Time flies. Given that it’s been a while since I checked in with a contribution to the blog you might be asking what I’ve been up to. I’m not sure how to explain my inactivity. It’s not exactly that I’ve been busy- although I have been focusing on other activities more than COC. It’s not exactly that I’ve lost interest in posting – although the amount of comments suggests that either no one is reading COC or, if they are, they don’t much care for the content. It doesn’t matter. I get drawn back here like a moth to the flame. I just seem incapable of staying away. Once more I’m speaking my mind and letting it all hang out. Today, Thanksgiving is on my mind. Thanksgiving is almost on us and, dog gone it, I’m excited. I can’t explain but, no matter the reason, today I’m thankful.
Being thankful comes easy to Americans. We live in the greatest country ever. We have great traditions and a glorius track record of accomplishments. Thanksgiving is a time when we celebrate our history but there is more to Thanksgiving than political history and philosophy. Thanksgiving is also a celebration of abundance and a successful harvest. It’s a time to indulge the appetites and cravings suppressed throughout the rest of the year and relase the inner glutton that gets beaten down at other times.
Happy Thanksgiving from the Cantakerous Old Coots
I’t only natural to feel Thankful at Thanksgiving when you can finally free your inner gourmand. At last you can take a seat at a dining table loaded with delicious food and dig in with reckless abandon. After long months of watching your weight, counting your calories and measuring you cholesterol, it’s time to indulge. Thanksgiving provides an excuse to stuff yourself like a hog without worrying about snide comments deriding your expanding paunch. Finally it’s time to eat big like your grandparents instead of your teenage grand daughter and enjoy the bounty of our fruitful country. Thanksgiving embodies traditional American values as translated into a bountiful feast.
The Thanksgiving table is always filled with the good stuff, butter basted turkey with rich stuffing, tasty vegetables, both candied and creamed to better enhance their goodness, luscious deserts and delightful libations to wash it all down. There is nothing parsemonious about Thenksgiving. Thanksgiving distills all the food traditions from all the countries of the world brought to America and made American. Thanksgiving embodies the bounty of the American fruited plains and the legacy of the American melting pot in glorious exuberance.
Good food and ample portions used to be part of the American lifestyle but increasingly this way of life is disparaged and ridiculed. These traditions, once widely accepted as representing the best in good living face a growing threat from the nanny state nutritian police. More and more Americans are urged to eat ‘healthy’ and are brainwashed into thinking that middle aged men should have 28 inch waists. Traditional and tasty food is becoming reconfigured to eliminate evil fat and carbs. Thanksgiving is our one celebration where tradition still holds and food is still rich, tasty and abundant. On Thanksgiving it is still permitted to stuff yourself silly and eat all the goodies that tastes really good without remorse. Health nuts claim that there is nothing wrong with the traditional Thanksgiving feast that can’t be fixed by eliminating fat and carbohydrates. They insist that you can have all the pleasures of a Thanksgiving feast and still be skinny as a teenager. Some of them even manage to do it but all you have to do is look at their faces and you know they are faking it. Still the brainwashing continues and more and more people forget what good food tastes like. Turkey is relatively healthy but cooking it right requires tasty and caloric embellishment with butter basting and a rich, delicious stuffing. Vegetables are favorites of the health nuts but are at their best when candied, creamed and buttered to delicious excess. Deserts are off limits to health nuts but central to a Thanksgiving orgy. Follow that dinner with pie- or make that pies- and Thanksgiving becomes a gluttonous frenzy with a football game to rest your palate before one last bed time stuffing. My tastebuds are quiverring in anticipation. It’s the one day of the year when the health police shut up.
As we celebrate our history and appreciation for our country and the delightful traditions, customs and eating pleasure that make up our national heritage, it’s also a time for reflection and some serious questions. With the abundance of cooking traditions brought here from all corners of the world, how is it that good traditional food today is villified and mocked. Why are we constaintly urged to consume tastless and unsatisfying lo-cal food. Why are we bombarded with bastardized recipes that claim the names of our traditional favorites but have been denuded of all the flavorfull components of those dishes? What can you make of grocery shelves containing fat-free cream, no-fat yogurt, sugar-free ice cream and glutlen-free bread. Are we a first world country with a third world pantry? How have we tolerated nutrition cops to foist turkey bacon on our plates- let alone tofurky?
Given our President’s proclivity to bypass government processes and the First Lady’s peculiar food fetishes, how much longer will free spirits who treasure the goodness of our food traditions be permitted to indulge in holiday gourmandizing even just one time each year? The next executive order will probably mandate non-fat Thanksgiving. Clearly our countries best day’s are behind us and the well-packed bellies that keep us from seeing the bathroom scale will soon disappear.
This Coot will be celebrating Thanksgiving with exuberance and gusto. This might be the last real Thanksgiving ever. I’m taking no chances. My ears will be sealed to critical voices and any suggestions that I don’t need that second helping or third piece of pie. This Thanksgiving, I’ll be eating like there’s no tomorrow.
