Well, not really. But I thought that might grab my readers' attention. I survived Thanksgiving again. As I sat at my family dinner table eyeballing all the entrees I couldn't help but speculate how things might have been different had this continent been conquered and subjugated by Greece or perhaps Thailand.
With the exception of the cranberries everything was brown.We had all the usual and accustomed dishes: pumpkin pie from a can, genetically modified hormonally enhanced industrial turkey, a green vegetable disguised by something crunchy and brown from a can, mom's seafood salad, mashed potatoes and some other brown stuff.
I brought nothing so I can't complain. I did, however, have the adventure of shopping with my sister on the day before and that was an eye opener.We needed preformed pie crust and some ingredients for a broccoli dish. The broccoli dish required the addition of cream of something soup just like the pilgrims had so we went to that boomer comfort section called Campbell's Soup.
Ask any boomer if they remember grilled cheese sandwiches with Campbell's tomato soup. Most will get a warm fuzzy smile. That was something mom served on cold days. It tasted good. Cheese and tomatoes! A lot of us tore small bites of our sandwiches and dunked them in the thin red brothy soup. Every now and then if you were lucky you found a chunk of tomato but that was rare.
I had not visited this section since childhood so just for fun I read the labels of random cans. Without fail every single can of Campbell's soup I picked up contained my nemesis, my arch enemy: MSG. I have to admit. I felt betrayed. The icon of wholesome cold war boomer America when everything was simple and you left your doors unlocked and you knew all your neighbors and the names of all their pets was full of.....poison.
I never did understand mashed potatoes much. I know they comfort the palates of many Americans but I can't help but think that any other vegetable reduced to such a mushy state would be called baby food. I think mainly they are a delivery device for butter and gravy. I just see so many different things one could create with those starchy edible tubers.
The one delight was three different kinds of deli gourmet olives....just like the pilgrims had. These were certainly different than the canned generic black olives of my youth. Clearly, there had been a few changes. I was too old and my fingers too large for the olives to fit but I scarfed them down by the handful. Yummy.
That's what started my speculation about the different possibilities for this American tradition. What if we all sat down each November to a meal of stuffed grape leaves, leg of lamb and baklava? What if the entrees included stir fried vegetable in curry coconut sauce? What if all of us Anglos acknowledged the Hispanic heritage of Turtle Island with some pico de gallo? Maybe we could support some of the Midwest Tribes by cooking some indigenous wild rice? What if we insisted our corn and cornbread was not genetically modified, that it came unaltered...wild and free.
Thanksgiving is made up holiday anyway with a sordid past. The story is one of those comfortable myths we all grew up with. We like to believe these myths because it allows us to go about our daily lives guilt free on conquered soil with bellies full of MSG soup just like Mom made.
I wsa a freeloader this year so I really have no right to complain about anything. I had not done Thanksgiving in many years but I am already planning for next year. There's gonna be a little red in my dishes.
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