Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner by Alexis Madrigal, Wired, 10-minute read, free
A brief look into how industrial farming has changed the production of food since the first Thanksgiving. Focusing mainly on the hybridization of turkey, but also looking into the corn and potato hybrids that have developed over the years, this read examines how not only the size and flavor of food has changed but also how consumer expectations and desires have informed that change. “Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents’ Thanksgiving dinner table,” reads the first line. Corn breeding has made corn six times as sweet as it was back when there were pilgrims; potatoes are modified to have more starch and less sugar so that they make crispier chips and fries; and turkeys, as you may already know, are grown with larger breasts to satisfy the desire for more white meat. It may not make your Thanksgiving meal more enjoyable, but you’ll at least have something to talk about at the table.
Freebirds by Michael P. Branch, Orion magazine, 10-minute read, free
Branch’s daughters come home from a day of classic Thanksgiving fun (think paper turkeys based on cut-out hand shapes) and their blithe enthusiasm prompts an exploration of the holiday and its strange traditions, mainly the extravagant evolution of the traditional White House turkey pardon. While no one is really sure who issued the first such presidential pardon (there are stories that Abraham Lincoln was the first to pardon a turkey his son had become attached to), it’s widely accepted that George H.W. Bush was the first to make an official turkey pardon. The turkeys would go on after their pardon to live out their short lives at a petting zoo in Virginia. Now, in a strange but fitting stretch of extravagance, they’re flown to a Disney property to take part in a parade. President Obama seems to grasp the strangeness of this tradition in this quote: “There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland.”
Native Intelligence by Charles C. Mann, Smithsonian.com, 25-minute read, free
In grade school, we learn a very simple and satisfying narrative of the first Thanksgiving: Pilgrims give the Indians pots and pans, the Indians teach the Pilgrims how to plant crops and they all sit down for a nice meal together. Though this paints a nice picture, it’s vastly incomplete. Tisquantum (known popularly in school as ‘Squanto’) did indeed help the colonists, but it’s rarely asked: Why would he help the people who were invading his homeland? This read dives into the Machiavellian complexities leading up to (and continuing on after) the first Thanksgiving dinner, making the first dinner seem less like a holiday and more like a hesitantly festive blip.
