The pilgrims of Plymouth invited the neighboring Wampanoag Indians to participate in the festivities. They cooked and ate both meat and the products of their harvest.
Today's Thanksgiving
Americans eat around 550 million pounds of turkey every Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving and turkey have become almost synonymous. Our domesticated turkeys are bred to be eaten and are so large that they can't even fly.
Turkey is naturally quite low in fat and our turkeys have ample breast meat. The skin is very fatty though and the dark meat is much more greasy with higher levels of saturated fat and about 30 more calories per ounce than white meat. With the skin, you add on another 10 or so calories per serving.
The stuffing that goes with our turkey is typically bread-based. The average serving contains around 550 calories and 45 carbs. This is true whether you cook your stuffing inside of your turkey or separate. Adding gravy just adds on more calories and carbs.
Cranberries and cranberry sauce are other foods closely associated with Thanksgiving today. The tart little berries themselves are low in calories and great for you. The sauce we often add to our holiday meals though is full of sugar and one serving contains around 100 more calories than the original berries.
Potatoes, candied yams and corn are three other common Thanksgiving foods. Potatoes are highly nutritious, but less so if you drown them in butter. Yams, or sweet potatoes, are a valuable source of fiber, but adding the components to candy them also adds calories. Corn is a powerhouse with lots of fiber, especially sweet corn. For dessert, you probably plan on pumpkin pie. Pumpkin is loaded with nutrients, but the pie crust adds a lot of carbs and calories.
The First Thanksgiving Menu
Very few of our Thanksgiving foods today were on the first Thanksgiving menu, which surprises a lot of people. It is unknown whether or not turkey was eaten. If it was then it was wild turkey, which is substantially more lean and smaller than today's turkey. There is documentation that the pilgrims ate fowl, but this could also include duck and goose, which were native to the area as well. A lot of us enjoy ham on Thanksgiving, which was nowhere to be found on the first Thanksgiving table. The meat definitely on the menu was venison. Deer meat is one of the healthiest of all meats, especially if it's wild and fresh. One serving of deer contains only 1 gram of fat and 33 calories per ounce.
Stuffing is a fairly modern invention. The pilgrims had no wheat flour and no access to ovens so breads were not made at all. For flavor, they instead cooked their meats with herb rubs or stuffed with onions and nuts. It was also common to cook the meats into stews with a variety of vegetables.
Cranberries, though native, were too tart to be eaten raw like blueberries, raspberries and other berries. These other berries were probably served, but not cranberries and certainly no cranberry sauce because by the time the first Thanksgiving rolled around, sugar supplies were very low. Cranberries weren't eaten until around 50 years later. Potatoes, sweet and otherwise, were not yet cultivated in North America so they wouldn't have been found on the table either. Corn was there, but it wasn't our sweet or yellow corn. Instead, it was what we call "Indian corn" and it was removed from the cob and made into a porridge.
Pumpkin was also present, but not as pumpkin pie. Again, there was no way to bake the pie nor make a crust. Pumpkin was simply cooked and eaten along with similar squash. In addition to colorful squash, other vegetables eaten at the first Thanksgiving included leafy greens such as spinach, cabbage, beans, carrots and maybe peas. These could all be incorporated into stews or cooked over fires.
Creating a Healthy and Historically Accurate Thanksgiving
The first Thanksgiving dinner didn't include a lot of carb-heavy breads, fatty and sugary foods or dairy. It was very vegetable-oriented with plenty of meat, including fish and shellfish. In general, it was lower carb, lower cholesterol and more nutrient-rich than today's Thanksgiving dinners.
If you don't want to forego your turkey then stick to eating skinless white meat and try stuffing it with vegetables as well as onions, and herbs like rosemary for added flavor. Steamed spinach or kale makes a great side and a mixture of squash is very colorful and naturally sweet. Fruits, berries and nuts make great desserts and snacks in the form of custards or even raw.
Robert Vena
NJ Acupuncturist
Acupuncture-in-NJ.com
