ReThinking Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a constructed holiday.




Just like the rest of them... Christmas, Easter, Patriot Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Like the sediment that piles up underwater against a dam that is holding back a river, holidays are accretions of stories and rituals that pile up over the years. We celebrate holidays in particular ways because we have learned these stories and rituals, and we find comfort in their repetition. We look forward to them, we plan and prepare for them, we enact them and recall them with nostalgia. If we're willing to consider these stories thoughtfully, they can tell us a lot about who we are as Americans, and what it is we are truly celebrating.

Problem is, America's never been big on questioning her own stories.

When I was ten years old, I portrayed Queen Isabella in a 5th grade play that endeavored to offer some Thanksgiving backstory. Wearing one of my mother's fancy dresses, I tossed a handful of costume jewelry at another fifth grader dressed as Christoper Columbus. "Take my jewels, Christopher Columbus," I haughtily declared, "and find a New World." Not surprisingly, the play failed to illuminate how he did so, by accident, and heartily set out enslaving, killing off, and infecting with STDS and other infectious diseases all the kindly natives he found there.

Fast-forward a few years. Good, honest Puritan folk travel to Columbus's New World, seeking to start anew in the Americas, a blank slate for enacting values of freedom, liberty, and private ownership, and fleeing the occasional criminal record back home. They did so emboldened by the imperial doctrine of terra nullius, a 16th century philosophy that dictated that any land occupied only by savages (ie, those who failed to cultivate it) was the property of the European nation who claimed it (or, the European nation that won control of it by force). The Puritan Pilgrims weren't much prepared, tho, and some kindly Indian folk, headed by the genteel Squanto, came to the rescue with platters of corn on the cob and a giant roasted turkey.

Its a nice story.

Except, in actuality, it wasn't a nice story. While some indigenous peoples certainly extended their goodwill and local knowledge to the struggling settlers, they and their descendants would soon find that any generosity to the European arrivals was sorely misplaced, as it was rewarded almost universally by violence, new diseases, displacement, and the rapid destruction of the natural resources indigenous communities relied upon for their survival.

In later years, once native populations had been sufficiently decimated to offer no threat to the new United States, we demonstrated that our goodwill could often be as destructive as our outright hostility. In an effort to "teach the savages" about that most hallowed of American traditions, Private Property, we carved up the reservations we'd just confined them to in treaties, gave them tiny parcels, and sold off the remaining land to railroad companies and white settlers. We kidnapped generations of indigenous children from their parents and forced them to abandon their languages, traditions, and cultural identities in pursuit of assimilation. We caricatured indigenous women as squaws or sex objects, and indigenous men as noble savages, alcoholic bums, or cartoon sports mascots.



We gave one generation livestock to teach them about the agrarian lifestyle, then returned a few generations later to slaughter that livestock, chastising its owners for decimating the rangeland. We used alcohol as a weapon against them, then criticized them for not controlling their consumption. Liberals excoriate Native communities that permit logging or mining on their lands, accusing them of being "bad Indians"--- but fail to consider the crushing effects of generational poverty. Colonialism is alive and well in the U. S. of A., and brutal as ever: a mindset as much as a policy.

For many native peoples, "Thanksgiving" is observed as a National Day of Mourning, a tradition begun in 1970 when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited a Wampanoag leader, Frank James, to speak at a Thanksgiving event at Plymouth Rock---then uninvited him, when they learned he planned to address the oppression of American Indians.


(Indigenous activist Russell Means)

It makes sense that in the 21st century, we'd all prefer to gloss over that reality and celebrate a feel-good holiday where Indians and Pilgrims sit side by side and share things like turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pipe.

Except there wasn't actually pie---
the Pilgrims didn't have enough butter or flour to make the crusts.

The "First Thanksgiving" wasn't conceived of as a new American holiday at the time---it was a celebration of a good harvest, heading into the winter--- a ritual that's been practiced by cultures that procure their own food for millenium, in every part of the world. Oddly enough, the average American family sitting down to re-enact that harvest feast has no concept of gratitude for good harvests going into winter because we are completely divorced from the production of our food. We can buy what we want to eat year-round, without having to consider the fossil fuels, suffering, genetic engineering, soil depletion, and sketchy food preservation processes that made that January tomato or cheap turkey breast possible.

Thanksgiving offers us a rich opportunity to practice gratitude in the tradition of the harvest feast. Sitting down with family and friends and sharing a meal, lovingly and intentionally prepared, is an exquisite ritual with which to express that gratitude.

First, we have to divest the ritual of the weighted Thanksgiving mythology.

Second: lets reevaluate the traditional fare. Those meat-eaters who've tasted wild or heirloom breeds of turkey express astonishment at how bland the average thanksgiving turkey tastes. I'll admit it--- I'm one of those half-assed vegetarians who's happily made exception for thanksgiving turkey in the past. Don't plan to this year, but I won't judge anyone who does choose to partake. If you are going to serve up the bird, though, please consider a few facts about the industrialized production of turkey meat in this country. In the interest of true Thanksgiving.

Farm Sanctuary reports:

Modern turkeys have been genetically manipulated to grow twice as fast, and twice as large, as their ancestors. Comparing a turkey poult’s growth rate with that of a human baby, Lancaster Farming, an agriculture newspaper, reported: “If a seven pound [human] baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, it would weigh 1,500 pounds.” The strain of growing so quickly makes young turkeys susceptible to cardiovascular disease and can lead to fatal heart attacks. Although this rapid growth poses a serious threat to the animals’ health and welfare, the turkey industry continues to push birds beyond their biological limits.. This continual increase in growth causes commercially-bred turkeys to suffer from crippling foot and leg problems too. According the agribusiness newspaper Feedstuffs , “...turkeys have been bred to grow faster and heavier but their skeletons haven't kept pace..." Catering to consumer tastes at the expense of animals, producers also raise turkeys with abnormally large breasts which prevent them from mounting and reproducing naturally.... Completely unlike their wild ancestors not only in terms of physique but also in hue, commercial turkeys are white, the natural bronze color bred out of them so their bodies are pigment-free and more palatable to consumers....At the slaughterhouse, fully conscious turkeys are hung by their feet from metal shackles on a moving rail. The first station on most poultry slaughterhouse assembly lines is the stunning tank, where the turkeys' heads are submerged in an electrified bath of water. Stunning procedures are not monitored, and are often inadequate, leaving the fully conscious birds to continue along the slaughterhouse assembly line. Some slaughterhouses do not even attempt to render these birds unconscious, as turkeys and other poultry are specifically excluded from the Humane Slaughter Act, which requires that animals be stunned prior to slaughter. After passing through the stunning tank, the turkeys' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, and blood begins rushing out of their bodies. Inevitably, the blade misses some turkeys, who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line:, the scalding tank. Here, they are submerged in boiling hot water, and turkeys missed by the killing blade are boiled alive – a brutal end to an equally miserable existence on factory farms.

If the traditional Thanksgiving story is the gravy covering up the violence of American colonialism, then the turkey is... the turkey.

Its easy to create a decadent, cruelty-free, delicious meal to share with your loved ones. In doing so, you'll be investing the celebration with potent and sustainable values. Lip-smackin' good food, rich with conscience, humanity, and ecological integrity, does everyone good, and much less harm than the traditional spread.

Even if you only replace one traditional component of your Thanksgiving feast with a sustainable, vegetarian or vegan alternative, you're taking a big step.


There's lots of ways to do this. To that end, every few days I will spotlight a tried and true vegan holiday recipe favorite from now until Thanksgiving day. In most cases, you can make your traditional favorites---mashed potatoes, stuffing---with only minor modifications, and I can guarantee you, no one will know the difference. Vegan desserts? Scrumptious, and simple, and again---hard to tell the difference! I'll dish out vegan gravy recipes, and a great way to do that green bean casserole. And, you're feeling like taking the leap: Tofurkey is nothing to fear, Its delicious, and simple to prepare.
Check out Farm Sanctuary's Adopt a Turkey program:

Stay tuned for recipes!

urban garden 2008: recap

(me, helping Mom in the garden c. 1982)

Sometime in March, Ryan disappeared into the lumber section @ the hardware store. Not certain why we were there originally. Might have headed in to buy a new handle for the toilet (?) or possibly some lightbulbs. I found him pulling down long pieces of lumber.
"I'm going to build you a garden," he informed me.

The pieces looked sort of huge. I tried to imagine them somewhere in our small (but respectable) urban backyard. I thought about the raised beds we'd built together from scratch at our last house, the bags and bags and bags of beautiful organic worm-casting soil we'd hauled in, in time to do an early august planting and harvest greens all winter... and how we'd had to move away and leave those gorgeous beds, without ever getting the chance to do spring plantings and summer harvests.

And while I agreed with him wholeheartedly when he pointed out that we'd made an improvement on that last house for future dwellers that is impossible to put a price on, I still felt a little bitter. Sort of embarrassed to admit I gave him a hard time in the lumber section, but I did. "Where the heck is it going to fit?" I asked. "Do you realize how much its going to cost to fill this with good dirt? Are we going to stay in this house long enough to harvest? Can we afford all the stuff we'll need?"

He saw right through the snarkiness (he usually does).

At home, he laid out the lumber in a gravel patch behind the shed. I braced the boards while he hammered them together, with the dog looking on. We pulled out the weeds that were poking up through the gravel. A few weeks went by before we got around to filling it with dirt. We knew we couldn't afford to buy enough 20 pound bags of organic soil to fill the bed, so in late April, we rented a large (large) pickup from the hardware store and headed out to Maple Valley in the midst of an early spring snowstorm to buy our dirt in bulk, from the compost-managing-folk @ Cedar Grove. Assata rode up front between us like the farm dog she is (despite her year and a half of city-living, her formative months were spent on a small family farm in Oklahoma, 5 miles down a dirt road, ten miles south of Kansas). We plunked down 21 dollars at the counter, and I drove the truck down into a giant dirt field, where a giant loader scooped up a bucketful of "vegetable garden mix" and advanced on us. 2000 pounds of dirt crashed down in the bed of the truck, sagging the cab down around the wheels and setting off the load limit alarm. We gingerly manuevered our way home. Spent several hours shovelling the dirt into the garden frame.

Raked it, leveled it, and molded it into furrows. Shoveled some of the excess into buckets, pots, bins, and a couple whiskey barrels from the West Seattle Nursery to expand our growing potential.

Laid out our seed packets, (sugar snap peas, kentucky wonder pole beans, beets, carrots, tulsi holy basil, lavendar) and transplanted the two tubs full of starts (zuccini, spinach, and cucumbers we'd started from seed in peat pots and yogurt cups on top of the washer and dryer a month before) that we'd been lugging in and out of the laundry room to soak up sun all month. visited the Seattle Tilth Fair (http://www.seattletilth.org/) in the rain with a few hundred other giddy seattlites, gathering up boxfulls of lovely starts---- tomatoes, hot peppers, eggplant, broccoli, summer crookneck squash, butternut squash, pearl onions, walla walla sweets, brussel sprouts, leeks, lemongrass, oregano, sage, pineapple sage... and a few others I'm forgetting now.

Sprouts emerged, and popped leaves, and vines. I spent my mornings barefoot in the teeny tiny rows (so narrow I couldn't actually turn around,) glorying in the appearence of plants from seeds, (astonishing to me every time, even though I've been privy to this small miracle since I was a kid in cloth diapers keeping mom company in the garden). Watered them gently. Clucked encouragingly to the transplants.



And as it all picked up and grew, I began to realize I might have been overly enthusiastic. The "Giant" bed I'd accused Ryan of planning to build was, in fact, somewhat overcrowded.
We adjusted, practiced training shoots and vines up trellises and in circles around tomato cages, transplanting some things from here to there, pulling out unpromising producers to better utilize their space. Made me feel like a real farmer, making the tough decisions. I found I wasn't tough enough to properly thin my beets or carrots though, (their greens are so CUTE), and settled for hoping they would all just find a way to grow on top of each other. (They did the best they could).

(the crowded carrot and beet greens: way too cute to thin).

Sometime in late May, early June, we began eating what we'd grown.

Most of my photos are still trapped on rolls of good ol' fashioned 35 mm film... bunches of giddy green spinach, bowls and bowls of wee cherry tomatoes that packed more flavor in their tiny bodies than a dozen beefsteaks or grocery story hothouse varieties... handfuls of basil and piles of crimson beets, zuccinni every night for weeks, dozens of perfect knobby yellow crooknecks, 6 perfect butternuts the size of Assata's snout, a beautiful little eggplant, sweet finger length carrots and hundreds of sweet sugar snap peas eaten right off the vine...

Its now the 30th of October, and we are still enacting that most decadent of rituals...
harvesting food from our backyard and preparing it for our table.

Put in some spinach and chard seeds a few weeks ago, tho i fear i waited till too late in the autumn. They've sprouted, but we'll see how they weather the cold. There are still 2 hardy stalks of brussel sprouts working at growing those perfect little globes, and more beets and leeks and carrots to harvest. The last of the tomatoes are ripening on the kitchen windowsill there are jars of dried herbs in the cupboards and pickled beets in the fridge. I'm already plotting what we'll start in peat pots on cookie sheets on top of the washer and dryer come February and March.