This year we had a big Thanksgiving. Ever since we got to Colombia in late 2008, I've made a special Thanksgiving dinner every year. In Colombia they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but among our friends and family we have sort of inserted the holiday as a major event in the year. Now everyone knows and looks forward to Thanksgiving at our house. Next year I'm thinking of introducing a football game in our local park as part of the get-together (though in my family we never played football at Thanksgiving).
I always make a big fuss for the Thanksgiving meal. Our first year I made some stuffed roasted chickens, and since then I've been gradually adding more dishes to the affair. Most of the recipes are my expatriate reconstructed version of US classics, with a twist of Andean flavor. This year I made Andean stuffed chicken, Boston baked beans, sauteed spinach, key lime pie, mashed potatoes, and corn bread. Guests brought more roast chicken, salads, cranberry sauce, green beans, and mashed squash. My corn bread turned out harder and less sweet than my usual recipe, but as such it resembled traditional US conbread even more. I was particularly proud of my home-made key lime pie.
The recipe is actually really easy--a can of condensed milk, a half-cup of lime juice, and (gasp!) five egg yolks. The real point of pride is that I made a graham-cracker-style crust from scratch. Since we don't have graham crackers in Colombia, I used the crumbs from galletas de sagu (made from the achira starch I'm studying in my job). These are delicious cookies made in Guayata, in the Tenza valley. However, their crumbly nature, combined with the awful, bumpy road into and out of Guayata, make for a lot of broken cookies. I took advantage of them to make this crust.
Here is the bed of vegetables on which my Andean chicken sat in the oven.
I arranged the photo so you can see bits of cassava, guatila (Sechium edule), four varieties of potato, cubios (Tropaeolum tuberosum), ibias (Oxalis tuberosa), ruba (Ullucus tuberosus), balu (Erythrina edulis), butternut squash, and arracacha (Arracacia xanthorriza). Hence the whole vegetable bed consists in New World crops.
The chickens and their seasonings are entirely Old World. They have celery, bread crumbs, white mushrooms, eggs, and onions in the stuffing, and a rub/baste of olive oil, curry, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, and a few other things. Here's the finished product:
This year we had something like 20 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Many of them were my wife's workmates. We had a few kids running around, which really lent a nice family flavor to the event. I think many people in Bogota, especially my wife's single coworkers, don't get to spend much time in family celebrations. In our town in Boyaca, families are bigger and more people live together with their whole family. Hence before my wife moved to Bogota, we didn't realize how special our frequent family get-togethers were, and we often longed for the more modern, urbane life of the big city. But seeing and talking to my wife's coworkers, I realized that for them family get-togethers are rare, and they in turn have an overdose of late-night parties shared only with other adults.
In preparation for the explanation I always give to our guests, I read up a bit on the original Thanksgiving celebration. I know there were actually some Thanksgiving-style celebrations in Virginia before 1620, but the Plymouth Colony version is the one we've accepted as our collective heritage in the US. I really like this Thanksgiving story of the Plymouth settlers and the Massassoit Indians, and sometime I would like to read more original documents and commentaries on it. Also, the harvest celebration of native New World crops that is at the heart of Thanksgiving relates very well to the Muisca Garden project at my work.
As has often happened to me in the six years I've been living outside the States, what had seemed familiar and boring growing up now seems cool and exotic. I am rediscovering the fascinating story of Thanksgiving, the early history of our nation, the conflicts and cooperation between Europeans and Native Americans that has defined us as a people. I miss the autumn, the change of weather, all the aspects of the natural environment in the Midwest that I never appreciated as a college student longing to learn about the tropics. Above all, I miss the traditions I grew up with in the US, though my wife and I are steadily building our own traditions to guide and anchor us as a family.
Here is an interesting radio essay that my friend's big sister presented on NPR a few years ago. She too talks about creating and changing traditions, though in her case the traditions are a fusion of Nigerian and US customs.
Another part of my imported US traditions this year was what we did after Thanksgiving. I boiled down the two stripped chicken carcasses and made bouillon, which I then froze into ice cubes to use in future soups. Then I added more water to the carcasses and made a soup that lasted a few days (and that everyone in the house was sick of by the end). The interminable leftovers are an important part of Thanksgiving.
In fact, I've recently been thinking more explicitly about a sacred ethic of food. This is a term I've coined to describe a reverent, non-wasteful attitude towards food. Here would be the components of such an ethic:
Food is sacred. This means it is not to be thrown away. Even food waste (leaves, stems, trimmings, etc.) should be recycled in some form, be it composting, feeding to domestic animals, or any other creative re-use (fermenting into vodka, for example). It also means that you shouldn't overeat. When you overeat, especially when you overeat protein in the form of lots of meat, your body can't process it all, and you piss out a good deal of the nutrients consumed. This to me is equivalent to throwing away good food, or even like the ancient Roman custom of eating huge banquets, then vomiting them up to eat some more. Another conclusion that follows if we accept that food is sacred is that you should eat real food, not processed artificial food-like items (Michael Pollan has gone more into depth with this last point in his "In Defense of Food"). Just as no Catholic would consider a piece of Wonder Bread that's been mumbled over by some guy on the street to be a sacred piece of the body of Christ, no eater should consider Cheez-Its or 7-up to be real food.
Mealtime is sacred. This means food is to be eaten with others around a table, as a ritual. Food is not a mere fuel to be shoveled furtively into one's mouth, on the run or while doing other things. Food is as much a social event as a nutritive one. An implication of this is that you should eat all of what's put before you. Food is not a mere consumer good, which we are to pick and choose according to our superficial caprices or fickle fashions. All food is good, and any meal prepared by another is to be revered. So no one should pick at their food, or claim not to like certain things, especially when someone else has prepared the food as an act of love and communion.
How would such an ethic of sacred food mesh with other sustainable food movements or currents? Veganism and even strict vegetarianism are out, at least for meals prepared elsewhere, because the offense you would cause your host by being a picky eater would offset any positive ecological or moral impacts you might have by not eating animal projducts. As for sermonizing on sustainable food choices (a flaw which I am wont to display), a follower of the sacred food ethic should work to make his family or friends' choices more sustainable over time (less meat, less junk food, smaller portions), but at the moment of eating a given meal, we need to show graciousness and reverence for what others offer us, even if it doesn't meet with the sustainability seal of approval.
My wife and I have tried to live these values in our home. We don't waste food (though I've spent three years now saying I'll soon get around to composting our food scraps), and we eat our meals at table. I think this latter point has been a positive point for our son Sam. He eats really well and widely, not like some kids that refuse to eat certain things or whose parents have to chase them around the room shoving yogurt in their face. I know to some extent kids' eating habits are inborn and thus hit-or-miss, but I have to think that our marking mealtime as a special, ritual moment and serving a wide variety of real food must have something to do with Sam's healthy habits.
I don't want to be too self-righteous about our eating habits, because it's very possible that Sam will go through a picky eater phase and I'll have to retract my self-congratulation. Even I, who in my infancy and from adolescence onwards am one of the most versatile, open-minded eaters I know, went through a few years where I only or mainly ate the garbage marketed to me by the US junk food machine. Spaghetti-Os, sugary cereals, and chicken nuggets were my go-to foods, though I never spurned the vegetables my mother served at every meal. You would think this might make me more tolerant and sage around picky eaters, able to reflect on the temporality of such a situation. But I have never been a very understanding person when I see picky eaters. Frankly, I don't know how I'd manage it if Sam went through a phase where he was like that. Aside from our infant son, my wife and I are raising two teenagers that don't always eat well, and to date I have not found any way of managing or changing the situation other than sulking or making acerbic comments, neither of which is of any use. Lately though I've been reading books about childraising, so maybe by the time Sam's older they'll have helped me to figure out how to constructively manage these tricky situations!
Here is a video of a guy whose family gets three quarters of their food from the dumpsters of high-end grocery stores. He's really living the sacred ethic of food. Dumpster-diving isn't as much of an option here in Colombia, where we don't use dumpsters and where supermarket waste seems to be lower than in the US, but when we go to live in the States I think I'd get a kick out of getting good, free food from places like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. I'd feel like I was bucking the system.
In the meanwhile, I'll keep trying to live a sacred food ethic in the context we live in.
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