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Thoughts on Thanksgiving dinner menus
Jun. 19th, 2021 06:56 pmI know it's not the right time of year for this, but this is something that's been bumping around in my head for a couple of years and came up again when I was driving home for a half-hour this afternoon.
The general idea is to do with the Thanksgiving menu something like Passover does with the dishes traditionally explained in the Haggadah: for each item, there is a meaning and a story. Thanksgiving is one of the main holidays in my family culture; now that I've moved away from that (sub)culture it feels important to consciously preserve the meaning, and it also feels important to engage with the aspects that are problematic.
This is tied into a lot of pondering at who one considers ancestors. Most of my genetic ancestors are North Carolinians of European descent, primarily English and perhaps Welsh -- names like Scarborough and Upchurch and Wicker have obvious heritage, and Moses was a name taken by English and Welsh religious dissenters against the Anglican Church. The ones I know of have been in America for generations, and so perhaps there is someone Black or Native American in my genetic ancestors, though since I have no knowledge of them, I'm not sure that would matter. It seems to me that it matters more that my ancestors in the 1700s lived in a world with many interactions with Native Americans (and since then in the land that they shaped), and my ancestors in all of their time in America lived in a culture tightly interwoven with Black culture in complicated ways. Culturally these are also my ancestors. But pushing back against this erasure is fraught with the need to take care to avoid cultural appropriation, especially since much of this cultural interweaving was coerced rather than consented-to. It's a complicated issue, and I don't have good answers, but food seems like a place to start.
( Menu ideas )
The general idea is to do with the Thanksgiving menu something like Passover does with the dishes traditionally explained in the Haggadah: for each item, there is a meaning and a story. Thanksgiving is one of the main holidays in my family culture; now that I've moved away from that (sub)culture it feels important to consciously preserve the meaning, and it also feels important to engage with the aspects that are problematic.
This is tied into a lot of pondering at who one considers ancestors. Most of my genetic ancestors are North Carolinians of European descent, primarily English and perhaps Welsh -- names like Scarborough and Upchurch and Wicker have obvious heritage, and Moses was a name taken by English and Welsh religious dissenters against the Anglican Church. The ones I know of have been in America for generations, and so perhaps there is someone Black or Native American in my genetic ancestors, though since I have no knowledge of them, I'm not sure that would matter. It seems to me that it matters more that my ancestors in the 1700s lived in a world with many interactions with Native Americans (and since then in the land that they shaped), and my ancestors in all of their time in America lived in a culture tightly interwoven with Black culture in complicated ways. Culturally these are also my ancestors. But pushing back against this erasure is fraught with the need to take care to avoid cultural appropriation, especially since much of this cultural interweaving was coerced rather than consented-to. It's a complicated issue, and I don't have good answers, but food seems like a place to start.
( Menu ideas )