The Sustainable Thanksgiving - Planning a Celebration of Food, Environment and Spirit

You can make this year’s Thanksgiving more meaningful by making your celebration more healthful, environmentally friendly and authentic. If you plan ahead and keep things simple, this more sustainable type of Thanksgiving doesn’t have to involve more work or expense, so it can satisfy your appetite, your spirit and your conscience.

First, start with a local harvest. The first Thanksgiving featured a regional bounty of fruits, vegetables, grains and meats native to the 17th Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, landscape, such as deer, lobster, dried gooseberries, pumpkin (though probably not pumpkin pie as we know it) and rabbit. While that menu might not please the modern holiday crowd, you can celebrate your own area’s bounty by buying as many fixings – potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, apples, pumpkins, squash and more – at your local farmer’s market instead of at a chain grocery store, where much of the food is trucked from hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

Second, make the centerpiece of your dinner table a sustainably, humanely raised turkey. Check your local food co-ops or farmer’s markets, or search online for organic poultry farms in your area (be sure to start looking well ahead of time). And if you can find a heritage turkey producer (someone who raises historic American turkey sub-breeds, as opposed to the Large White variety that dominates industrial farms) in your area, all the better; people who choose these types of birds claim they are firmer, richer and more flavorful than standard turkeys. 

Third, invest in a nice set of cloth dinner napkins. A set of four sateen-finish, organic cotton napkins might set you back $12 to $19 or more, but you won’t have to buy attractive paper napkins for the rest of the holidays … or the coming year. Even if you figure you spend only $2.50 every two months on ordinary paper napkins, that amounts to $15 for the year, and contributes a lot of waste to the environment as well.