Folklore, Food, and Culture

Posted: September 9th, 2013

Folklore, Food, and Culture

Identify a food that is ‘necessary’ for the proper observance of a custom (a ritual, a calendar custom, a rite of passage, etc). Trace its origins both in a larger, historical context, and in your own personal history.

The Thanksgiving holiday is one of the most important and cherished events in American calendars. During the event, many people far from home take the chance to be with their families or loved ones and to celebrate this holiday with them. It is one of the most celebrated events even in films, which have served to enhance the traditions surrounding it. The main purpose of the holiday is to give thanks for all that a person has. However, like all other events, thanksgiving has its own traditions and customs, some of which have evolved over the years. No Thanksgiving Day is complete without a turkey dinner. The turkey makes the centerpiece of most dinner tables during Thanksgiving. Indeed, other than going home for the holidays, most people have come to identify this calendar event with the turkey dinner.

Several accounts try to explain the origin of Thanksgiving Day, and the origin of using turkey as the main thanksgiving meal. The Thanksgiving holiday is based on the England puritan traditions of giving thanks. This religious event calls for people to consider and reflect upon the blessings they have received from God, and thank Him for these blessings. Other accounts explain that the event is based on the harvest celebrations in England and New England. The people celebrated and gave thanks after a bountiful harvest. Most people recognize the landing at Plymouth as the origin for thanksgiving. The piligrims landed at Plymouth, where there were many Native Americans. The land was rich and bountiful, but since the piligrims were new there, they did not know how to survive. The first recognized Thanksgiving celebration dates back to 1621. The piligrims and the Wampanoag celebrated a successful harvest together. The Wampanoag had helped the piligrims during their time of need. The piligrims had suffered from starvation, and the Wampanoag helped them by showing them their farming skills. In particular the Native Americans showed the pilgrims how to cultivate food and how to survive the winters in their new land. They celebrated during this time, as they shared their harvest and formed friendships.

The holiday was not always an annual event. People celebrated it after presidential proclamations. For instance, President George Washington had declared a Thanksgiving Day in 1789 as a day of giving sincere and humble thanks. John Adams issued a day of fervent Thanksgiving in May of 1798 (Davis, 2001). However, this event was not recognized again. It became an annual holiday after Sarah Hale convinced President Lincoln to set aside the day and declare it an annual holiday in 1863. President Lincoln set aside the last Thursday in November as the Thanksgiving Day. Since then, only one attempt was made to change the day when President Franklin D Roosevelt changed the day to the third Thursday in November in an attempt to lengthen the Christmas shopping period. This happened in 1939 when the country was facing the great depression. The President hoped that he would strengthen the economy if he gave people more time to shop for the holiday season. However, many people were not in favor of the idea, and this compelled Congress to reverse the President’s decision in 1941.

It is highly unlikely that the people ate turkey during their celebrations at that time. Although turkeys were abundant, they were hard to kill, and the settlers might have found this challenging. Therefore, they consumed other foods as they feasted: waterfowls and fish. As time went on, Thanksgiving became more important, and people celebrated the day by consuming different kinds of meat, which included domesticated turkey, beef, goose, mutton, chicken, and pork (Dennis, 2005). People used to celebrate Thanksgiving in different ways and they had a variety of dishes. In fact, they ate turkey meat not only for Thanksgiving Day, but also for other holidays such as Christmas (Gillespie & Mechling, 1987). Turkey was expensive, but people demanded it for Thanksgiving. They saw this as a form of patriotism, since illustrations often depicted the piligrims eating turkey on Thanksgiving (Dennis, 2005).

As this holiday became more common in different parts of the country, people changed the way they bred and consumed turkey. Wild turkeys ate a wide variety of foods, which include nuts, seeds, plant tops, grapes, berries, spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, snails, ants, slugs, caterpillars, crickets, worms, lizards, beetles and small snakes (Smith, 2006). During times of scarcity such as the winter periods, wild turkeys could eat almost anything they could find. American Indians ate wild turkey, which was abundant before the formation of the states. They prepared the turkey by boiling or roasting it. Some never ate the turkey meat, some consumed the eggs. Most of the American Indians hunted the wild turkey for its feathers, which they used to make different types of clothing and blankets. Some people used the bones for making tools and decorations. Once the piligrims arrived and started eating the turkey, people found ways of domesticating the bird. Many people in America domesticated the turkey, and they used it as a form of food. The turkeys were easy to breed since they could eat anything. Soon, turkeys were found in many parts of the world. However, they did not flourish in the tropics. People cooked turkey the same way they cooked fowls. The turkey meat was tender and nutritional (Smith, 2006).

Although turkeys were abundant in many parts of the country, they declined due to human activities such as hunting and destruction of their habitat for farming. People hunted the turkeys using different methods. Some used dogs while others shot them. Some developed traps, which caught many turkeys. The farmers also destroyed the turkey’s source of food, and this contributed to their decline. The turkey population also decreased because people had become more aware of its meat, and this lead to overconsumption. This happened as the demand for the turkeys increased. Soon, such demand led to a shortage in supply and a subsequent increase in the price of turkey.

The decrease of turkeys and the realized profitability led to the increase in domestication of turkey. People used to celebrate the production process of turkey, not just the consumption. Currently, people purchase frozen turkey for cooking on Thanksgiving Day. Many people in America have never seen a wild turkey because most of the turkeys are domesticated. Turkey production has become a scientific venture and a commercial project. People have found ways to engineer the birds genetically with the aim of increasing their weight and meat production. The process has become so commercialized that people no longer care how the birds are bred. Genetic engineering has increased the weight of the birds, and this has made some of them so big that they cannot stand. It becomes impossible for such birds to mate naturally, and these birds have to be produced industrially (Dennis, 2005).

The domestication of the birds led to the changes in the way the birds were reared. In the 1940s, turkey farmers developed a hybrid strain of turkey. These turkeys were smaller and more tender compared to the wild varieties. More farmers became interested in rearing the turkeys, and this increased the supply that had previously diminished. This led to a decrease in the costs. The farmers marketed the birds aggressively convincing people that turkeys were the most suitable birds for the season. Advertisements and illustrations in the newspapers and magazines showed a stuffed turkey as the centerpiece at the dinner table (Gillespie & Mechling, 1987). Films have continued to emphasize this function. Many films centered on the holidays show people consuming turkey. They depict the hustles that people go through when creating the ‘perfect’ stuffing for the turkey, knowing the exact time to place the turkey in the oven and  the right temperature to be used to ensure that turkey has the golden, crisp color and appetizing aroma that people crave for. After all the cooking and preparation, the family and guests sit around the table for a time of Thanksgiving and a plate of turkey.

Evidence of stuffing the turkey can be traced back to the sixteenth century. People stuffed the turkey with different items including berries, artichokes, herbs and spices, chopped liver, egg yolks, truffles, lard, oysters, and cheese. The stuffing depended on the available ingredients and their price. Some of the stuffing was too expensive for the ordinary person to afford. People became more creative in their cooking, and they developed different recipes on how to prepare and cook turkey. Some of these recipes involved stuffing different birds together. For instance, in one of the recipes, one stuffed a boned chicken inside a duck and then stuffed the duck inside the turkey. While this was not common and widespread previously, it became more common during the sixties (Smith, 2006). People continue experimenting with different kinds of stuffing when cooking the turkey.

Before mid twentieth century, many people did not like cooking turkey because they found it difficult to pin during preparations. Pinning is the removal of the tiny pinfeathers from the dark skinned turkey carcass. This prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a breeding program, which would produce a bird with a more appealing carcass. The USDA bred the Beltsville White, which it launched in 1947. The Beltsville White was light skinned, and it appealed to many people. The launching of this breed increased consumption of turkey during the fifties and sixties. Since then, it continued to increase over the years. It is estimated that Americans consume about 17.5 pounds of turkey per person per year. This is more than five times the amount of turkey consumed prior to 1940s, before the development of the Beltsville White breed (Farm Sanctuary, n. d.).

The turkey market used to operate during the winter season. This is because of the increased consumption of turkey during the winter holidays, especially Christmas. However, this has changed with advancement of science and technology used in farming. People no longer breed turkeys for their meat during the holidays. Further interest in the field has ensured the increased processing of turkey with products such as turkey sausages and turkey ham becoming popular. People have become more interested in consuming turkey meat because of its nutritional value. The meat is low in fat and high in proteins, and this makes it more appealing to the health conscious.

As the Thanksgiving holiday became more common in America, many people continued to celebrate the day irrespective of their religion or ethnicity. They see it as a day of reflection and appreciation what they have received during the year. There has been an increase in the number of turkeys slaughtered over the years. Many animal rights activists have decried the manner in which farmers and producers rear turkeys. They have called for people to be more sensitive to animal rights. Genetically engineering the birds and producing them artificially is a form of abuse. It makes the birds more overweight denying them the chance to run around, fly, and even reproduce. With such concern, there is an impending threat of changing Thanksgiving tradition if more people become aware of such activities. However, now many people continue enjoying their Thanksgiving dinner, which seems incomplete without the turkey. The nutritional value of the bird has made it more common, and people do not have to wait for Thanksgiving to consume turkey.

References

Davis, K. (2001). More than a meal: The turkey in history, myth, ritual, and reality. New York, NY: Lantern Books.

Dennis, M. (2005). Red, white, and blue letter days: An American calendar. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Farm Sanctuary. (n. d.). The history of thanksgiving. Retrieved from http://www.farmsanctuary.org/giving/adopt-a-turkey/adopt-a-turkey-history-of-thanksgiving/ .

Gillespie, K. A., & Mechling, J. (1987). American Wildlife in Symbol and Story. Knoxville, TN: Univ. of Tennessee Press.

Smith, F. A. (2006). The turkey: An American story. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.