Real Food For This Traditional Thanksgiving Day

In the autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims and their new found friends, the Wampanoag Indians, sat down for the very first thanksgiving. This feast lasted for three days.

The Pilgrims were thankful for arriving at Plymouth and gaining a foothold in the new land. They had endured unbelievable hardships on the trip from England and more once they arrived in the new land. Despite their numbers being decimated, they were thankful to God for bringing them safely there, and providing them with friendly natives.

The Wampanoags, led by Massasoit, taught the Pilgrims how to hunt and grow food. The menu during the three days of feasting included venison, roast duck, goose, turkey, clams, eels, corn bread, hasty pudding, leeks, water cress, wild plums, and dried berries.

This first Thanksgiving feast had real food. It was all natural and not tampered with by man seeking to "improve" it.

It can honestly be said that the feast on the first Thanksgiving Day was home cooked.

Fast forward almost 400 years. Real food is becoming hard to come by. Unsuspecting Americans are rapidly losing the option of being able to purchase food which hasn't been concocted in a laboratory.

The food that is available to us today is loaded with artificial colorings, artificial flavors, artificial presevatives, genetically modified organisms, artificial sweeteners, monosodium glutamate, pesticides, hormones, and antibotics.

And to compound the problem, home cooking has become a thing of the past. We now buy prepared food platters which just has to be placed into the oven or a microwave to warm up.

We need to go back to our traditional Thanksgiving Day of home food preparation and good family fellowship. What needs to be lost is eating out or buying prepared meals for the family. Healthwise there is no substitute for home cooking.

My mother would prepare and cook meals at home during the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas.) That was the norm and not the exception back in the '50s and '60s.

Our kitchen would be filled with the mouth-watering aroma of baking macaronic and cheese, roasting turkey, and three- layered cakes. When it was time to eat, my father would bless the table and carve the turkey.

The entire family, my father and mother and all ten offspring, would sit down and enjoy a splendid meal. (We always ate dinner as a family and not only on the holidays.)

Believe it or not, but eating at home has tremendous health benefits. For one, many but not all of the chemicals present in store bought, packaged food is eliminated. Many of today's chronic diseases can be traced to the food we eat.

Home cooking has been shown to make a dent in obesity rates too. Home cooked meals can be made even more healthier by buying organic to maximize the naturalness and nutrient content and to minimize the synthetic aspect of food.

Retro is clearly preferred in celebrating Thanksgiving Day in the 21st century. Fake food can never compete with real food in respect to health, nutrients, and flavor.

Have a blessed and safe Thanksgiving Day.

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