Today in the United States, people are taking the day to celebrate being grateful for everything they have. Some people don’t have much to celebrate and so today’s challenge is to, “help a family enjoy a good meal today. Donate food to a local food bank.”

FUN FACTS

Thanksgiving is an ancient tradition that is celebrated by many different cultures and can be traced back thousands of years to Nature Cults. It was, and still is, a celebration of all the hard work necessary to reap the rewards of the fall harvest season.

While many people in North America sit down to a dinner of turkey, ham, potatoes, gravy, bread, veggies, cranberry sauce, apple pie and pumpkin pie, the Natives enjoyed a very different meal. They relied solely on locally grown foods.

If you’re interested, this is what an original Thanksgiving dinner would have looked like:

• bird brain stew, from the Cree tribe
• buffalo stew, from the Lakota also called Tanka-me-a-lo
• corn, beans and squash
• grains like quinoa, amaranth and barley
• sunflower
• Nokake, Algonquin hoecakes
• salmon, seafood, mushrooms, and berries
• cornbread
• Succotash, a trio of lima beans, tomatoes and corn
• Psindamoakan, a Lenape hunter’s food made of parched cornmeal mixed with maple sugar
• Wojape, a Plains Indian pudding of mashed, cooked berries
• Acorn mush, from the Miwok people
• Mutton stew Navajo
• Stink Fish, Eskimo dish, of dried fish, underground, until nice & ripe then eaten for later consumption, also done with fish heads.
• Walrus Flipper Soup, Eskimo dish made from walrus flippers.
• Salted Salmon Eskimo dish, brined salmon in a heavy concentration of salt water left for months to soak up salts.
• Dry meats Jerky, smoked Salmon strips
• Piki bread Hopi
• Bean bread, made with corn meal and beans; popular among the Cherokee

Hmmm… some of this sounds yummy… But I think I’ll stick to the turkey. What do you think, Do Gooders? Any of these dishes appeal to you?