From the Onion:
“Noting that the nation’s long wait is now at an end, sources confirmed Thursday that the Thanksgiving holiday will grant millions of Americans the rare chance to eat incredibly large amounts of food while watching football games. ‘This kind of day doesn’t come around too often, so I’m excited to finally be able to sit back with family and friends over some delicious food and watch football for the entire afternoon,’ said 34-year-old Arnold Dawson of Henrico, VA.”
It isn’t the turkey, argues Ellie Krieger:
“It turns out the real Thanksgiving nap-inducers have been hiding behind the turkey all along. Yes, that means you, sweet potato casserole, stuffing and double-crust apple pie. These sides and desserts are all rich in carbohydrates, which don’t contain tryptophan but clear the path for it to get to the brain fast.”
Emma Brockes tries to make sense of Thanksgiving:
“I don’t claim to fully understand this American holiday—I have only lived in the US for seven years. But from my own experience of Christmas, I know too well the hysteria that can be brought on by deviating from the way things have always been done. There was, for instance, my dad’s heroic efforts one year, to suggest that we have steak instead of turkey on Christmas day, a well-meaning but egregious subversion of the first rule of the holidays: nothing is to change, ever.”
The New York Times serves up Thanksgiving dishes from all 50 states. Among the menu items: pawpaw pudding from West Virginia.
“When it comes to pawpaw, accept no substitutes. Trust us; we tried. We went to a bunch of experts—scholars who specialize in fruit, plus chefs and cookbook authors who know all about the proud culinary history of Appalachia—and we asked them, ‘If a home cook doesn’t happen to have any pawpaw, what combination of other fruits and vegetables might work well as a replacement?’ We picked up passing nods to sweet potatoes, bananas, papayas, avocados, really ripe mangoes. But in the end everyone came back with variations on ‘Forget it, there’s nothing like a pawpaw.'”
Local food supporters say we should pay more for our Thanksgiving turkeys, reports Margaret Badore:
“Last Thanksgiving, the average American family spent $22 for a 16-pound turkey. That’s less than $1.40 a pound.
“Yet slow food and small farm advocates argue it’s time we start paying more, closer to $10 a pound—or $100-$150 a turkey—if we want to address the many problems associated with factory farmed poultry.
“‘There’s a common dogma that cheap food is an absolute good,’ says Andrew deCoriolis at Farm Forward, a non-profit organization that promotes sustainable and humane agriculture. ‘It’s cheap to the consumer, but it externalizes costs,’ he adds.”
Emma Christensen suggests cooking two small turkeys rather than one giant one:
“With a big turkey, you start running into some big problems. It takes longer to thaw if it’s frozen and then exponentially longer to cook. Plus, it tends to cook less evenly, leaving you with a platter of dry meat. These turkeys are also harder to maneuver, flip, carry, carve, and just about everything else.”