They Held Their Noses, and Ate - New York Times Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards. Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of savagery.

Now what were the settlers really thankful for? Certainly not starving, but probably not for the food itself, as this NYT Op-Ed brilliantly surveys. Jared Diamond's The Collapse makes a similar point about the importance of culture for the survival of communities, e.g. the Greenland settlers refusal to eat fish.

 

The rest of the stuff about the relatively modern origin of the current Thanksgiving mythology and its concommitant rituals are fairly well-known (and rehashed every year on the occasion).

From the colonists' perspective, Native Americans grew crops in an entirely corrupt manner. They typically prepared fields by setting fire to the underbrush and girdling surrounding trees. Afterward, they planted corn, gourds and beans willy-nilly across charred ground, possibly throwing in fish as fertilizer. To the Indian women who tended the plants with clamshell hoes, the ecological brilliance of this arrangement was abundantly clear: the cornstalks stretched into sturdy poles for the beans to climb upon, the corn leaves fanned out to provide squash with shade, and the beans enriched the soil with extra nitrogen. But the English, blinded by tradition, never got it - they just looked on in horror.

Where were the fences? The neat rows of cross-sectioned grain? The plows? Where were the carts of dung? The team of oxen? The yokes? Why were perfectly good trees left to rot? Why not burn them to power a fireplace? And those fish! Why not salt them down and export them to Europe for a tidy profit? What was wrong with these people? The collective English answer - “everything” - honed the colonists’ distaste for foods, especially corn and squash, that they quickly judged best for farm animals.

The question is what role this attitude played later on when the rest of the US was being settled. There are probably many other examples of genocide where at least one of the factors was the other groups of ‘caring’ for their food and sources of food. Transgressions against food might be a good topic for a contrastive study (and quite possibly already has been).

An interesting question arose in a conversation I had earlier today. Are there any 'action' films where Thanksgiving is the main setting for the plot? There are several about Christmas (Die Hard 1 and 2, Lethal Weapon 1) and at least one about Independence Day so it seems surprising that there nothing with Thanksgiving comes to mind. But that could be just momentary lapse of memory.