Thanksgiving during Covid-19: Inventing New Traditions (Nov. 19, 2020)

Thanksgiving during Covid-19: Inventing New Traditions  (Nov. 19, 2020)

 

With the new surge of cases in Covid-19 throughout the U.S., people are looking at spending the Thanksgiving holidays at home without the usual gatherings of family and friends. The holiday was officially established as a way to unify the country during the Civil War (Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community is relevant here—simultaneous feasting gives us something in common), but today it is actually about affirming that we have communities to belong to. And the bigger the turkey, the bigger one’s community.

It is not surprising, then, that the thought of not being able to visit and eat with others for this year’s holiday is upsetting. It flies in the face of tradition, and traditions give us a sense of grounding, reminding us of life’s continuities. But tradition is not something crystalized in the past. Neither is Thanksgiving. 

As a folklorist, I know this, and study those non-crystalizations. I have long researched and documented regional and ethnic variations of Thanksgiving dinner, but also in my own life, have had to constantly reinvent the celebration. Living in a variety of countries as a child, our dinner table usually included dishes from a variety of cuisines, along with my mother’s southern and 1950s sensibilities (think of a fully laden table with every dish “fancied up”). With a partner from New England, I found in my own family the need to mix regional aesthetics and dishes. I usually “fixed” my dishes on Wednesday (cornbread dressing, sweet potatoes, pecan pie); he cooked the turkey, white bread dressing, mashed potatoes, mashed turnips on Thursday. When the children were little, we would spend the morning volunteering at the animal shelter so the workers could go home earlier. As they got older, they contributed their own ethos and aesthetics to the meal: tofurkey instead of turkey, green bean casserole made from scratch to celebrate their Midwestern heritage, roasted brussel sprouts. The meals still tend to be eclectic with various guests bringing their own specialties. Last year, it was Korean fish (a whole one) and chop chae (a “cellophane” noodles dish) with a Korean friend in town. 

 

            This year, we’re already planning a virtual cooking spree and meal, with family members zooming in from Ireland, Wisconsin, and Ohio (and probably Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina, if we can coordinate it). I’m introducing a new recipe—potato and squash gnocci from my friend, Betty Belanus, another folklorist who knows that traditions are dynamic. I bought a vegan “turkey roll,” but I’ll probably save it, and make stuffed acorn squash instead, something that I served at my daughter, Hannah’s engagement party in 2019. I’ll also make the apple-cranberry-walnut cake that I got from the Moosewood cookbook 33(?!) years ago and have made every Thanksgiving since. I might even try making green jello salad from a vegan gelatin mix. I was usually the only one that ate it, but it was a private tradition between my mother and me. She made it in a Chinese zodiac mold, her own privately subversive act against the suburban housewife culture to which she was expected to conform. And, I’ll experiment with other dishes, making them in smaller quantities since there won’t be a full house to eat the leftovers. 

 

This year will simply be more innovations that might in the future join the practices that we will call tradition. I’m already hearing from friends about creative alternatives. We will focus more on sharing recipes, virtual cooking, zoom dinners, and “quarantinis.” Humor is mixed in with serious suggestions—like my friend Jennifer’s post of a turkey “carved” from spam--but the point of all of these is that what the holiday really celebrates is belonging. It is definitely about the food, too, but the food is just a ruse for

gathering people together. That togetherness can be in a variety of forms, including virtual ones. Like the cartoon above says (and which happens to be by my son, Will Santino), that’s what the new traditions will recognize and celebrate. With a little imagination, we can all be together apart. And still eat too much!

Comfort Foodways, Covid-19, and Liminality: Suspending Rules, Making New Ones

 Comfort Foodways, Covid-19, and Liminality: Suspending Rules, Making New Ones 

(Nov. 16, 2020)

 

One way the American public along with American food industries and food media have dealt with the covid-19 pandemic has been to turn to comfort food. It makes sense that they would. According to medical sociologist, Julie Locher, comfort food is food that people consume in order to alleviate stress. That the pandemic has caused a great deal of stress is obvious. Another way to understand this turn, though, is to look at both as being liminal states of being.

            Developed by scholars in ritual studies, folkloristics, and cultural anthropology (Falassi, 1986; Turner, 1969; van Gennep, 1960), liminality is technically a period in between two stages in a rite of passage. During such times, the rules of the old stage no longer apply, but the ones for the new stage are not yet established, relieving participants of the usual expectations for proper behavior. The concept was expanded and applied to other times in our lives as well as spaces in which the normal rules are suspended. (Tourism scholars, in particular, have used this idea.) 

From this perspective, we can see commonalities between comfort food and the Covid-19 pandemic. Both are times of suspending rules. With the pandemic, we have left behind an earlier stage with its established rules and will move eventually to a post-pandemic world. In the meantime, we’re not quite sure how to behave properly.

Comfort food, as used in the U.S., is a similar suspension of

 the normal guidelines for “healthy” eating. It can be an excuse to eat foods considered un-nutritious, “fattening,” or otherwise “bad” for us, but the need to relieve stress makes it morally ok to eat those foods--although we might regret it later on when we weigh ourselves. Comfort foodways can also serve as a medium through which individuals are playing with a potential new order. Will calories still count; will sugar still make us “hyper;” will carbohydrates still translate into pounds on our hips? 

This liminality in itself is oftentimes stressful, but it also offers the potential to develop new relationships with food. Foodways activities that were previously mundane chores —shopping, organizing cupboards, consuming weekday meals, cleaning up- are now being recognized as providing opportunities for participation in larger social networks as well as for performing of identities, values, and relationships. This time is forcing us to appreciate those everyday activities as meaningful ones. 

Also, disruptions caused by the pandemic to those routines can make us aware of the connectedness of our own culinary experiences to the larger food system and to the comforts-discomforts of others. Comfort food, as thought of now, tends to be about the wellbeing of the individual. Can we expand comfort foodways to take into account how the individual interacts with and impacts food systems and culture in general? Perhaps these new relationships will be permanent, encouraging us to not only find comfort in all food and foodways, but to work to offer those opportunities to others as well. The liminality of this time, then, offers a chance to create and establish new—and better--rules.