Thanksgiving food reveals a lot about the country

After that first Thanksgiving, the event receded from memory for two centuries. Then, in the early 1800s, some shaky historical evidence of that 17th century meal was unearthed. Amid a lot of tension over slavery and immigration, some leaders sought to elevate the bit of Colonial history as a unifying project that could bring a divided nation together. From there, the influence of home economics, advertising, industrial food production, animal science, factory farm breeding, and other transformations have made the Thanksgiving meal into one of abundance, standardization, and shortcut home cooking.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of a very popular women’s magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book, wanted to create a Thanksgiving celebration as a project of national unity. For many years, she petitioned sitting presidents to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She finally succeeded with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, when he passed the Thanksgiving Proclamation in October 1863.

Lincoln doesn’t actually reference the 1621 event at all, but he suggested that the Thanksgiving holiday was about national unity in the midst of the Civil War—a project I think we can all get behind.