Giving Thanks

Norman Rockwell painting on "Freedom of Want," one of the four freedoms that President FDR said belonged to all Americans.  This is a poster published by the Office of War Information.  It was also the cover art for an issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

I've always said the Thanksgiving meal of turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans and pumpkin pie was my favorite.  

In my post-cancer "mouth" phase, turkey now seems to me to be pretty mealy, so we're having ham instead.  No stuffing.

I am adding mashed butternut squash to the menu, will make cranberry orange relish (100x better than canned), and I made an olive tapenade for appetizers.  

Last week I made some refrigerator pickles, so I'll put them out too.  I wanted them to be hot but they aren't.  They are more like the quick pickle without dill on the pickle bar at Parkway Deli in Silver Spring--I miss them so much.  No deli in Utah compares.

For the tapenade, the 1950s blender I have was strong enough, I put it on high, thinking it would have a problem with the olives, but nope, it's a paste, rather than a little more chunky.  

I'm getting wood fired oven focaccia bread from the Central 9th Market, I just can't bake in an oven to that level of bread softness that they pull off.

Scary for me, there's an article about how a big meal like at Thanksgiving can trigger a heart attack ("Why big meals can trigger heart attacks, just like stress or heavy exercise," Washington Post). I have heart failure but haven't had a heart attack.

In past entries for Thanksgiving I've suggested giving books such as on the regional cuisine or a subscription to one of the Edible Communities publications, instead of bringing bottles of wine or beer.  

-- "Improving the food system related host/ess gifts for Thanksgiving," 2023

Poverty in the midst of abundance/Food (in)security.  Is all the more relevant this year, given the Trump Administration cuts to food support programs, the willingness to suspend SNAP food benefits as part of the shutdown without any regard for people and the pain of food poverty ("Some SNAP recipients still waiting on payments ahead of Thanksgiving," USA Today, "SNAP Benefits Map Shows How Many People Face Being Removed in Each State," Newsweek. "SNAP recipients will now get up to 65% of November food stamp benefits, Trump administration says," CBS). 

The opinion piece in the New York Times, "Opinion | A New Era of Hunger Has Begun," discusses this in the context of the increased demand at a food bank in Western Massachusetts.

Cutting SNAP will drastically increase the pressure on food banks. Their pantries are a model of decency, of coherent community efforts on behalf of people in need. Their offerings aid families suffering emergencies, but although they supplement SNAP, they don’t fill nearly as many stomachs. According to Feeding America, which oversees food banks across the country, SNAP provides nine times as much food as all of its 200 food banks combined. Moreover, because SNAP money goes mainly to people who live in urgent need, the funds are quickly spent, injecting economic activity into local economies. Each $1 in SNAP benefits adds as much as $1.50 to the country’s gross domestic product, a helpful buffer during economic downturns and recessions.

Political conservatives have long disliked SNAP. Many of them argue that it’s poorly run and discourages Americans from providing for themselves. And yet the need for SNAP is obvious, dire and nationwide. There is no county in America, no matter how wealthy, where the only hungry people are those on diets. The most recent data available estimates that 47.4 million Americans suffered from the threat of hunger at some point in 2023. Among these people, 13.8 million were children. Almost seven million households experienced what’s referred to as very low food security, meaning they sometimes had to go without a meal, or even a day’s worth of meals, and often didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. Disproportionate percentages of Black and Latino Americans shared in the misery.

... In all, the law will take about $1.2 trillion away from social programs over the next decade. Its supporters like to say that their changes will reduce fraud and waste and save social programs for the future, but part of the intent is clearly to save money for other purposes — such as adding more than $100 billion to help squads of men in masks cleanse America of undocumented immigrants. The Republican Congress also chose to extend the large tax cuts of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mainly for that reason, the law will end up adding about $3.4 trillion to the country’s huge deficit over 10 years, according to the C.B.O.’s estimate.

... To many Republicans, the domestic policy law — which Mr. Trump calls the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (such a triumphal phrase, like a schoolyard boast) — represents a victory in a long-running attempt at “entitlement reform,” at repairing, if not eliminating, the programs that make up the nation’s social safety net. But this so-called reform does nothing to lessen the hardships of the people those programs were created to assuage.

The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement is a book about the repositioning of a "needy" food bank to a community food center in Toronto, which also touched off a national movement to shift how food banks operate in Canada ("Food activist Nick Saul on why we’re ripe for a revolution" and "Nick Saul: The man who built the foodie bank," Toronto Star).  

With food aid in the United States being cut in so many different ways, repositioning food banks about food systems and community strengths seems out of the question.

Plus there is the rise in the cost of health care, the cuts that are coming to health programs.  All relevant to the concept of health equity and focusing on the social determinants of health ("Health equity devolves to cities and states as the federal government cuts taxes for the wealthy").

More recently there have been calls to recognize the roots of indigenous peoples in the Thanksgiving holiday.  These days, with the Trump anti-DEI campaign, I can't recall seeing much about revisiting the indigenous perspective.

We took the land.  The Boston Gobe's review of the book This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by GWU Professor David Silverman reminds us of the reality that the land we have, America, was taken from Native Americans.

KALW-FM, the public radio station in San Francisco, featured an interview with Professor Silverman.

-- "The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue," Smithsonian Magazine

A few years ago the Globe had an interesting story on Plimoth Plantation, the re-enactment heritage park focused on the origin story of English settlement in Massachusetts.  Recently, the site was renamed Plimoth Patuxet Plantation, to directly include Native Americans, although the article argues the site has a long way to go to tell a richer, more complete and accurate story ("More than name change may be needed at former Plimoth Plantation").

Isle of Man stamp commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower.

The New York Times has an article, "The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year," about greater efforts at re-examination of the mythology around Thanksgiving, and the putting forward of the Native American interpretation.  For decades, Native Americans in New England have termed Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning, to recognize the trials and tribulations in the face of English settlement.

Bon Appetit has an article about Native American chefs and Thanksgiving.  From the article:

To many Native people, reckoning with Thanksgiving can be difficult—for obvious reasons. This is partially why the I-Collective, an organization of indigenous chefs and activists across the country, was born ("Brit Reed is leading a new generation of indigenous chefs"). The group hosts Thanksgiving dinners with a decidedly different narrative, celebrating the resilience of their people and telling their stories through food.

We are all immigrants.  At the same time, Thanksgiving should remind us, given the anti-immigrant focus of the Trump Administration ("There’s no other way to explain Trump’s immigration policy. It’s just bigotry," Washington Post) that every person in the United States, except for those of Native American descent, descends from immigrants, including people first brought here by force.  

A few years ago, when the Post was liberal they ran this editorial, "Gratitude once suffused America. Today, things are not as they should be." Given their new conservative slant I doubt they'd do so today.

These days they're more likely to be calling attention to "Supply Side Jesus."