Could you do Thanksgiving like it's 1621? An Agrarian Thanksgiving

I wrote out a blog entry for Lex Anteinternet on what the first Thanksgiving Dinner in 1621 must have been like.

Pheasants.

It really surprised me, even though it shouldn't.  We modern Americans are so used to the "poverty of resources of our ancestors" story that, well, we believe it.  In reality, that first gathering in English North America to celebrate God's bounty and give thanks for it, no matter how imperfect the Church of England and Puritan celebrants, and the native ones as well, was a really bountiful feast.  I've joked in the past that it probably consisted of salt cod, but in fact it seems likely to have featured waterfowl, maybe turkey, deer, mussels and quite an abundance of other foods stuffs.

Unlike now, what it didn't feature was pie, probably, even though pies of all sorts were a feature of the English diet, although at this point I frankly wonder. What would have kept there from being pie would have been a lack of wheat, as that crop wouldn't have come around for at least a few years. And the lack of a grain crop meant that there wouldn't have been beer, if that's something your Thanksgiving usually features (mine does).  It's an open question if there would have been wine.  There would have been a lot of fresh vegetables, however, as well as fresh foul, venison and fresh fish.

It would have been a good meal, in some ways one we'd recognize, but also one in which we might note some things were missing.  No potatoes, for example.

This set me to wondering what a killetarian/agrarian like me might end up with if allowed to do a  Thanksgiving Dinner all of stuff I'd shot or gathered.  Could I do it?

Well, there'd be no mussels on my table, but most years there would be fare similar to what the first celebrants had.  There are wild turkeys in my region, although I failed to get one this year.  Events conspired against me and I didn't get a deer (at least yet) either.  But if I had a major dinner, and time, I think I could muster it.  It might be pheasant rather than turkey, or a wild turkey, which is really no different in taste, only in bulk, from the domestic ones.

The challenge, however, would be vegetables, depending upon how feral I'd take this endeavor.  If I went full hunter/gatherer, here I'd really be in trouble.  I frankly know next to nothing about edible wild plants.

Now, starting off, I'd note that in my region, like the rest of the globe, a vegetarian would have starved to death in a few days prior to production agriculture.  It's not only an unnatural diet, but it's impossible up until that time.  Indeed, one of the ironies of agriculture has been the introduction of unnatural diets.  When you read, for example, of the Irish poor living on potatoes and oatmeal, while that's not what their Celtic ancestors had eaten prior to 1) row crop agriculture, and 2) the English.  Shoot, potatoes aren't even native to Ireland.

Anyhow, I note that as the native peoples of the plains were more heavily meat eaters than anything else, as that's what there was to eat.  But there is some edible vegetation.

I just don't know much about it.

I guess I'd start off with that I knwo that there's a collection of native berries you can eat.  I mostly know about this as my mohter used to collect some and make wine with them, and I've had syrup and jelly made with them as well. UW publishes a short pamphlet on them, which is available here.  There are also wild leeks, which my mother and father, and at least one of my boyhood friends would recognize, which my mother inaccurately called "wild onions".

And that's about all I know about that.

Which isn't enough to make much of a meal.

Now, a person could probably research this and learn more, and I should, simply because I'd like to know.  Indeed, on the Wind River Indian Reservation there's a "food sovereignty" movement which seeks to reintroduce native foods to the residents there in order to combat health problems, which is a really interesting idea and I hope it has some success.  I hope that they also publish some things on this topic, assuming that they haven't already.

So, in short, at least based on what the present state of my knowledge is, the Thanksgiving fare would be pretty limited, vegetable wise.

Now, what about grow your own?

Well, if expanded out to include what I can grow myself, well now we're on to something else indeed. . . assuming that I can get my pump fixed, which I haven't, solely due to me.

If I were to do that, then I'm almost fully there for a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, omitting only the bread and cranberry sauce.

And I'm not omitting the cranberry sauce.

I'm not omitting the bread, either.

Frankly, I think the modern "bread is bad for you" story is a pile of crap.  People have incorporated grains into their diet for thousands of years.  To the extent that its bad for you, it's likely because Americans don't eat bread, they eat cake.  That's what American bread is.

Of course, I think the keto diet is a pile of crap too, which I discuss on another Lex Anteinternet post.  So here, I'd have to make bread, or buy it, and I'd prefer to make it. Soda bread more particularly.

On this, I'd be inclined, if I could to have an alcoholic beverage for the table, which is another thing, albeit a dangerous one, that humans have been doing since . . . well too long to tell.  The Mayflower sojourners started off their voyage with a stock of beer. . . ironically in a ship that had once been used to haul wine, but they were out when they put in at Plymouth Rock.  By the fall of 1621 it's unlikely that they'd brewed any. as they lacked grain.  The could have vinted wine, however.  If they did, we don't know about it.

So in my hypothetical, if I stuck to local stocks, I could probably do the same.  I don't know how to do it, but I could learn.  But I'm not going to do so, as frankly my recollections of that wine aren't sufficiently warm to cause me to bother with it, and I recall it took tons of sugar, which obviously isn't something I'm going to produce myself.

I'm not going to brew beer either, although plenty of people do.  I don't have the time, or the inclination, and either I'd end up with way too much or not enough.

And this reflects the nature of agrarianism, really.  A life focused on nature with agriculture as part of that.  I don't have to make everything myself, but I have to be focused on the land, have a land ethic, and focus on what's real.

Maybe next year I'll try this.