Come Together, over my dead body
On the Thanksgiving 'tradition'
Having grown up as an outsider to the American Thanksgiving tradition due to 15 years of vegetarianism (and being much more acquainted with the debauchery-laden yet more effusive “Friendsgiving”), I can’t help but wonder why it all feels like a routine doctor’s appointment with the pomp and circumstance of a new Emperor’s coronation. There’s nothing particularly off-putting about the main gustatory feast other than the dogmatic calls to “set aside our differences for one meal”, yet the mediocrity of the centerpiece meat itself - turkey - pervades throughout the entire occasion.
The occasion of the first Thanksgiving turkey I ever ate was fairly par for the course - the 3-7 Dallas Cowboys were inexplicably favored, as usual, this time against the 10-0 Carolina Panthers. Naturally, they got blown out, an atrocity on which I will not further elaborate. Thanks to an NYU dorm policy of catering a Thanksgiving meal for foreigners, students who couldn’t travel, and fellow charlatans who don’t celebrate, a modest crew of a few dozen students and staffers got to have our fill of a traditional Thanksgiving meal, with turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and so on, along with nonstandard accompaniments like dumplings and the indefatigably present Insomnia cookies. It is from this basis that we attack the Thanksgiving heterodoxy straight on, starting at the turkey itself.
Is there any more pedestrian meat in the US than turkey? At best, it acts as a poor vessel for a more savory flavor profile like gravy due to its total lack of adherence capability. At worst, it’s a dried-up rebuke to flavor harkening back to the days when lobster was a peasant food, with a pittance of skin to compensate for the fact that it’s a glorified unsalted chicken breast. Why is Thanksgiving so bound to the turkey, a meat that most often shows up when lunch is closer to an afterthought than a meal, so behooven to this ‘cut-and-dried’ tradition that hundreds and thousands of writers with a deadline annually harangue us about being made up? The entire meal is an excuse to consume copious amounts of MSG in the form of gravy, because, in terms of understanding flavor, the American taste is haplessly behind the entire Eastern hemisphere. Thus the literal ‘essence of flavor’ is still looked upon suspiciously by the general public.
Even the side dishes are an excuse to splather more gravy on everything. Stuffing, to my understanding, is just baked bread, again, eaten with gravy. Using “proper chicken broth” would add some natural MSG to the dish as well. The only quasi-break from the savory overload is cranberry sauce, which would probably go better with vodka rather than the rest of the meal, and an ungodly sweet potato - marshmallow concoction, a scourge on your teeth that 9/10 dentists ignore because Halloween candy is an easier target. Nobody actually sets aside their views, as a result - arguments are expected, but never as unseemly as predicted, for détente comes through collective gluttony and sedative television - truly an American tradition unlike any other.