Thanksgiving dinner, we like to imagine, is the one moment in the year when time can be made to stand still. In a busier, noisier, crazier world, where change is to be embraced rather than feared, everyone craves that still point of mealtime communion where the old ways can be revived.
Tradition, that daunting word by which all Thanksgivings are measured, is a dead weight almost everywhere else. But when the autumn harvest festival returns in its entirely predictable way, it's hard not to give thanks: As long as some ancestral values can be made to last, even if it's just the handed-down family recipe for turkey stuffing, we're connected in a way the tradition-deniers will never know.
It's a reassuring thought for anxious times, and on the surface, everything about Thanksgiving stays much the same — even the Tofurkey vegans find a way to join in. But the reality of the food world is that everything is in flux. Thanksgiving endures, but the meal is subject to the restless whims of scientists, politicians, marketing executives, dietary crusaders and those fickle creatures known as consumers who can't make up their minds about what they really want.
So you want to believe that Thanksgiving is a timeless thing? Consider this simple holiday meal, a recipe for change if ever there was one.
TO START
Smoke Salmon
Thanksgiving likes to claim aboriginal origins alongside its harvest-festival leanings, so let's begin with a food that is one of the more successful culinary achievements of the first peoples. Of course, much has changed since B.C. natives first showed off their salmon-preserving smoke to European interlopers. These days, your delicate, buttery, paper-thin appetizer is far more likely to have started out on a fish farm than in the wild, and what many diners don't know is that much Canadian-made smoked salmon begins with frozen fish from Chile. Kim Dormaar of the award-winning Medallion Smoked Salmon in Ebenezer, PEI, prefers fresh deepwater Newfoundland caged salmon and pays upward of three times what larger producers do for their previously frozen fish, which are mushier because of cell-wall breakdown. The more industrial approach to processing salmon depends on liquid smoke or smoke-soaked pads to impart flavour. Mr. Dormaar chooses to cold-smoke his fish over PEI alder, a wood used in native sweat-lodge ceremonies and traditionally prized for its medicinal properties as much as for its salmon-enhancing aromas.
Mixed Greens
Salad before the main course or after? The more pressing question with our greens may be: Are they really all that good for you if they've been trucked in from California? Environmental politics are never far from the table these days, and even Thanksgiving's throwback side has to defer to the modern preoccupation with food-miles. But here's the problem: If you want to do the right thing and eat organic greens, there's a good chance they will come from the massive Earthbound Farm in California's Salinas Valley. The company grows 80 per cent of the organic lettuce produced in the United States, and its plastic boxes of fresh-cut, washed salad mix are widely available in Canada, thanks to technology that uses inert gas to maintain the little arugula's crispness in temperature-controlled transport. Big isn't bad — Earthbound's rejection of pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers is a model for industrial farming. But it's not just the 100-mile diet crowd who question the wisdom of turning organic salad into a transcontinental convenience food with an extra-long shelf life. "For every calorie of salad you eat," notes Michael Pollan, author of the forthcoming In Defense of Food, "getting it to the East Coast takes 57 calories of fossil-fuel energy. Moving all that water across the continent — and that's essentially what you're doing with salad greens — may not be the wisest thing."
