Year: 2013

The increasingly popular “Daniel Fast” provides yet another approach to weight loss:

In the Bible, the Jewish noble Daniel and his companions are captured by the Babylonians and inducted into the service of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonians offer Daniel and his men rich food (“the King’s meat” and wine), but Daniel was wary of God’s prohibition of “unclean foods.” … Daniel said he and his friends would eat a diet of only vegetables (“pulse”). After 10 days, they grew healthier and stronger than the Babylonians, and his diet became a small demonstration of his opposition to the King’s power.

This passage is occasionally used to encourage Christians to resist the corrupting influences of the outside world. But several years ago, some Protestant churches began to take the “diet” aspect of Daniel’s story literally.

Motivated by both faith and fitness, today many protestant Christians around the country are, like Daniel, occasionally limiting themselves to fruits and vegetables for 21-day increments. Several such believers told The Atlantic that while their intention for the initial fast was simply to enter a period of Lent-like self-denial in deference to their Lord, they have since found that the fast broke a life-long pattern of unhealthy eating and seems to have set them on a course toward better nutrition even after the 21 days ended. Now, a longer-term version of the Daniel fast is being promoted by the California-based Saddleback Church, the seventh-largest church in the US. …

In 2010, Rick Warren, the best-selling author and leader of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, began to notice that his own and his congregation’s waistlines were expanding. On Jan. 15, 2011, Warren began to push what he calls “the Daniel Plan,” a year-round program that encompasses exercise groups, small-group gatherings, and a diet composed of 70 percent fruits and vegetables and 30 percent lean protein and whole grains—less strict than most Daniel fasts but still far more virtuous than the typical American diet. By last year, an estimated 15,000 people were taking part in Warren’s Daniel Plan, both in person and online. In December, Warren will publish a book based on his version of the regime, The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life, which he co-wrote with psychiatrist Daniel Amen and physician Mark Hyman.

In October 1863, in the midst of civil war, Lincoln reflected on the year’s blessings in his Thanksgiving proclamation:

John Eicher reflects on today’s meaning within the national narrative:

One of the most powerful features of the Thanksgiving story is its emphasis on unity—between different cultures, and between humans and God. Significantly, the Thanksgiving story was advanced when it was far from certain that a (re)union of North and South was possible. When Lincoln invited the nation to collectively “set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” he not only wanted to bind the nation together, but to bind the nation with the transcendent and eternal God of Christianity— a powerful seal indeed.

Unity remains elusive in America. The Atlantic/Aspen Institute’s 2013 American Values Survey reports that 61 percent of Americans believe the nation has become “somewhat more” or “much more” divided over the past 10 years, and a surprising 20 percent of the population is doubtful that the United States can remain united as one country. We’re divided by fault lines of race, religion, politics and class. Yet national traditions live on.

Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Christians of all denominations, and even the separatist Amish celebrate these traditions in their own ways. For both religious and non-religious Americans, the spiritual unity embodied by the Thanksgiving story has been supplemented with new commercial and cultural practices—parades and football—that would likely surprise Lincoln. Thanksgiving has proven itself to be quite malleable and inclusive of most Americans, despite—or perhaps because of—its debatable origins. Myths live and die, mutate and adapt, according to the interests of the societies that carry them. On an individual level, we cannot escape our collective myths because they are so personal. They are the glue that allows us to cultivate solidarity with others and make sense of our individual experiences. Though many Americans question whether we can remain one indivisible nation in a political sense, the civic practices of celebrating our unity, and the ways we incorporate the national myth into our own identities, remain strong.

So this Thanksgiving weekend, as you drive on an interstate highway to visit relatives, spend a common currency at the mall, measure the weight of your turkey by United States customary units, or gather at the bar to watch the Cowboys or the Steelers, remember that unity in America is alive and well in the most routine, yet effluvial, ways.

Petula Dvorak talks to Dennis Zotigh, a cultural specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian:

“It makes me really mad — the Thanksgiving myth and what happens on Friday,” said Zotigh, who is a Kiowa, Santee Dakota and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Indian. He thinks the holiday, filled with stereotypes about Native Americans, damages Indians and non-Indians. “There are so many things wrong with the happy celebration that takes place in elementary schools and its association to American Indian culture; compromised integrity, stereotyping, and cultural misappropriation are three examples,” Zotigh wrote….

The National Day of Mourning is what the United American Indians of New England has called it since 1970, when they first led a march and protest to the area known as Plymouth Rock. Zotigh said he’s heard from Native American parents who sign their kids out of school on the day of their Thanksgiving reenactments. Their children have been punished in class for bringing up the American Indian’s side of the story and demanding that “the national moral atrocity of genocide” be acknowledged. Some simply call the day of national gorging “The Last Supper.”

Not everyone Dvorak spoke to felt the same way:

“Thanksgiving is like every day for us. Giving thanks is a big part of the native cultures. So the basic message of the holiday, that’s still part of who we are,” said Ben Norman, 32, a member of the Pamunkey tribe in Virginia. His tribe’s chief, Kevin Brown, said he travels to reservations all across America, and he hears about folks who won’t celebrate Thanksgiving. “But most people I know, we love eating and we love being together with family. And that’s what this day is about,” said Brown, 58. “I’m too busy eating and watching football to spend my life worrying about the past,” he said.

In 2011, Megan Gambino talked to Kathleen Wall, “a foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts,” about what the menu for the very first Thanksgiving would have looked like:

Turkey was not the centerpiece of the meal, as it is today, explains Wall. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons would have been available as well. “Passenger pigeons—extinct in the wild for over a century now—were so thick in the 1620s, they said you could hear them a quarter-hour before you saw them,” says Wall. “They say a man could shoot at the birds in flight and bring down 200.” …

It is possible that the birds were stuffed, though probably not with bread. (Bread, made from maize not wheat, was likely a part of the meal, but exactly how it was made is unknown.) The Pilgrims instead stuffed birds with chunks of onion and herbs. “There is a wonderful stuffing for goose in the 17th-century that is just shelled chestnuts,” says Wall. “I am thinking of that right now, and it is sounding very nice.” Since the first Thanksgiving was a three-day celebration, she adds, “I have no doubt whatsoever that birds that are roasted one day, the remains of them are all thrown in a pot and boiled up to make broth the next day. That broth thickened with grain to make a pottage.” In addition to wildfowl and deer, the colonists and Wampanoag probably ate eels and shellfish, such as lobster, clams and mussels.

Meanwhile, reviewing a history of turkey-carving, Heather Hess digs up some early advice:

The following instructions for cutting up a turkey first appeared in The Family Dictionary, or Household Companion (London, 1695), and were repeated verbatim in cookery books marketed at English housewives throughout the eighteenth century. Why not take a lesson from history this Thanksgiving?

Raise up the leg fairly, and open the Joint with the Point of your Knife, but take not off the Leg; then with your Knife lace down both Sides of the Breast, and open the Breast-pinion, but do not take it off; then raise the Merry-Thought betwixt the Breast-bone, and the top of it; then raise up the Brawn; then turn it outward upon both Sides, but not break it, nor cut it off; then cut off the Wing Pinions at the Joint, next the Body, and stick each Pinion, in the Place you turn’d the Brawn out; but cut off the sharp End of the Pinion, and take the middle Piece, and that will just fit in the Place.

If that doesn’t work, there is always the electric knife.

Marilynne Robinson has long argued against the stereotypical understanding of the Puritans as brooding killjoys who dressed in black. Here’s a passage from Robinson’s great essay, “Puritans and Prigs,” from her book The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought:

My reading of Puritan texts is neither inconsiderable nor exhaustive, so while I cannot say they yield no evidence of Puritanism as we understand the word, I can say they are by no means characterized by, for example, fear or hatred of the body, anxiety about sex, or denigration of women. This cannot by said of Christian tradition in general, yet for some reason Puritanism is uniquely regarded as synonymous with these preoccupations. Puritans are thought to have taken a lurid pleasure in the notion of hell, and certainly hell seems to have been much in their thoughts, though not more than it was in the thoughts of Dante, for example. We speak as though John Calvin invented the Fall of Man, when that was an article of faith universal in Christian culture…

Yet the way we speak and think about the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.

Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had a survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

(Image of Embarkation of the Pilgrims by Robert W. Weir, commissioned in 1837 for the United States Capitol Rotunda, via Wikimedia Commons)

Friedersdorf rolls his eyes at the president’s tweet encouraging people to talk about health insurance this Thanksgiving:

Once that conversation is over perhaps you could bring up reproductive rights, immigration reform, and judicial filibusters. They’re all important subjects of national concern. Why not set aside some time on Thanksgiving Day to discuss them too? Maybe just pick up the remote, turn off the football game, and ask everyone if you could have their attention while you explain how progressive public policy can improve their lives if only they do their part. They’ll appreciate it!

Similarly, J.D. Tuccille scoffs at a campaign that urges people to initiate holiday conversations about gun control:

I don’t know what holiday dinners are like at Michael Bloomberg’s house, but I suspect there’s an awful lot of picking at food while the windbag at the head of the table lectures the assembled guests about why he’s right and they’re all idiots. That’s the message I get from his pet Mayors Against Illegal Guns organization, which wants its loyal minions, if there are any, to sit down to their Thanksgiving feasts and immediately start fights with relatives they haven’t seen in a year about gun control. All you need is a handy list of tendentious talking points—and a shitload of patience from Cousin Bob, who rebuilds old pistols for fun and just wrapped himself around half a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Ann Friedman, who disagrees with her family on politics, is grateful that “when we’re together in person for visits or holidays, we’ve learned to steer clear of all vaguely political conversation”:

This live-and-let-live attitude has served us well for more than a decade, although we did learn tolerance the hard way. Unlike the vast majority of teenagers, who tend to agree with their parents’ outlook on politics, I was a burgeoning liberal atheist in a conservative Catholic household. I measured my political progress by the distance I created between my beliefs and theirs, and our fights were explosive. These days, I spend more time thinking about how to stay close to my family when our worldviews — political, religious, cultural — remain so far apart.

Then again, maybe fighting at the dinner table served a purpose:

I’ve always been jealous of friends who were raised by parents who read The New Yorker and had art-museum memberships and voted for liberal Democrats. But I’ve also long suspected that my beliefs wouldn’t have the same amount of fire behind them if I hadn’t forged them in contrast to those of my family. “The bottom line is I’m glad you think for yourself,” my mom said with discernible pride in her voice. “I think it’s better for you to have an opinion on your own, one that you’ve come to based on your feelings and beliefs and what drives you.” And now I’m a little bit sad I won’t be going home for Thanksgiving.

Philip Bump offers some basic tips to avoid conflict:

If someone brings up politics, treat it as you would any other unpleasant and undesired topic. Let’s say you’re sitting across from your grandmother, and she proceeds to describe the battery of tests to which she was subjected, revealing that her rash was impetigo that required a special cream for treatment. You do not want to talk about this, because it’s gross. What do you do? You change the topic. “Oh, well I’m glad they figured it out! Is that why you’re wearing that beautiful blouse, Gran? Where did you get it?” And: boom. Topic changed.

You have this skill. You know how to 1) be nice but also 2) not talk about things you don’t want to talk about. Worse comes to worse, you get up and go to the sideboard / kitchen / KFC for more sides. By the time you get back, the topic has likely changed regardless. In order to make Thanksgiving one that can be enjoyed by non-jerks, take this approach to political topics.

John Cook, on the other hand, relishes Thanksgiving throw-downs:

How Do I Know If I’m Winning? Think of it as one of those blue vs. red military exercises. When your adversary gets frustrated and inadvertently sputters out a transparently racist epithet (I once got my uncle to shout “because they’re swinging on trees and eating bananas!” during a Thanksgiving fight about the Sandinistas), that’s like capturing their flag.