On Thanksgiving dinner

The crush is on in the supermarkets to buy the food for Thanksgiving. This seems rather ironic for me because most of these people don’t cook during the rest of the year. They not only don’t cook on a regular basis, they don’t even eat at home, ever. Although there is nothing morally superior to making your own food, it is certainly better and cheaper, if not healthier. People who eat in restaurants all the time tend to overeat on a regular basis, which leads, of course, to obesity. So the crush is on. Let me guess, pumpkin pie, cranberries, the ubiquitous turkey, dressing, gravy, green bean casserole, lots of whipped cream, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes. To say that Americans are totally unimaginative would be to underestimate the situation. The Thanksgiving Day menu is a cliché at best. Cooked by people who never cook, I would be so afraid to try a turkey cooked by an inexperienced cook who doesn’t know what they are doing, much less know how to handle a turkey. Most of the menu is either baked or boiled, so ruining it might take some initiative, but I know people who have. I’ve seen burned turkey, raw turkey, frozen turkey, tanned turkey, exploded turkey, underdone turkey, dry turkey, tasteless turkey and inedible turkey. Turkey is one of those dishes which takes a lot of culinary know-how, and most people don’t have the street creds for getting the job done correctly. Do people really know how to handle a raw cranberry? And opening a can of pre-cooked cranberries is for wimps and pretenders. Let’s not talk about dressing. Most people just don’t cook enough to develop the experience necessary to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner. So they buy all this stuff–flour, shortening, mince meat, sugar, spices, bread crumbs, croutons–and they think that just because mom used to cook all this stuff that they can do it too. Actually, I’m amused by all this cooking activity because I think we would all be served by more home cooking even if it affected the national restaurant economy. When one eats at home, one eats less, one eats less bad fats, one eats less starch, one eats less sugar, and one stays healthier. I know a lot of pigging out is going to occur this week across the country, but there is very little reason for it. By eating less, we stay healthier, we feel better, we have fewer aches and pains, climbing the stairs is easier as is just about any other task we perform on a daily basis. Our interaction with food is complex and chaotic, but the over-abundance of food, our horn of plenty, is almost as a much a curse as it is a blessing. Since the only thing we cannot resist is temptation itself, we fall into the trap of overeating and suffering because of it. Perhaps Thanksgiving would be a holiday best served by humility and moderation, but eating less and walking more, by not focusing on how much turkey and dressing we might eat, by not focusing on how much dessert we show down our gullets. What if we didn’t make pigs of ourselves, ate sensibly, exercised more, and forgot about putting a ton of food on the table that we never needed in the first place? If you don’t put it on the table in the first place you will never know that you ever missed it. With so much of the world starving, it seems like a shame to gorge ourselves on food we don’t even need.