- I'll be talking about local foods and vegan holiday recipes on KUOW (FM 94.9) on Wednesday between 2 and 3, so the next few days I'll be posting Thanksgiving recipes from my cookbook "Local Bounty," so they can link to them.
Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday, is a celebration of local food. According to the story we've all heard many times, the Pilgrims had trouble raising enough food to feed themselves so the Native Americans helped them out and taught them to grow some indigenous crops, which got them through those early tough times. Many of the foods that we're used to having on our Thanksgiving tables are American foods: pumpkins, potatoes, wild rice, green beans, cranberries, and, of course, turkey. (I know I'm posting vegan recipes, but the turkey does help to illustrate my point.)
Indigenous foods aren't necessarily local foods, especially in this day and age. Carrots, apples and Brussels sprouts originated in other parts of the world but can be grown close to home. Blueberries are indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, but when they're out of season and we want them "fresh," we buy them grown in Chile. But without splitting hairs, I do think that buying locally grown food is very much in the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, whether or not those foods are indigenous to the locale that we call home.
The Pilgrims achieved food security by learning to use the foods they found in their immediate environment. It wasn't sustainable for them to live on familiar foods shipped from England, and the seeds they brought with them didn't take well to the new soil, at least initially. Today we're faced with a sustainability issue as well, though our short term survival isn't necessarily at stake. But eating local foods does improve our long term food security, at the same time that it expands our culinary horizons, just as it did for the Pilgrims.
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