Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving dinner, what side dish would you prefer to accompany your turkey — a serving of well-marinated conflict over how much or how little you eat, or some nice, fresh criticism of your cooking skills?

As families gather around the country this week to celebrate Thanksgiving, many of them are bracing for the intense emotions of the holiday meal. The combination of food and family often brings out longstanding tensions, criticism and battles for control. Simple issues like cooking with butter or asking for seconds are fraught with family conflict and commentary.

“If we had an audiotape of a lot of families talking together, you would hear so much chatter about what other people are eating, who gained weight, who lost weight, who’s eating like a bird, who’s having seconds,” notes Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Bulik told the story of a patient whose mother scolded her for not eating her homemade cookies. “You don’t like my cookies?” she asked. As a result, the daughter relented and took a cookie. But when she then reached for a second, her mother scolded her again. “Do you really think you need another one?” she asked her.

In another family, a mother-in-law agreed to show up for Thanksgiving only if she could be assured none of the foods would be prepared with butter. “I’m not doing butter right now,” she said. “If you do butter, I’m not coming.”

Many people have an unhealthy preoccupation with body image or have undiagnosed eating problems that they may then try to impose on others, said Dr. Kathryn Zerbe, professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and a longtime expert on eating disorders.

A Long Island woman, who like others interviewed for this column didn’t want to be named, said she and her family traveled 12 hours by train for a summer vacation gathering with her husband’s family. When her husband asked for seconds, the sister-in-law said there wasn’t any more food.

“There was all this food around, but she had cut us off,” the woman said. “We were just really shocked we were being told you can’t eat any more after coming all this way. We found out later she really controlled food in the household.”

The woman said that in her own family, she faced a different problem: the pressure to eat more. During holiday meals, her son, who has never been a big eater, was constantly pestered about not eating enough. “There was a lot of pressure on him when he would visit my family,” she said. “To try to get him to eat, my mother would say this terrible thing to him. She’d say: ‘You know you want to be a winner. You want to be a winner.’ ”

A Boston physician said that in her household, holiday meals would inevitably lead to a food fight. Her father, a headache sufferer, had quit eating chocolate years earlier and became obsessed with stopping others from eating it, blaming chocolate for causing colds and other ills.

“Both of my grandmothers liked to cook chocolate cakes,” she said. “He would always get angry whenever they would offer him some, and he would not infrequently cause a scene. He would fly into a rage if he thought we had some chocolate.”

People who are overweight are particularly vulnerable to family criticism at holiday time. One person told the story of a mother-in-law who would prepare a huge holiday spread and then berate her overweight daughter for eating it.

“Holiday time is an extraordinarily difficult time for anybody with any kind of food issue,” Dr. Zerbe said. “There are complex family relationships around eating.”

If you know you have a family member with a tendency to criticize what others eat or don’t eat, it might help to speak up about it and set some rules before the meal starts, Dr. Zerbe advised. Make a good-natured announcement that comments about how much or how little someone is eating are off limits, she said.

“Be prepared that the person won’t stop talking about it,” Dr. Zerbe said. “They can’t; it’s a form of control. But you have to battle that intrusiveness by putting up stronger family boundaries. Intervene and intervene again.”

Betsy, a high school teacher in Boston, said she had longstanding issues with her mother-in-law, some of which began after she underwent a Caesarean section. After the delivery, her mother-in-law, a slim woman, brought her only light lunches of lettuce salad, even though she was famished after nursing her baby. “Because of the incision, I couldn’t go down the stairs to the kitchen,” she said. “I called my husband at work, weeping, and asked him to come home and make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Betsy said her cousin also complained of holiday meal tension with her own family, so the two devised a strategy to help each other cope. Each made bingo cards, but instead of numbers, the squares were filled in with some of the negative phrases they expected to hear during the meal, like “That outfit is interesting” or “Your children won’t sit still.” As comments were made at the separate family celebrations, each woman would mark her card.

“Whoever fills up a bingo row first,” Betsy said, “sneaks off to call the other and say, ‘Bingo!’ ”

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Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/health/24well.html

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At hospitals, gastric distress is a part of the holiday tradition

As millions sit down to Thanksgiving dinners, emergency room staffs are getting ready for a busy day. ‘It never fails,’ one doctor says.

Take this as a cautionary tale.

The man was covered in sweat, clutching his chest, when he entered an emergency room on Thanksgiving some years back. His words are fixed in the memory of Dr. Mark Morocco, associate residency director of emergency medicine at UCLA.

“I just ate a lot of meatballs. . . . Oh, my God, here it comes!” he said, then vomited into a sink in the triage area.

The diagnosis? More than a dozen of his mother’s meatballs, all crammed into his stomach.

Yes, on this Thanksgiving you can eat too much, too quickly, to the point where you might just feel sick enough to go to the emergency room.

“There’s folks who . . . can literally fill themselves up with undigested food,” Morocco said. “We see, routinely, people who come in who think they are dying, and really what they have done is overeaten, and they just feel bad.”

In the early hours of Thanksgiving, while footballs are tossed or watched and turkeys roast, emergency rooms are typically empty. It’s after the eating begins in the afternoon that people start to arrive.

“It never fails, every year,” said Dr. Nagi Sous, who heads the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in Hollywood.

There are the times when whole families turn up.

“One badly cooked turkey can easily strike a blow at a dozen people at grandma’s house on Thanksgiving,” Morocco said. “If you thaw a turkey wrong or cook a turkey wrong . . . it’s an opportunity for turkeys to get even with the human population.”

The problem waddles into the kitchen when a cook thaws a turkey for 12 hours on a countertop or leaves the roasted bird out for two or three hours before serving it.

During that time, a virus or bacterium can land on the food and start growing, Sous said. A virus can cause gastroenteritis, also known as the stomach flu. Simply reheating the meat may not fix the situation. Although bacteria will die under heat, the toxins made by the bacteria that cause illness can survive even in a hot oven.

Morocco cited a classic case reported in 1986 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which a buffet served to 855 people at a New Mexico country club sickened at least 67 people. Twenty-four needed emergency treatment or hospitalization. Scientists later determined that the turkey had Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, which were also found in two food handlers’ noses.

“The turkey had cooled for three hours at room temperature after cooking — a time and temperature sufficient for bacterial proliferation and toxin production,” officials concluded.

Sous said those experiencing upset stomachs should be drinking only clear liquids; any more eating or taking aspirin or Alka Seltzer will just bring on an encore.

Sometimes, trips to the hospital are triggered by a fish bone stuck in the esophagus. Other times, it’s a chicken bone. Or a large piece of pork. Or a chunk of steak.

Such a sufferer can breathe but might not be able to eat any more food or even swallow saliva.

When that happens, doctors can insert a long tweezer into the mouth to take out the offending item, or push down a long tube, with a tiny camera attached on it, to nudge the food to the stomach, said Dr. Gail Carruthers, director of the pediatrics emergency department at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children’s Hospital.

She exhorted people to follow two bits of advice. “Don’t overeat. Chew your food.”

There are more serious scenarios people should keep in mind.

People with heart conditions should avoid too much salt, which can trigger an accumulation of fluid in the lungs, making it difficult to breathe, Sous said.

And Carruthers warned that some symptoms of indigestion are similar to those of a heart attack. If you’re having severe indigestion symptoms, especially if accompanied by sweating, you might consider going to the ER to have it checked out, Carruthers said.

“You may just have indigestion,” she said, “but let us figure that out.”

Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times

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Full article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gastric-distress25-2009nov25,0,3792019.story

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Redmen of Alcatraz

From the archive

1969: A Thanksgiving protest on Alcatraz

One of last week’s Thanksgiving celebrations reversed the seventeenth-century original. This time it was white men who brought turkeys to hungry redskins and it was on the west coast of America not the east: the Indians have been starved almost off their native continent.

To dramatise the plight of their people and to demonstrate what they think should be done about it, a group of over 80 braves and squaws from about 20 tribes, led by a Mohawk, has been occupying Alcatraz island, the federal government’s abandoned prison in San Francisco Bay, for the past two weeks. They claim it as their right under a century-old treaty which ceded to the Indians any unoccupied federal land; they offer $24 worth of beads and cloth in exchange. Most of them are college students and they want to establish a university and cultural centre for all American Indians, managed by themselves but with financial support from the government.

Meanwhile they seem to have set up an efficient organisation on the dilapidated 12-acre island. Its buildings are crumbling, there is no water supply and it is exposed to fog and wind. A Bureau of Caucasian Affairs has been established to turn away undesirable immigrants, especially white hippies. Indian visitors from all over the country crowded in for the Thanksgiving pow-wow, with dinners presented by a San Franciscan restaurant.

The General Services Administration, which is responsible for the island, tried to blockade it at first and talked of evicting the invaders. Now apparently they are to be allowed to stay as long as they like but the authorities refuse to discuss the future until they leave. If and when they do that, Mr Hickel, the Secretary of the Interior, who is in charge of Indian affairs, is ready to smoke a peace pipe with them. In the end the Indians may succeed in this first attempt to reclaim their land from the white man. There is much sympathy, official as well as popular, for their aims and both the government and local people have been trying to find some socially desirable use for Alcatraz.

The Economist

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Happy Franksgiving

How FDR tried, and failed, to change a national holiday.

Last I checked, Thanksgiving is still scheduled to take place tomorrow. The economic news may be gloomy, but unlike President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, President Barack Obama has not tinkered with the date of the holiday.

In 1939, FDR decided to move Thanksgiving Day forward by a week. Rather than take place on its traditional date, the last Thursday of November, he decreed that the annual holiday would instead be celebrated a week earlier.

The reason was economic. There were five Thursdays in November that year, which meant that Thanksgiving would fall on the 30th. That left just 20 shopping days till Christmas. By moving the holiday up a week to Nov. 23, the president hoped to give the economy a lift by allowing shoppers more time to make their purchases and—so his theory went—spend more money.

Roosevelt made his decision in part on advice from Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins, who was in turn influenced by Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association. Hahn had warned Hopkins that the late Thanksgiving, Nov. 30, might have an “adverse effect” on the sale of “holiday goods.”

In an informal news conference in August announcing his decision, FDR offered a little tutorial on the history of the holiday. Thanksgiving was not a national holiday, he noted, meaning that it was not set by federal law. According to custom, it was up to the president to pick the date every year.

It was not until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln ordered Thanksgiving to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November, that that date became generally accepted, Roosevelt explained. To make sure that reporters got his point, he added that there was nothing sacred about the date.

Nothing sacred? Roosevelt might as well have commanded that roast beef henceforth would replace turkey as the star of the holiday meal, or that cranberries would be banned from the Thanksgiving table. The president badly misread public opinion. His announcement was front-page news the next day, and the public outcry was swift and loud.

First to complain was Plymouth, Mass., home of the Pilgrims and location of the first Thanksgiving in 1621. “Plymouth and Thanksgiving are almost synonymous,” intoned the chairman of the town’s board of selectmen, “and merchants or no merchants I can’t see any reason for changing it.”

College football coaches also objected. The United Press news service noted mildly that coaches would find the date change “a considerable headache.” The Associated Press predicted that the Roosevelt plan would “kick up more clamor than a hot halfback running the wrong way.” By 1939 Thanksgiving football had become a national tradition. Many colleges ended their football seasons with Thanksgiving Day games, a custom that dated back to the 19th century. In Democratic Arkansas, the football coach of Little Ouachita College threatened: “We’ll vote the Republican ticket if he interferes with our football.”

FDR’s proclamation of the date of Thanksgiving had the force of law only in the District of Columbia and the territories of Hawaii and Alaska. A few states mandated that Thanksgiving be marked on the date set by the president, but in most states governors issued pro forma ratifications of the date the president proclaimed.

Now, however, the celebration became a political hot potato. Governors had to read public opinion, examine the local business climate, consider political loyalties, and decide which date to select as the official Thanksgiving.

Do they stick with tradition and celebrate Thanksgiving on Nov. 30, or follow FDR’s lead and change the date to Nov. 23? It wasn’t long before people started referring to Nov. 30 as the “Republican Thanksgiving” and Nov. 23 as the “Democratic Thanksgiving” or “Franksgiving.”

Public sentiment ran heavily against Roosevelt’s plan. Ten days after the president’s announcement, Gallup published the results of a national poll finding that 62% of Americans surveyed disapproved of the date change. By the time November arrived, the 48 states were nearly evenly divided. Twenty-three decided to stick with the old Thanksgiving, and 22 decided to adopt FDR’s date—Texas, Mississippi and Colorado said they would celebrate on both days.

For the next two years, Roosevelt continued to move up the date of Thanksgiving, and more states resigned themselves to celebrating early. By 1941, however, the facts turned against Roosevelt.

By then, retailers had two years of experience with the early Thanksgiving, and data were available regarding the 1939 and 1940 Christmas shopping seasons. In mid-March 1941, The Wall Street Journal reported the results of a survey done in New York City. The Journal’s headline put it succinctly: “Early Thanksgiving Not Worth Extra Turkey or Doll.” Only 37% of stores surveyed favored the early date. In Washington, the federal government reported that the early Thanksgiving resulted in no boost to retail sales.

And so, on May 20, 1941, FDR called a press conference at the White House and announced that he was changing Thanksgiving Day back to its traditional date. The early Thanksgiving had been an “experiment,” he said, and the experiment failed. It was too late to move the 1941 Thanksgiving back to the traditional date, but in 1942 Thanksgiving would revert to the last Thursday of the month. This was “the first time any New Deal experiment was voluntarily abandoned,” a Washington Post columnist wrote.

Thankfully, there is a happy ending to this tale of Washington folly: On Dec. 26, 1941, Roosevelt signed a joint resolution passed by Congress making Thanksgiving a national holiday and mandating that it be celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page.

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And the Fair Land

‘For all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators.’

Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.

This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.

And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.

So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.

For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.

His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.

How can they turn from melancholy when at home they see young arrayed against old, black against white, neighbor against neighbor, so that they stand in peril of social discord. Or not despair when they see that the cities and countryside are in need of repair, yet find themselves threatened by scarcities of the resources that sustain their way of life. Or when, in the face of these challenges, they turn for leadership to men in high places—only to find those men as frail as any others.

So sometimes the traveler is asked whence will come their succor. What is to preserve their abundance, or even their civility? How can they pass on to their children a nation as strong and free as the one they inherited from their forefathers? How is their country to endure these cruel storms that beset it from without and from within?

Of course the stranger cannot quiet their spirits. For it is true that everywhere men turn their eyes today much of the world has a truly wild and savage hue. No man, if he be truthful, can say that the specter of war is banished. Nor can he say that when men or communities are put upon their own resources they are sure of solace; nor be sure that men of diverse kinds and diverse views can live peaceably together in a time of troubles.

But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere—in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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The Desolate Wilderness

A chronicle of the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton.

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

These editorials have appeared annually since 1961.

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A Liberal Thanksgiving

We hear much less nonsense about the wisdom of markets these days.

The positive psychologists tell us that being thankful makes us healthy and happy. For entirely selfish reasons, it seems, we need to show lots of gratitude as we go through life. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I figure it’s time to get with the program.

But what to be thankful for? These are anxious times, with staggering unemployment and record numbers of bank failures.

According to a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report, the percentage of households that are “food insecure,” to use the preferred term, rose to its highest level since 1995, when the current technique for measuring hunger came into use. (Among households with children, the percentage who are “food insecure” is a stunning 21%.)

On the other hand, Wall Street banks are on track to hand out record bonuses to their employees. A few years ago, this would by itself have been cause for rejoicing, and not merely around the groaning tables of the lucky bonus-winners. All our great gray organs of consensus opinion would have helped to steer our gratitude in the right direction. Society is becoming more unequal, they might have allowed, but in the long run we all stand to benefit from Wall Street’s prosperity. After all, just look at the soaring Dow Jones Industrial Average. The market is simply directing resources to where they will do the most good, rewarding the geniuses who guide society’s investment and encouraging us all to work harder to claim our own piece of the bounty.

The correct response, back in those addled days, would have been something like the catechism urged on us by T. Harv Eker in his book “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”: “Place your hand on your heart and say . . . ‘I admire rich people!’ / ‘I bless rich people!’ / ‘I love rich people!’ / ‘And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!’”

But who takes this kind of pledge today? The great gray dealers in consensus wisdom are dropping all around us. Just about the only ones who still believe in omniscient markets anymore are the think-tankers who are paid to believe in it.

The rest of us have moved on to something harsher, more realistic. Indeed, the only reason I know about the quotation from Mr. Eker is because I found it in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Bright-Sided,” an attack on positive thinking that, in its refusal of optimistic delusions, seems in step with the new national mood.

Former President George W. Bush delivers a speech at McFarlin Auditorium on the SMU campus regarding the Bush Presidential Center.

Maybe that prickly new mood is what I should be thankful for. Americans are finally paying attention to issues like financial regulation. We’re reading headlines about Ponzi schemes and not instantly brushing them off as irrelevant buzzkill.

The change is noticeable even among the pundit corps. Ideas this august group once dismissed out of hand are now being taken seriously. The concept of regulatory capture, for example, was once regarded as a form of conspiracy theory; today it’s a firmly established social-scientific principle.

Thanks to the legislative fight over health care, even the fetish of centrism has started to lose its glow, as it slowly dawns on the commentariat—and maybe, one of these days, on the Obama administration, too—that an idea’s validity isn’t established by whether its equidistant between two talking points.

Conservatives deserve thanks, too. While the tea party set may be groping toward the answers in entirely the wrong way, at least they are asking the right questions. By demanding that the administration explain its actions toward the big banks and defend the idea of social insurance, they have ensured that mushy clichés won’t work for the next few election cycles. For that, I think, they deserve our gratitude.

The old order, meanwhile, has slouched off to a distant college campus and delivered its effects into the hands of archivists and librarians. Last week saw the unveiling of the architectural plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which is to be situated on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The thought of that newest presidential archive preparing to open its doors to scholars warmed this liberal’s heart.

Part of the Bush Center will be a George W. Bush Institute, charged with “turn[ing] ideas into action,” as its Web site puts it. The institute’s executive director will be James K. Glassman, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.”

Discovering this, I was struck by how cosmically correct it all was: This great Wall Street optimist will oversee the remnants of an administration whose members once pooh-poohed the “reality-based community,” who thought voluntary compliance was a good way to regulate industry, who took almost no action to deflate the mortgage bubble, who anticipated being greeted in Iraq as liberators. Surely gracious providence brought them together. Let us give thanks.

Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal

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A Moveable Fast

“IT’S Thanksgiving — time to put our feedbags on,” my family likes to say as we elbow for room next to the Pilgrim and Puritan ghosts the holiday summons to our table. Our colonial forebears probably would not disapprove of our having second and third helpings of sweet potatoes and stuffing, or even rushing off to watch football after the meal — the Pilgrims themselves played lots of games at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. But I imagine they would find fault with our binge for another reason: it is not accompanied by a fast.

To the Pilgrims and Puritans, the community-wide fast, or “day of public humiliation and prayer,” and the thanksgiving feast, or day of “public thanksgiving and praise,” were equal halves of the same ritual. But the fast was not merely a justification for a community-wide gorging. Both customs were important components of a religious rite that served to pacify an angry God who was believed to punish entire communities for the sins of the few with starvation, “excessive rains from the bottles of heaven,” epidemics, crop infestations, the Indian wars and other hardships.

According to the 19th-century historian William DeLoss Love, the New England colonies celebrated as many as nine such “special public days” a year from 1620 to 1700. And as the Puritans were masters of self-denial, days of abstention outnumbered thanksgivings two to one. Fasting, Cotton Mather wrote, “kept the wheel of prayer in continual motion.”

Pleas for rain during spells of drought were the most common reason for fasting. But Puritans also fasted whenever a comet, an evil portent, appeared in the sky; at the start of the Salem witch trials; and throughout the various colonial Indian wars (Mather preached that the horrors in King Philip’s War, against the Wampanoag Indians, had been sent by God to chastise colonists for the sin of wig wearing).

Thanksgivings were celebrated at the end of these and other hardships and in honor of such auspicious events as the “dissipation of the pirates,” the succession of English kings and safe ocean crossings of ships bearing colonists and much needed supplies. Yet these feasts all began with fasts and hours of prayer, during which ministers praised God’s goodness and railed against the sin of gluttony. (Once, after eating too much, John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, fretted that his flesh had “waxed wanton” and begged God to “revive” him.) Intemperance was believed to go against the very idea of gratitude. Of course, people did often overindulge at these thanksgivings. But then additional fast days often immediately followed.

Puritans believed that expressions of thanks to God for their good fortune helped keep his future punishments at bay — a point that does not detract from the genuine appreciation they felt at privations’ end. Nonetheless, participation was mandatory. In 1696, William Veazie of Boston was pilloried for plowing on Thanksgiving Day.

It was in the late 1660s that the New England colonies began holding an “Annual Provincial Thanksgiving.” The holiday we celebrate today is a remnant of this harvest feast, which was theologically counterbalanced by an annual spring fast around the time of planting to ask God’s good favor for the year. Yet fasting and praying also immediately preceded the harvest Thanksgiving. In 1690, in Massachusetts the feast itself was postponed, though not the fasting, out of extraordinary concern that the meal would inspire too much “carnal confidence.”

As life in the New World wilderness got easier, the New England colonies gradually began holding only their annual spring fast and fall harvest feast. Even after Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, Massachusetts continued to celebrate its spring day of abstention for 31 more years.

In the nearly 400 years since the first Thanksgiving, the holiday has come to mirror our transformation into a nation of gross overconsumption, but the New England colonists never intended for Thanksgiving to be a day of gluttony. They dished up restraint along with gratitude as a shared main course. What mattered most was not the feast itself, but the gathering together in thanks and praise for life’s most humble gifts. Perhaps this holiday season we could benefit from restoring a proper Thanksgiving balance between forbearance and indulgence.

Elyssa East is the author of the forthcoming “Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.”

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Full article and photo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/opinion/24east.html

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Animal, Vegetable, Miserable

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more “humanely” raised meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives. And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife.

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds.

The easy part of this consists in seeing clearly what ethics requires and then just plain doing it. The difficult part: You just haven’t lived until you’ve tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society.

What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant ordeal. You might think that it’s as simple as just removing meat, eggs and dairy products from your diet, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

To be a really strict vegan is to strive to avoid all animal products, and this includes materials like leather, silk and wool, as well as a panoply of cosmetics and medications. The more you dig, the more you learn about products you would never stop to think might contain or involve animal products in their production — like wine and beer (isinglass, a kind of gelatin derived from fish bladders, is often used to “fine,” or purify, these beverages), refined sugar (bone char is sometimes used to bleach it) or Band-Aids (animal products in the adhesive). Just last week I was told that those little comfort strips on most razor blades contain animal fat.

To go down this road is to stare headlong into an abyss that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, will ultimately stare back at you.

The challenges faced by a vegan don’t end with the nuts and bolts of material existence. You face quite a few social difficulties as well, perhaps the chief one being how one should feel about spending time with people who are not vegans.

Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you say when a dining companion says, “I’m really a vegetarian — I don’t eat red meat at home.” (I’ve heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn’t around.) Or when someone starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous bunch. The number of vegans I know personally is … five. And I have been a vegan for almost 15 years, having been a vegetarian for almost 15 before that.

Five. I have lost more friends than this over arguments about animal ethics. One lapidary conclusion to be drawn here is that people take deadly seriously the prerogative to use animals as sources of satisfaction. Not only for food, but as beasts of burden, as raw materials and as sources of captive entertainment — which is the way animals are used in zoos, circuses and the like.

These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder.

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value.

We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Yes, there are animal welfare laws. But these laws have been formulated by, and are enforced by, people who proceed from the proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior to human beings. At best, these laws make living conditions for animals marginally better than they would be otherwise — right up to the point when we send them to the slaughterhouse.

Think about that when you’re picking out your free-range turkey, which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, is the author of “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status and Kinship.”

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Full article and photo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html

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Still Here After a Rough Year

We’re serving up a new gratitude this Thanksgiving.

Last Thanksgiving, it looked as if a hard year was coming, and it was and it did. The holiday was shadowed by a sense of economic foreboding—Wall Street failing, companies falling and layoffs coming. It isn’t over—no one thinks it’s over. But the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different.

An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: “We’re still here,” and, “I am so grateful.” Almost all experienced business reverses, some of which were deep, and some had personal misfortunes of one kind or another: “I am thankful that my mother’s death was fast and that she did not have to suffer,” wrote a beloved friend. But something tells me that a number of Thanksgiving dinners will be marked this year by a new or refreshed sense of gratitude: We’re still here. I am so grateful.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn’t been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf’s, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it’s there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf’s is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We’re still here. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. “I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish,” he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, “dodge the firings” in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. “Broadly,” he added, “I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out ‘I Wanna Rock’ is so America.”

A scene from the NBC comedy “30 Rock.”

My friend Robert wrote, “I am thankful that I lived to see a person of color sworn into the office of President.” He takes heart that America has set a new face toward the world. “I am thankful and proud when I am in London and people ask me about my president and show great interest in him.” And, “I am thankful that my friends survived the global financial disaster. I am thankful America survived it.”

A real estate lawyer in Washington emailed, “Whether you agree with the policy decisions made by the new administration or not, let’s be thankful that our economy did not fall apart since last Thanksgiving.”

A Washington journalist: “I am thankful that this is still a normal country, with predictable common-sense reactions to excesses. The American people served as a counterweight to the excesses of the Bush years, and are now serving as a counterweight to the excesses of the Obama years.”

A friend who emigrated from Nicaragua 21 years ago and lives now in New York knew right away what she was thankful for: her still-new country. “I’m mainly grateful that I could raise my son in freedom. I could vote for the first time in my life. I could express my opinions without being shot on the spot, jailed, or exiled like my grandfather. I could sleep through the night without fearing for my life. I could work and buy food without rationing.”

My friend Stephanie is grateful that she got health insurance despite a pre-existing condition. Another friend, an academic, was grateful to have been raised in America that taught well the rules of survival—perseverance, discipline.

Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, “the number of frowns” he saw on the street “was overwhelming.” He decided to take action. “I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It’s such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back.” He hopes to start “a smiling epidemic” in Chicago.

My friend Vin said, when I asked him what he was most grateful for in 2009, “I remember reading that survival rates for breast cancer have been improving. I remember thinking: Thank God.”

I am grateful for a great deal, especially: I’m here. I’m drinking coffee as I write, and the sun is so bright, I had to close the blinds to keep the glare from the computer. When I open the blinds, I will see the world: people, kids, traffic, dogs. Too many friends have left during the past few years, and it reminds us of what death is always trying to remind us: It’s good to be alive.

And after that, after gratitude for friends and family, and for those who protect us, after that something small. I love TV, and the other day it occurred to me again that we are in the middle of a second golden age of television. I feel gratitude to the largely unheralded network executives and producers who gave it to us. The first golden age can be summed up with one name: “Playhouse 90.” It was the 1950s and ’60, when TV was busy being born. The second can be summed up with the words “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “ER,” “24,” “The West Wing,” “Law and Order,” “30 Rock.” These are classics. Some nonstars at a network made them possible. Good for them.

I leave it to others to dilate on why TV now is so good and movies so bad, since both come from the same town, Hollywood, in the same era. But there is a side benefit to televisions’s excellence, and that is the number of people who follow a show so closely, and love it so much, that after it’s aired they come together on long threads on Web sites and talk about what happened and what it means. People use their imaginations and unfocused creativity to add new layers of meaning and interpretation. “You know that was a reference to ‘Chinatown.’” “Did anyone notice what it meant when Peggy told Mr. Sterling ‘no’ when he asked for the coffee? A whole revolution captured in one word!”

Those threads are golden. We rightly discuss the fact that media now is fractured, niched and broken up, that we no longer watch the same shows or have the same conversation. But what’s happening now on the Internet after a good show is a conversation, a new one, and it’s sprung up from the technology that helped do in the old one. How ironic and predictable, and another cause, however small, for gratitude.

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574546093616349588.html

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