Giving Thanks at Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is all about food, so it’s ironic our culinary traditions tend to stray for this holiday. The Puritans and Wampanoag enjoyed venison and wild fowl (possibly ducks and swans) at the first Thanksgiving near Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621. Historians think there may have been other strange foods, such as shellfish and eel, and the corn and squash unique to the New World.
Thanksgiving also is one of our few truly national holidays, declared as such by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in 1863. Curiously in a nation with so many cultures and ethnic influences, we now have a pretty uniform Thanksgiving menu.
Admit it. Would it be Thanksgiving without turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes? But how many of us have ever seen cranberries in a bog, helped dig sweet potatoes or scraped out a pumpkin for pie? Traditional foods, yes; my local harvest, not hardly.
At the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, we have been interested in local foods for a long time. As early as 1997, we began to request foods from Iowa farms and farmers for our events and conferences. We also fund local food research, and do some in-house projects such as our often-cited 2001 “food miles” report. We found that produce travels an average of 1,518 miles to reach the Chicago terminal market before it arrives at Iowa supermarkets. This conventional system of transporting food from national sources used four to 17 times more fuel and released from five to 17 times more carbon dioxide than Iowa-based regional and local systems.
To help Iowans see the potential for local and regional foods, the Leopold Center also developed the Iowa Produce Market Potential Calculator. This on-line tool looks the production and consumption of nearly 40 fruit and vegetable crops that can be grown in our climate and rich soils. The tool reveals some pretty big potential markets, such as for carrots: Iowa farmers produce only 1.4 million pounds annually, while Iowans consume about 25.9 million pounds each year.
Another recent Leopold Center tool reveals more about our eating habits than we probably care to admit. Where do your fresh fruits and vegetables come from? shows the source of fresh fruit and vegetable shipments tracked by the USDA. It also shows the far reaches of the planet where we get produce when not in season in the Northern Hemisphere.
Consider that traditional Thanksgiving menu. The USDA tracked 16.4 million pounds of celery in 2007, with California the leading domestic producer. However, Americans also ate celery from Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Mexico, Canada, China and the Dominican Republic.
Fresh green beans (for green bean casserole) come from Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, North Carolina, California and Virginia, but also Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, Peru, Nicaragua and Argentina. Carrots, a staple for the holiday relish tray, come from California, but to guarantee year-round supplies Americans also get carrots from Mexico, Costa Rica, Israel, Belgium, China, Guatemala, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Brazil and Germany.
Potatoes and cranberries appear to be primarily North American products. The USDA tracked 108.9 million pounds of potato shipments, primarily from Idaho, also Colorado, Washington, Wisconsin, California, Nebraska, Oregon, North Dakota, Maine, Minnesota, Florida, Michigan and of course, Canada. As for cranberries, three-fourths of the 1.1 million pounds are shipped during September and October, coming from Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Washington and Canada.
Each year the American Farm Bureau calculates the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and notes that dinner for 10 is only $44.61, up $2.35 or 5.6 percent from a year ago. While that’s a bargain, it’s also good to remember that Thanksgiving was, first and foremost, a harvest celebration. It’s a time to feast on the foods of one’s community, sharing the bounty from the work of many hands.
I invite you to get in the spirit of the first Thanksgiving this year and thank a farmer. And if you know him or her by first name, consider yourself twice-blessed.
Laura Miller is Communications Specialist for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a research and education center at Iowa State University in Ames, http://www.leopold.iastate.edu.
