Secretaries' Day for the dinner table
My Bulgarian friends have always asked me about the meaning of Thanksgiving. Yeah, we all know the official story...pilgrims, Native Americans, turkeys and what not. But, really, what's in it for the regular American?
Well, just today, my very own prof. Grady has come up with the answer I have been looking for in years:
Thanksgiving is nothing if not a festival of side dishes, a tribute to the lesser offerings without which the main courses of our lives would have nothing to look so main next to. A sort of Secretaries' Day for the dinner table, if you will.
I perfectly agree with him.
Now, the other food-related question that I need him to answer is a well-argued response to the one question I personally have always hated the most: Are Americans really THAT fat?!
Well, just today, my very own prof. Grady has come up with the answer I have been looking for in years:
Thanksgiving is nothing if not a festival of side dishes, a tribute to the lesser offerings without which the main courses of our lives would have nothing to look so main next to. A sort of Secretaries' Day for the dinner table, if you will.
I perfectly agree with him.
Now, the other food-related question that I need him to answer is a well-argued response to the one question I personally have always hated the most: Are Americans really THAT fat?!
9 Comments:
I was just getting ready to tackle the fat question—or at least give it a good squeeze—though I was only going to talk about my own, not that of my fellow Americans. Hmm, perhaps I could loosen my belt and make room for a few more pounds.
Oh, and thanks for the plug! ;)
Hey Prof. Grady - do you mind if my friend uses your quote about Thankgiving in her term paper? We're in this anthro class together, and though I don't know what her specific thesis is, I know it has something to do with the holiday....
-Brooke
Brooke,
Well, yeah, I'd be completely flattered. I'm pretty sure I've never been quoted before. Can I ask, just out of curiosity, what the class is about? I wish I got to write term papers about Thanksgiving!
Brooke! I was so going to ask the same question. What class is that? I want to take it! :D
Professor: Are you promising to tackle the weight issue?
Most people have seen themselves that the Americans are more obese that the average Europeans. Obesity is not just an issue in America, but there it seems most visible. Otherwise the Americans are not that fat – they are just fatter than the average European or South American. Nothing too extraordinary.
It is a common phenomenon, that when the food has become more affordable, delicious and relatively cheap, many people could not stop their appetite. And another mass phenomenon of our culture: lots of people like to tease their taste receptors with every kind of food, and then go to the gym “to burn the calories”. Sometimes they go there by car or even SUV!...
A waste of resources beyond imagination. Millions of animals and acres of land are sacrificed for the gluttony of the unsustainable consumer society... But that is what we call living standard .
Hey, pretty cool blog...lets exchange links. Check out the city.
http://turbocity.blogspot.com/
Wow, such enthusiasm! Perhaps you guys should come over to anthro and join in on the fun! ;)
The class is about cultural memory - how it's formed, transmitted, and interpreted and what it can tell us about the present as it understood by social groups. My friend is exploring what Thanksgiving is seen to commemorate, particularly through the eyes of her own family. But of course, she's going to have to set the stage for that, so nifty quotes are always useful... :) Before I passing it on and getting her hopes up, though, I just wanted to make sure it would be cool. And whaddaya know - it's not only cool, it's flattering. Awesome!
Funny, though - I never understood why my Buryat hosts were so perplexed at why foreigners would find their shamanic practices interesting, which blew my mind. Then recently I found out that a foreign scholar visting the Folklore Department is writing a whole dissertation on Thanksgiving, and I had the exact same reaction my Buryat hosts had had to my own interests! (And who says exoticism doesn't play some kind of role in academic research?!!) I guess it just speaks to how much we tend to take for granted in our own cultures...
-Brooke
Who's fatter, who's slimmer, who's more warlike or more like the French (cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys), who's from Mars and who's from Venus? These are the pointless discussions that often go around the table on a casual cliché-ridden evening. Better question: is the turkey on the table real turkey or something else :)
Nice shot at the Thanksgiving question, prof. Same goes to Petya.
P.S. Petya, I could not find turkey around Thanksgiving in Sofia. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places. Did you have some?
No, Nicky, I did not. I personally never liked turkey, so I didn't really look... An American friend of mine here in Sofia, however, became friends with the chef at the Hilton and got him to make him a full Thanksgiving dinner: turkey, stuffing and everything else.
Are you back in Bulgaria?!
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