News

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."

And as for that extra-virgin olive oil in your vinaigrette, be suspicious if the usual fruity, peppery flavours are missing and it instead smells the slightest bit like cucumber or has a metallic note or a hint of greasiness. These off-putting qualities are among the 16 designated by the European Union as official taste flaws and potential signs of fraud, a huge problem in an industry that sees profit potential in the Mediterranean Diet (a modern construct virtually created and expensively promoted by none other than the International Olive Oil Council).

It's common enough in the extra-virgin business to mask the true country of origin, so that North African or Turkish oil comes across as Italian. Greedier tricksters blend in cheaper vegetable oils and add colouring and flavouring. Even the European Union's vaunted lab testing proved ineffective at catching the perps, which is why all those cucumbery, greasy so-called olive oils must be weeded out, one hopes, by expert tasting panels.

THE MAIN EVENT

Turkey

Nothing could be further from its traditional beginnings than the big bird itself. The modern turkey, even before the patented Butterball margarine mixture is stuck under the skin or the unwanted dark meat is transformed into high-sodium processed turkey loaf, bears little resemblance to the bird of 50 years ago, let alone to its wild ancestor. Thanks to an aggressively single-minded breeding program, Tom Turkey has become a breast-meat beast, unable to mate with his female counterpart because of all that low-fat white stuff modern consumers prefer on their festive occasions. Heirloom breeds of turkeys taste much gamier than the bland broad-breasted white turkey that almost completely monopolizes the market and now defines what people think of as the taste of turkey, which is why we all pour on the gravy, with its more complex caramelized flavours, and demand seconds of the more highly aromatic stuffing. Farmers love the sheer efficiency of the modern bird, which can reach 30 pounds in 16 weeks, compared with the 35 weeks it used to take a turkey to climb to a mere 25 pounds little more than a generation ago.

But the cost-cutting supersizing isn't without its problems. As families grow smaller, free time grows shorter and basic cooking skills erode, a monstrous turkey become less desirable for many holiday diners. Alberta turkey producer Darrel Winter takes pride in raising a grain-fed, free-range turkey with a natural self-basting layer of breast fat that doesn't need the cheap beneath-the-skin fats commercial producers add to counteract a factory bird's dryness. But in the extra weeks it takes to put on that fat, his statuesque bird looks even less like the boneless, all-breast turkey roasts many Thanksgiving devotees are shifting to. "It's a challenge," he notes. "We seem to be on the wrong side of the argument."

But not as wrong as the turkey's ostracized dark meat, which has never been more in disfavour — hence the rise of the processed-turkey business, which is essentially a means of taking unwanted dark meat and turning it into turkey burgers, turkey sausages, turkey bacon, turkey kielbasa etc.

Chestnut stuffing

Where do your chestnuts come from? Not from Canada — those are horse chestnuts covering the sidewalks so atmospherically every fall and far too tannic to be eaten. Traditionally, Italy has been the largest exporter of fresh and shelled chestnuts to this country, but lately China has been seizing a greater share of the market with this, as with so many other agricultural products. (Canadian apple juice made from concentrate is more likely to be from Chinese apples than Canadian.) Canada imported about $870,000 worth of fresh chestnuts from China in 2001. By last year, total imports were over $2.4-million.

Sweet potatoes with marshmallows

So this is what Thanksgiving nostalgia comes down to: a longing for a gummy kiddie confection on top of a bright-coloured tropical tuber. Retro tastes meet an infantile culture — we're not being rude, just observant — and so even the celebrated chef Mario Batali makes a point of marking Thanksgiving with mini-marshmallows on his sweet potatoes (on the other hand, he cooks his 20-pound turkey in an outdoor wood-burning pizza oven). Once upon a time, there was a plant known as the marsh mallow, the roots of which yielded a gelatinous muck useful as a binding agent for ancient remedies and sweetmeats. The modern marshmallow has left its marshy origins far behind: It's a tradition-denying confection that owes more to the infinitely elastic properties of corn syrup, egg whites and gelatin. This recently evolved, time-honoured dish began to achieve its holiday popularity only in the 1930s when the gelatin industry promoted its wacky goods to cooks who wanted to put more fun into the sober Thanksgiving feast. Jell-O salad, anyone?

A TOAST

Sauvignon Blanc

Tradition, that daunting word by which all Thanksgivings are measured, says nothing about sauvignon blanc, so feel free to opt for the time-honoured glass of tomato juice or rye 'n' ginger before tucking into your Butterball Roast 'n' Slice Boneless Stuffed Turkey. But grassy, herbaceous sauvignon is the white wine of the moment for those who have moved on from chardonnay, and its popularity is a precise indicator of the modern desire for full-frontal flavours. If chardonnay was bland and predictable, sauvignon is a wild thing whose biggest fans use sensory descriptors like "gooseberries" and "musky" and "tomcat." The grape's rapid ascent in the global marketplace has confounded experts who like to condemn the unadventurousness of mass-market taste (they now damn mouth-filling New Zealand sauvignon as being too "obvious"), but it has not escaped the attention of the flavour fraudsters — in 2004, a leading South African producer was caught punching up its sauvignons with "tropical-fruit" additives to achieve consumer expectations of excess. However, most of sauvignon's sudden popularity is based on a combination of innovative science and more traditional marketing techniques. On the winemaking side, producers are better able to protect their sauvignon juice from excess heat and oxygen to retain its freshness while relying on a new generation of yeast strains that enhance the grape's precocious flavours. And then the all-knowing salesmen step in and make sure the wine is sweet enough for the tartness-fearing global palate — a victim of success, the bone-dry sauvignon is now a rarity.

Red wine

Wine experts, in their alchemic wisdom, insist that you drink a light gamay or pinot noir with turkey, but most red-wine drinkers will opt for something rounder, smoother and considerably sweeter in what has become known as the New World style. This has nothing to do the New World in the pilgrims/Indians, invention-of-Thanksgiving sense, and much more to do with technologies developed in Australia and California to transform cheap rouge from the bitter, tart, low-alcohol wine it used to be into a highly quaffable, blockbuster-seeming red.

The harsh tannins of the old days and old ways are minimized by making wines in stainless steel, adding less-stringent tannin powder (for a more voluptuous mouth-feel) and oak "adjuncts" (as the inexpensive, flavour-enhancing shavings and chips are known) and increasing sweetness levels, which makes red wines seem fruitier. But the best technological shortcut may be micro-oxygenation — a method of dissolving minute amounts of purified air in red wine that immediately makes harsh, youthful wines taste softer and more mature.

A SWEET FINISH

Pumpkin pie

Do you remember when they told us pork fat was bad for our heart, and all those melt-in-the-mouth pie crusts that used to be made with lard were transformed into not-quite-so-melting pastry made with something called shortening? Time passed, and then it was discovered that the hydrogenated fats used to make vegetable shortening imitate lard were actually the evil now known as trans fats — what were we thinking? Pork fat, meanwhile, was starting to get better press, except that the few remaining lard makers had also gone the hydrogenated route so that diehard pastry chefs could store their pig fat at room temperature as if it were shortening.

Now the trans fats are disappearing from lard, all so we can make a melting crust that wraps itself around a leaden filling of canned spiced pumpkin purée, which makes even calorie-counters reach for the whipped cream.

Or you could turn to the fresh pie pumpkins that are coming to market in greater quantities, thanks to the rescue efforts of plant breeders and the growing curiosity of thrill-seeking foodies who do not want to be in thrall to the canning industry and its limited palate of Thanksgiving spices (heavy on the nutmeg). They are sweeter than Halloween pumpkins and less fibrous.

Or you could skip past the pastry debates, drop a few calories at the end of a huge meal and try a pumpkin gelato. Hart Melvin of Toronto's Gelato Fresco makes his from fresh pie pumpkins, and adds fresh ginger to the usual spice mix of clove, cinnamon and nutmeg. His only problem is that pie pumpkins are so weather-sensitive and can ripen any time between early September and "five days before Thanksgiving, which doesn't help at all."

That's Canadian Thanksgiving, of course, which may explain why our traditionalist forebears came to rely on the weighty canned version.

Chocolate

No pleasure is simple any more. Bestselling books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma have made thoughtful eaters think again about the modern diet. With her all-encompassing study Bitter Chocolate, Canadian journalist Carol Off exposed what she called the dark side of the world's favourite sweet, which includes at its worst forced child labour, entrenched poverty, extensive political corruption and international cartels that keep the dehumanizing system running smoothly. No one wants a guilt trip at Thanksgiving — the holiday's emotive name still has a feel-good power in a cynical world. But, as Ms. Off says, "everything we eat has a political component, and with tropical commodities like chocolate, somebody's paying the price for our pleasure."

We taste with our brains, which means these dark thoughts can get in the way of our pleasure. Ms. Off doesn't like the guilt-assuaging idea of boycotting chocolate. She would rather see us challenge politicians to make the world of chocolate a better place, improving the lives of others rather than ostentatiously depriving ourselves.

And in the meantime, those who want to do their bit for chocolate politics are opting for certified fair-trade chocolate, which provides a premium to growers and their communities. Until recently, this put dedicated chocolate-lovers in a horrible quandary, a face-off between doing right and eating well. "A lot of fair-trade chocolate was crap," says David Castellan of Soma Chocolatemaker in Toronto. The fallback position for conscientious connoisseurs was to buy organic chocolate or local "single-origin" chocolate in hopes that the premium prices paid for more rigorous farming methods or a greater attention to artisanal production would end up in the hands of the people who needed it most. But now, Mr. Castellan says, "the quality of fair trade is much better. You can go for the beans with the good history because they taste good."

John Allemang is a Globe and Mail feature writer who contributes regularly to the Focus section.