Good Food Thanksgiving

Planning for Thanksgiving—a favorite holiday of foodies across the nation—can be, well, downright frustrating for the meal planners.  One guest is watching their cholesterol intake, another their glycemic load, one hates veggies, and one is a vegetarian….  I recognize that to add to this potentially divisive list of demands the esoteric concepts of environmental and social responsibility might seem mad to some, but I believe this holiday devoted to giving thanks should be based on these concepts.

In my book, delicious, healthy, and ethical food is worth any extra effort for the deeply honest pleasures it can provide.  And with some planning, it might not seem extra at all.  Slow Food USA is trying to make it easy on meal planners trying to please both palate and conscience with a Thanksgiving Guide, replete with recipes, tips for easy meal planning, and thoughts on the origins of the holiday (the story of which was explored here in 2009.) 

Top 5 tips to have a Slow Food Thanksgiving:

1. Shop for fresh, seasonal, and local foods at a farmers market;
2. Take the time to learn about where your food comes from and how it was raised;
3. Give thanks for the labor that brought your food to your table and the earth that grew it;
4. Get all hands on deck in the kitchen. Teach others what you know and learn from them;
5. And then sit back and savor the meal with family and friends.

When I plan Thanksgiving, there are a few key ingredients—delicious, nutritious, place based ingredients—that I consider the stars of the table.  What follows is a bit of musing on some of these fine foods:

Apple varietals, once numbered in the thousands across this land, are now quite limited, with industrial foodways leaving room for only a few varieties in the grocery stores.  But a trip to the Milwaukee County Winter’s Farmers Market, or one of our local antique apple orchards, will yield many varieties such as the Wolf River, Autumn Berry, Willow Twig, Lady Apple, Golden Russet, Northern Spy, Black Giliflower, Arkansas Black, Northwest Greening, Snow, Winesap, etc....all autumn varietals in our region.  On my table, I might feature local apples on a cheese plate or in an apple cranberry sauce, in an apple crisp, as an ingredient in the stuffing or by serving an artisanal apple cider with dinner.

Pumpkin or winter squash, a truly American food, is a must at Thanksgiving, and need not be limited to the realm of pie.  The bright orange flesh (due to all that beta carotene) is a reminder that they sat in the field all season, soaking up sun.   Unique varieties of squash, like Sibley, Boston Marrow, Amish Pie, Galeux d'Eysines, Buttercup, Marina di Chioggia, each have their own unique flavors and textures and stories though they are, for the most part but with many caveats, interchangeable.  My all time favorite, the Marina di Chioggia, comes from Italy and has dense flesh, and a rich, nutty flavor that finds a good home in biscuits and breads, pies and purees. This year I’m likely to use the Long Pie Pumpkin (otherwise known by the name Nantucket) or Fairy Squash grown by my friends at Pinehold Gardens for a pumpkin and sage bisque.  In years past, squash has been served up simply; halved, brushed with real maple syrup, roasted and sliced or diced large and roasted along with root vegetables or baked and stuffed with the next key ingredient, wild rice.

True Wild Rice is precious—an important traditional food of the Ojibwe and Menominee people of this region, it is still hand harvested each year by “knocking” the rice into canoes as they glide through the wetland stands in which the rice grows wild.  This tradition is at risk, due to polluted waters, changing land use, and shifting foodways, which is likely why real wild rice has gone up in price in the past couple of years, making it unaffordable to many Native people who don’t harvest it themselves.   To seek out  and serve wild rice at the table not only supports people continuing an important traditional foodway, but is a truly nutritious and delicious regional food.  Always nutty and aromatic, real wild rice flavor will vary from rice bed to rice bed.  It’s hard to compare the real thing with the much more common cultivated “paddy rice” which takes much longer to cook and has a very different taste and texture.  Wild rice is wonderful served on its own, but I often like to serve it as a dressing/stuffing; mixed with ingredients like cranberries, celery, hazelnuts and apples.  Learn more and find distributors of real wild rice here

And then there’s the turkey.  Heritage turkey breeds, like Narragansett, White Holland , Bourbon Red, Bronze, are uniquely American and very, very unique. Today 99% of turkeys are the same industrialized breed; the Broad Breasted White is raised to grow so fast, that they’ve no ability to forage, fly, or mate naturally.  To serve a heritage turkey supports small family farms and it also yields a much richer, more flavorful meat due to the slow growth rates.  The Slow Food Thanksgiving guide has more information on heritage turkeys and through my local Slow Food WiSE chapter, we compile an annual local heritage buying guide to promote the restoration of heritage breed turkeys within our region by pairing farmers with eaters.  

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”         ― Wendell Berry

 Happy Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving Story

This year, as we sat around the table with family and friends, enjoying the American Bronze Heritage Turkey, Sibley Squash, home grown potatoes, just picked brussel sprouts, and the many more delights that graced our table, I gave thanks for the health and wellness of our group and reflected on the origins of the very first Thanksgiving.

Certainly, humans of all cultures have been giving thanks for a bountiful harvest throughout the millennia, but the holiday we Americans celebrate each November commemorates a real occurrence- the survival of Plymouth colonists due to the generosity of the native Wampanoag people, who shared their knowledge, skills and food with the starving settlers. This is where our bucolic image of the “first Thanksgiving” usually ends- a large 3 day feast of venison, wild game, pompion, and brotherly love between the Pilgrims and Indians. This story is, of course, incomplete. The “survivalist training” provided by the Wampanoag was rewarded with massacre only a generation later. The first Thanksgiving was actually a scene in a horror story.

Even so, showing gratitude at the end of a harvest season remains ever appropriate. But the story we tell ourselves about our celebrational food is often much like the fairy-tale version of Thanksgiving. On the surface (or on the package) our food appears bucolic, yet underneath it’s a bit more sinister with corresponding environmental, health, and ethical horrors. This is especially so of the industrial holiday turkeys that grace most American’s plates.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her book detailing a year of local eating, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, famously penned her quest to establish a breeding flock of heritage turkeys. In describing why, she writes about the state of the turkey industry.

“Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted white should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that make turkey behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing to wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend holds for all animals bred for confinement. For turkeys, this scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.”

Rather excitingly, Barbara’s Red Bourbon turkeys do end up mating naturally by the end of her story, but the lineage of the Broad Breasted Whites continue to be left up to human “sperm wranglers.” It is for this and many other frightful reasons that I gave up eating turkey even at Thanksgiving for more than decade in favor of what I presumed was the only sane alternative: vegetarianism. For much of my life I avoided factory farming and it’s moral, environmental, and health atrocities by avoiding all meat. It wasn’t until I moved to a community in Vermont, teeming with small scale farms, that I realized there existed a viable alternative to factory farming aside from altogether abstaining from meat: pasturing animals in the brilliant out of doors. In the case of birds, pastured poultry can result in a healthier animal, food, community and ecosystem.

The American Bronze heritage turkey we enjoyed (after a quick brine and simple oven roast) came from JenEhr, a local family farm whose turkeys are raised on pasture have an opportunity to do what turkeys do best: walk around in the fresh air and eat grass and bugs. In the process, their meat develops a rich flavor and healthier nutrient profile than grain fed industrial birds. Pastured poultry has increased beneficial omega 3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, and beta carotene from the diverse diet they’ve had access to as well as less fat overall. Our Bronze turkey yielded a remarkably tiny amount of fat in the pan as it roasted, but what drippings it did yield were very rich in flavor and made a delectable gravy.

Heritage breeds are making a comeback due to dedicated conservationists- chefs, farmers, and eaters. Groups like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Slow Food are working to maintain biodiversity and prevent further food extinction in our food system. Our local chapter of the national organization, Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast, pairs local eaters with local growers of heritage breeds like the Standard Bronze, Red Bourbon, and Narragansett, with the Heritage Turkey Project- a basic list of heritage turkey growers. Heritage Turkeys in other parts of the country can be located on the ALBC and Local Harvest websites.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:
It costs more to buy a heritage breed- they take more time and skill to raise. And takes more time to purchase than simply picking out a cheap bird from a pile in the freezer section of mega-mart. But it is a mistake to believe that a cheap price is a bargain. All down the food chain, the cost of cheap meat is felt- in the waters polluted by factory farm waste, in the unsafe conditions and poor wages paid the to industry workers, in the effects of chronic diseases on the eaters whose options are often limited to industrialized, processed foods. My recommendation is to buy better meat less often or just altogether skip it- and all the problems associated with cheap meat can be avoided. I choose quality over quantity and reserve my meat eating to those rare occasions when I’m comfortable it was raised in a way I can stomach. And when we do eat heritage meat, it is something we can truly be thankful for...

Thankfully

Heritage turkeys from Top o' the Hill Farm in Northwestern Illinois.

This Thanksgiving, I am most thankful to share good, clean, and fair food with loved ones.

Thankfully there is healthy soil, sun, air, and water for food.

Thankfully there are mindful people to raise the plants and animals that ended up gracing our plates...

I am especially thankful for these things because they are at risk: our topsoil is quickly disappearing, our climate is changing, our air and water has become unsafe in communities all over the world. The irony is that the very food system dependent upon these natural resources is ruining them.

While our holiday table bounded with roots and vegetables from our garden and our farmer friends' fields, possibly our biggest, or maybe our newest, adventure was finding the locally raised, organic, heritage Bourbon Red turkey we feasted on. After seeking out this treasure, it was comforting to see the farm our turkey was raised on and to know that the way it was raised led to healthy meat. Grass fed, foraged birds, that are supplemented with organic feed, and who have access to plenty of fresh air while roaming the wide out of doors are naturally better for the eaters.

Heritage breeds preserve tradition and flavor and our health. Find out more about heritage animals from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy which works to promote the preservation of these endangered breeds. Heritage turkeys can be purchased through Local Harvest or Slow Food Chicago's Turkey project.