This Thanksgiving, despite having a baby in one hand and a toddler snatching biscuit dough off the counter every time my back was turned, I felt surprisingly calm. Upon later reflection I realized it was probably because I’ve cooked at least 10 Thanksgiving dinners now, for a motley crowd of friends and family members and acquaintances on a couple of different continents. And once you’ve trekked all over the city of Berlin in search of cranberries and double-action baking powder, or done your level best to cook a green bean casserole in an ovenless Italian shoebox of a kitchen, having a few grubby mitts clamoring for scraps doesn’t feel like such a challenge. By now the duties and rhythms of the big feast are second nature, and I never forget about the gravy.
I love just about everything about Thanksgiving, from the traditions I’ve grown up with—pomegranates in the salad, the cheesy recitations of gratitude—to the ones I’ve picked up along the way: my college friend’s bourbon cranberry sauce, my husband’s green beans with almonds, Kenji Lopez-Alt’s spatchcocked bird, inviting over all the international students we can round up and cheerfully exploring the tangled threads of national mythology. The American Thanksgiving myth is colonialist to its core, to be sure—but grappling with the murky stories behind food and identity is, to say the least, one of my jams.
I even love shopping in crowded stores and farmers’ markets the week ahead of time—seeing celery and sage and bread poking out of everyone’s tote bags, standing in line to stock up on pinot noirs, trading strategies for pureeing pumpkin smoothly and chopping chestnuts without losing a finger. I love slipping pies into the oven on Wednesday and imagining how all my neighbors’ kitchens smell like nutmeg and cinnamon, too. It’s lovely to wake up on Thursday morning and imagine myself part of a battalion of cooks donning aprons and dusting off our largest pans in unison.
This year, getting ready, I thought about how happy I am to live in Maine, even though it’s teetering at the end of the country, closer to Europe than to my family in Southern California. Even though it’s snowy for half the year, muddy for a quarter, and mosquito-ridden for the rest. Even though relatively unpilled fleece passes for formalwear, when paired with well-wiped LL Bean boots.
And then I thought about Eula Biss’ essay in No Man’s Land about moving from New York to Iowa, how she feels oddly at home there and doesn’t want to admit to herself that it’s because so many of the people are around her are white, and so her own whiteness is unremarkable.
“I enjoyed, when I first came to Iowa City, a kind of giddy, blind happiness. By then I had moved often enough not to have the usual illusions about a clean slate or a fresh start or a new life. I knew that I could not escape myself. And the idea of beginning again, with no furniture and no friends, was exhausting. So my happiness then was hard to explain. I am tempted now to believe that entering the life one is meant to inhabit is a thrilling sensation and that is all. But I am haunted by the possibility that I was happy when I arrived in Iowa at least in part because of my misconception that I had come to a place where the people were like me (122).”
Maine is the oldest and the whitest state in the country, and I tell myself I love it despite that fact, but is that true? How committed am I, in my heart of hearts, to widening the welcome, to communing even with those who think soggy baked bread or warm sweet mashed squash are simply revolting, who do not begin their Thanksgiving mornings by pouring a strong cup of coffee and setting butter out to soften?
I speak often, and with conviction, about the capacity of food to bring people together, to build community across language and cultures. And it can. But it doesn’t always. Hunger has many flip sides. One is what we foodies love to think of: “the warmth and richness and fine reality of a hunger satisfied,” as MFK Fisher puts it. Another is disgust. Another is alienation. These, too, are part of the story—even if they don’t necessarily appear around the table.