How on earth did people manage Thanksgiving before the internet? We're holding it at my house this year, and here's what I've done so far:
First, I used the Butterball turkey calculator, which is unfortunately buried under piles of flash, but their site has other tempting things, like the turkey podcast, so I'll link them anyway.
I won't be buying a Butterball turkey -- poor, miserable, oppressed turkeys that they are (were). Nor did we convince my mother to raise her own this year, since none of us said we'd step up to slaughter it. Instead, I'll reserve my turkey -- plus rolls -- at New Seasons. I'm assuming those turkeys were able to participate in the Farm Animal Make-A-Wish Program, which gives each a chance to live out his or her fondest dream before being slaughtered. (Wait, that doesn't exist? Someone get busy! Don't tell me you're too busy sending goats to the needy to buy iPods for turkeys?)
The sides at New Seasons also look tempting, but since cooking is a large part of the fun, I'll do most of it myself. If I enjoyed cooking less, I'd be very tempted by New Season's complete dinners (another flash site, I think, so click around). $70 for dinner for 4-6, from soup to nuts, is a very good price -- I know I'll be spending more than that, even if you don't count my labor -- and I'm sure it will be tasty.
There's a lot of talk currently about how terrible it is that none of us cook anymore, but I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with it -- it's just that the food we tend to buy is so bad for us, particularly the cheap stuff, but most of us don't have the huevos to add the amounts of butter and salt that make things really tasty. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Betsy/mom was telling us the other night how when she was in a political study group in the '60s/'70s, they thought that it was a great thing the way people in China would get take out on the way home from work, so they didn't have to go home and cook. (We won't go into the pros and cons of Maoist China here, okay? And no, they didn't think people were eating "takeout" like sweet and sour pork every night.) The point is, there is something genuinely compelling and sensible in the utopian vision of applying economies of scale to the household.
A character in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward talks about how, back in the day, "A very important cause of former poverty was the vast waste of labor and materials which resulted from domestic washing and cooking, and the performing separately of innumerable other tasks to which we apply the cooperative plan." They had communal dining halls as the answer.
I'm not going to get into Marx and Engels on women's work and the family (not least because I don't know that much about it) -- but the point is, it's undeniable that the work of cooking is endless and a large part of it (washing up, for instance) is pure drudgery, and this is what modern conveniences aim to be sparing us.
But in some ways, we've gone the opposite direction from economies of scale: many of us live in smaller households, so instead of cooking for an extended family, you're cooking for one or two or maybe three at a time (and, believe me, cooking for one is a pain in the ass -- a sad, lonely, miserable pain in the ass). Where we have adopted economies of scale, instead of collective kitchens creating wonderful foods based on the best health science and gourmet practices, for most of us, it means McDonald's or Taco Bell. Or maybe Trader Joe's, if you want to get fancy about it. But it's more like soylent green than manna.
This tension between the inefficient pleasures of individual craftsmanship, and alienating economies of scale is something I think about a lot and tend to blah blah blah about too much, but it's one of those concepts, like the mapmakers paradox, that I find compelling and applicable to many situations. It sometimes seems like we have the worst of both worlds now, at least in the food and cooking department.
But then, Thanksgiving, when practiced in its modern traditional form, is itself practicing economies of scale by bringing large groups of people together, and a return to individual craftsmanship by encouraging us to cook for each other. And so: Happy Thanksgiving, or, as it will now be known in my household, Celebrating Individual Craftsmanship and Small Scale Economies of Scale Day!!
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