Juicy turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes topped with pecans, stuffing and cranberry sauce are many of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes.

But they may hold more importance to their consumers than simply satisfying an appetite, said Lucy Long, Folklorist and assistant professor of the popular culture department, during the Brown Bag Luncheon in Hanna Hall yesterday.

“Food can become something that is emotionally laden,” said Long. “Why is it that food can carry such emotion, such power?”

Long talked about how Thanksgiving dinner represents more to people than they realize and it isn’t always the picture perfect event that people idealize it to be.

“It represents the intersection of three domains; food, family and holiday,” she explained. “Each one of those can be extremely emotional and each can carry a lot of memories for people … you put them all together and it is a recipe for disaster.”

Long believes that Thanksgiving is essentially about celebrating family and unity.

“Family members feel they are a part of something that is larger than themselves,” she added.

Among the women at the luncheon was freshman Megan McAuley, who agreed that food and the traditional essence that is so often attached to it can cause problems at times.

“A bunch of [my family] run in the turkey trot every year and someone usually always wins a turkey which we eat, and one year no one won it so everyone was disappointed in the ‘backup’ turkey from the grocery store,” she said, causing laughter around the room.

Another person who made the ‘mistake’ of imposing a change from Midwestern white bread stuffing to corn bread stuffing in her family’s traditional Thanksgiving meal was Mary Krueger, director of the Women’s Center.

“It’s been seven years and I still hear about it … my family will say, ‘remember the year that Mary ruined everything by making corn bread stuffing?'” she said.

Another point made by Krueger was the family’s strive for consistency in every dish each year.

“People make fun of the green bean casserole but it still has to be there,” she said with a chuckle, causing many others nod in agreement.

Long also mentioned that “food ways” – which means the “network of activities surrounding food, like how it’s made, where it came from, who prepared it” – can have a lot to do with why people are attached to certain foods and traditions.

“It’s through food ways that personal memories get attached to food, embedded in food,” she explained, adding that product, procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, consumption and clean-up are seven elements of the meal that make the difference to people.

“If your mother takes off three days of work to prepare this Thanksgiving dinner, will it mean more to you?” she asked, watching as people nodded. “It better,” she added, causing laughter in the room.

On the contrary to present day, Long said, Thanksgiving originally was a festival-like celebration for the Pilgrims’ hard work through winter and spring and to celebrate their first harvest.

“It was not a family centered event, it was about the Pilgrim men and Native American men hanging out and playing sports,” she said, adding that the women tended to the preparation of the meal.

Long thinks that modern day Thanksgiving also expresses families’ regional identities, for example, the North celebrates differently from the South.

“It’s very purposefully a celebration of regional identity for us,” she said. “It’s stating to people that you are willing to be part of a social network.”

Enactment and presentation of the family structure also occurs during Thanksgiving, Long said.

“It can be an idealization of the family structure,” she said, explaining that people who may not get along will try to for the day.

“It can be an intensification of the family structure, or it can be an inversion of the family structure,” she said, which means that the things that are normally done by the family are intensified, or the normal things are done by opposite people and sometimes in opposite ways.

Using this knowledge of the Thanksgiving dinner can help us better understand why some people get upset, eat too much, or eat too little, Long said.

“Food is not just food, it represents identity … the past is brought in, and the present circumstances come in as well,” she said. “We can use this knowledge to manipulate our own Thanksgiving.”

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