Local varieties of potatoe at the village of Huito, District of Pitumarca, Peru (upper photo) and Woman with turkey at the market in Toluca, central Mexico 1968 (lower photo)
The quintessential symbol of Thanksgiving as we celebrate it in North America is the turkey, a new world domesticate, and a wild bird hunted by Indigenous peoples in New England where the legendary first Thanksgiving occurred.
Scientifically the turkey is Meleagris gallopavo- the “rooster-peacock Guineafowl” . Meleagris is a name for guinea fowl, according to the Wikipedia article I checked to confirm the scientific name, while gallus is the rooster and pavo is the peacock. Turkeys were new to the colonists when they arrived in the Americas, and their true relationships were not immediately apparent...so the Europeans likened them to edible domestic fowl of three distinct families (guinea fowl are Numidae, roosters are Gallidae, the family to which turkeys in fact belong, and the peacock, in the genus Pavo, is in the Faisanidae or pheasant family). Turkeys are apparently named “turkey” because Turkey symbolized the exotic, and it was also a name for Guinea fowl. In Mexican Spanish, turkeys are called “guajolote” an onomatopoetic name derived from the Nahuatl guajolotl [in Spanish the ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h’). Turkeys were domesticated in what is now Mexico, and are still the basis of a number of delicious Mexican specialties like mole poblano, a delicious concoction of cooked turkey or chicken, chili and spices and chocolate, and other ingredients like sesame butter and raisins.
The next most iconic food at Thanksgiving is the cranberry Vaccinium macrocarpon, a tart round red fruit of a leathery leafed plant in the heather family that grows in the peat bogs of New England. These tart fruits remain edible after freezing, and with the addition of some sweetening, make a tart sauce to counteract the richness of rich meats. As I discussed earlier, the lingonberry (V. vitis idaea) of the circumboreal North has a similar flavour, but much smaller fruits, and grows in the mossy understory of coniferous forests. The large and now domesticated cranberry of our Thanksgiving table also has smaller wild relatives. I have harvested bog cranberries from sphagnum bogs in northwestern British Columbia, and also recorded stories from some of my Witsuwit’en Elder friends about harvesting this cranberry. This species is called Vaccinium oxycoccus. When I first moved to Northwest British Columbia more than 30 years ago I used to harvest instead the highbush cranberries Viburnum edulis to make my holiday sauce.
In my school days stories of the first Thanksgiving, corn was also a feature of the meal, though I now associate it more with summer plenty. Corn, Zea mays is a grain, the seeds of a large erect grass. Much has been written about the unusual anatomy or corn, and about its inability to propagate itself at all without the assistance of people. There is a lot of fascinating archeobotany of corn and its gradual transformation into the large robust cobs we see today, and it is also a crop that has thousands of cultivated varieties of different textures, colours, and cooking qualities, a staple food from Peru through Mexico and much of the present United States, extending even to what is now Canada. In our ethnobotanical saga of Thanksgiving, I don’t want to get too distracted by the very rich literature on corn, so I’ll simply say here that it was grown by the indigenous peoples of coastal Massachusetts when the settlers arrived, in conjunction with beans and squash in mixed gardens, the so called Three Sisters. (I won’t discuss the beans today, and we’ll get to the squash shortly when we consider dessert....)
More typical of the Thanksgiving dinners of my childhood was candied yams, likely not a part of the celebration at Plymouth Plantation. Yams Dioscorea sp. and sweet potato (Ipomea batatas) - are both tropical starchy tubers. Apparently the orange fleshed tubers we buy as yams in North America are actually varieties of sweet potato and are thus also Ipomea batatas. Sweet potatoes apparently occurred in the south Pacific (where they are called kumara), and in South America, where they name was apparently also kumara, as well as in southeast Asia, suggesting there must have been some trade and contact across the Pacific before European exploration. In contrast yams of the genus Dioscorea were an important food of Australian Aborigines and of various tribal peoples of southern India. Incidentally Mexican yams were also the source of the plant steroids originally used to synthesize birth control pills.
Another typical part of today’s holiday meal, and likely not eaten by the Pilgrim colonists, is mashed potatoes. Potatoes are the tubers of Solanum tuberosum, a plant in the nightshade family (along with tomatoes and eggplants). Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes and altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, which is still the centre of agrobiodiversity of the potato, and taken to Europe after the conquest of Peru. The starchy tubers of potatoes come in many flavours and varieties from bitter (with higher levels of solanum glycoakaloids) to “sweet” (lacking noticeable amounts of the bitter compounds). As these plants can produce large amounts of food in relatively cold, damp and acidic soils, they were immediately popular in northern Europe, where they quickly became a food staple of the poor, and a well loved and traditional element of European cuisines, especially served with butter or cream from domesticated milk producing breeds of Bos taurus, traditional foods from Europe’s dairy culture.
One of my favourite parts of Thanksgiving dinner is pumpkin pie- pumpkins, orange fruits of Curcurbita pepo, are a type of squash and were domesticated in the New World. Squash seeds are found in some of the earliest agricultural remains in Mexico (Nee, M. 1990. “The domestication of Curcurbita (Cucurbitaceae),” Economic Botany 44(3: 56-68). Squash flowers as well as the large fleshy fruits are edible. Wild relatives of the squash protect their fruits from herbivores with bitter compounds, which were bred out over generations of selection for sweeter fruits. Squash require rich soils, so make good partners in cultivation with nitrogen fixing beans. Modern Thanksgiving pies combine cooked pumpkin with eggs, milk, cream, sugar, molasses and a range of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to make a rich and spiced custard filling for a wheat flower crust. Pumpkin pie is a thoroughly hybrid dish, as eggs, milk, cream and the spices and the wheat for the crust are all Old-World products while the pumpkin is a New-World native.
Wheat is so iconic of food in Europe and the Middle East that the Bible admonishes “Man shall not live by bread alone” to remind Christians that there is more than a full belly. Wheat is the seeds of a grass Triticum aestivum, a hexaploid hybrid, and its history too is a fascinating study in archeobotany and plant genetics (see Simpson and Ogorzaly’s 1986 Economic Botany pp156-158 for a brief and readable summary of its genetic history). It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, and has been a foundation of European agriculture since it began, along with its fellow grains barley and rye.
Now we have considered the components of Thanksgiving dinner, but what of the significance of this special meal? Harvest festivals have been important in the calendrical cycles of agricultural peoples throughout history. They bring people together to celebrate and share the successful harvest. While most of us are far removed from harvesting the food we eat, and the Supermarket offers abundance year round without our efforts, Thanksgiving is still in its essence a harvest feast. Although its particular symbolism has been assimilated, in the United States, to the founding of the Nation, it still commemorates and gives thanks for the fruits of the earth...and can thus be seen as marking a relationship.
Canadian Thanksgiving is somewhat of an echo of the American version, but is less significant as a celebration of the founding charter of the state; and because of our more northerly location, is also held about 6 weeks earlier, at a time just after our own harvest season, and before winter really sets in. The menu is much the same as the American version, and for us the same general format seems to have generalized to other Canadian celebration holiday meals such as Christmas and Easter dinners, also typically marked by turkey.
Other traditions also have harvest feasts. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot or the Festival of Booths which ended today, is a week long celebration held out of doors in late September or early October (the 15th of the lunar month of Tishri). It follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which mark times of remembrance and atonement at the Jewish new year. There are some fascinating ethnobotanical aspects of Sukkot in the symbolism of plants carried in procession and/or used to construct the booths, which I don’t have space to elaborate here.
For people who obtain their harvest through hunting, fishing and gathering, harvest feasts, if you will, may mark the first harvest of fish or berries or roots in the year. Hunn and Selam describe this for the Sahaptin in Nichi W’ana, the Big River (University of Washington Press 1990) and the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en celebrate annual landmarks like the beginning of salmon harvest with “First Salmon” feasts. All of these celebrations really mark the relationship of people to the living earth with provides their sustanence....a relationship we need to cultivate to ensure the earth and its plants and animals continue to sustain us, and we them.
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