An Urban's Rural View

Thanksgiving, for many, is a day to celebrate food, family and football. I too appreciate those things, but there's something else I look forward to on T-day: the interesting observations this holiday brings forth from so many writers.

Some are so good the authors repeat them year after year. The Wall Street Journal has run the same two editorials on the day before Thanksgiving since 1961: "The Desolate Wilderness" and "And the Fair Land."

The newspapers that carried humorist Art Buchwald knew they would get the same column, "Le Grande Thanksgiving," from him each year, the one he'd penned in 1952 while living in Paris. In it he told the Thanksgiving story with a Gallic twist, substituting French words like "dinde" (turkey) and "pelerins" (Pilgrims) and "Peaux-Rouges" (Indians) for the critical nouns. Miles Standish became "Kilometres Deboutish."

Other writings attempt to answer perennial questions about the holiday. What does history say about what the Pilgrims really ate at the first Thanksgiving dinner? According to a blog post on Smithsonian.com (http://tiny.cc/…), there are only two documents mentioning those feasts, and from them it seems the only items we can be sure were on the menu were turkey, venison and Indian corn in some form.

A separate Smithsonian piece (http://tiny.cc/…) listed 14 interesting facts about turkeys. One that intrigued me: Legend to the contrary, Benjamin Franklin never actually proposed the wild turkey as the national bird. He did call it a "more respectable bird" than the bald eagle. Another: "A turkey's gender can be determined from its droppings -- males produce spiral-shaped poop and females' poop is shaped like the letter J."

Supermarket News (http://tiny.cc/…) carried a newsy item reporting that more and more retailers this year are offering free-range, organic and heritage or heirloom turkeys costing as much as $10 a pound.

Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor and Bloomberg columnist, noted the similarities between America's situation this Thanksgiving and the same holiday in 1812. A New Hampshire pastor's sermon ticks off the evils facing the country that year, from war-weariness to bad weather to partisan gridlock. Sound familiar?

To Mark Bittman, the New York Times food blogger, turkey is "just about the worst piece of meat you can roast," guaranteed to produce dry white meat and under-done dark meat. To Bittman the food to celebrate on Thanksgiving is the sweet potato. You can read his take on its many virtues here: http://tiny.cc/….

At Slate.com (http://tiny.cc/…) Matthew Yglesias explains why turkeys actually become cheaper at Thanksgiving. Stores use them as a loss leader is his principal theory. Another: During the rest of the year the only whole-turkey buyers are "idiosyncratic people" who don't understand, or care, that whole chickens are easier to cook. They're willing to pay more for their favorite fowl. The rest of us who only buy a whole turkey at Thanksgiving are more price-sensitive.

No Thanksgiving reading list is complete without Dave Barry. His November 19, 2000, column, which his home newspaper, the Miami Herald, re-circulated this year (http://tiny.cc/…), recounted how a 25-pound tom turkey in Pittsburgh terrified a dump-truck driver by crashing through his windshield and assuming the classic turkey fighting posture.

"I didn't know that turkeys had a fighting posture" Barry wrote. "What do they do? Put up their dukes? But if they put up BOTH dukes, they'd topple over, right? Maybe they put up just one duke, and hop around on the other duke in a threatening fashion. Whatever they do, I'm sure it would be terrifying to see one of them doing it next to you in a dump truck."

The driver somehow made it to safety and called police. The bird was then "was apprehended by a state game official who, incredibly, let it go without pressing charges."

Two days later, a woman walking a sidewalk in the same city was almost killed by a 25-pound turkey that crashed into a skyscraper and plummeted earthward. Convinced that it was the same bird, Barry concluded that "This is why the American Poultry Manufacturers of America stress that, in selecting a Thanksgiving turkey, the No. 1 rule is, quote, 'it should be a dead turkey.'"

Whatever you choose to eat -- or read -- I hope your Thanksgiving is a happy one.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

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