, not just a regional New England holiday.  She and others advocated the meal as a way to express their belief that the family was the civic basis of the young American republic and that simple, plentiful, unpretentious food was what set their country off from the monarchies of Europe.  For more details, click on this link to an article I wrote for the Boston Globe five years ago (from which the title for this post comes). http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/11/24/thanksgiving-how-eat-american-politics/dr3jHLnGnsS7Cj9i9X44jP/igraphic.html

This year, the popular Thanksgiving theme for food historians, at least judging by several posts or articles I have seen, is to expose the implicit racism of the first Thanksgiving. In the current political mood, that’s understandable.  The mid-nineteenth century institutionalization of Thanksgiving at the hands of Sarah Hale also had its problems. When I talked about her campaign to the Capitol Rotary Club in Austin, Texas, the group bristled as if this example of perceived Yankee aggression were just yesterday, not a hundred and fifty years ago.

So, the past is not always comfortable terrain. Injustices and inequalities abounded. People behaved in ways that we find unacceptable, causing much suffering.

Just for one day, though, I can’t help but think that, given a history of meals intended to divide and exclude that stretches back millennia, at Thanksgiving almost nine out of ten Americans sit down to share a democratic and inclusive national meal.

Enjoy.

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