Where Did Your Favorite Thanksgiving Day Food Originate? | Smithsonian Institution (2024)

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Where Did Your Favorite Thanksgiving Day Food Originate? | Smithsonian Institution? ›

According to Bruce Smith, senior scientist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, much of what is eaten at Thanksgiving today came from Mexico and South America. “We can trace many of these foods up through the southwestern United States into other parts of the country,” he said.

Thanksgiving Day, annual national holiday in the United States and Canada celebrating the harvest and other blessings of the past year. Americans generally believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.

The Wampanoag guests brought five deer with them, so venison was on the menu. The English brought fowl, "probably migrating waterfowl like ducks and geese, which were plentiful in autumn," says Beahrs.

The turkey comes in because the big birds were plentiful in New England, often distributed to soldiers in the Army. By the end of the century, Smith writes, the typical Thanksgiving meal had a turkey at the center of the feast due to the bird's low price.

According to Bruce Smith, senior scientist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, much of what is eaten at Thanksgiving today came from Mexico and South America. “We can trace many of these foods up through the southwestern United States into other parts of the country,” he said.

Several days of Thanksgiving were held in early New England history that have been identified as the "First Thanksgiving", including Pilgrim holidays in Plymouth in 1621 and 1623, and a Puritan holiday in Boston in 1631.

But like most of the Thanksgiving traditions we know today, turkey didn't become widely synonymous with that November holiday until the mid-19th century. This was largely thanks to the efforts of the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who became known as the “mother of Thanksgiving.”

The “first Thanksgiving,” as a lot of folks understand it, was in 1621 between the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag* tribe in present-day Massachusetts. While records indicate that this celebration did happen, there are a few misconceptions we need to clear up.

While live cows and hens were useful as long as they were producing milk and eggs, respectively, turkeys were generally raised only for their meat and thus could be readily killed. Third, a single turkey was usually big enough to feed a family.

"Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture," says the United American Indians of New England. They've marked the occasion as a day of mourning for 48 years, according to Native Hope.

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The centerpiece of contemporary Thanksgiving in the United States is Thanksgiving dinner (informally called turkey dinner), a large meal generally centered on a large roasted turkey.

There are only two surviving documents that reference the original Thanksgiving harvest meal. They describe a feast of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, a bounty of cod and bass, and flint, a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.

New England and Virginia colonists originally celebrated days of fasting, as well as days of thanksgiving, thanking God for blessings such as harvests, ship landings, military victories, or the end of a drought. These were observed through church services, accompanied with feasts and other communal gatherings.

For many Native Americans Thanksgiving is not a heartwarming holiday marked by gathering with family and serving others, but rather “a reminder of genocide, colonialism, and oppression, it's a symbol of smallpox blankets, Christianity, land grabs and manifest destiny,” artist Tony Abeyta says.

In this version o]f the Thanksgiving story, the holiday commemorates the peaceful, friendly meeting of English settlers and the Wampanoag tribe for three days of feasting and Thanksgiving in 1621. Every year, news outlets and social media are a-buzz with Thanksgiving themes.

In the last week of Jesus' life, He met with His disciples in a large upper room where He shared the Passover meal with them. It was during this Passover meal that the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving—was instituted.

Thanksgiving-type celebrations were common at the turn of the 19th century with many opting to put a turkey on the table instead of slaughtering a useful animal like a hen or cow that was producing other needed products, according to Britannica. Turkeys at the time, and still today, were raised to be meat birds.