Thanksgiving is just around the corner! Since your meal might look a little different this year with less family gathered around the table, you might as well shake the whole holiday up by trying a vegan Thanksgiving!
There is truly no better year to try going vegan for Thanksgiving because of how different everything will be anyway! Worried that Grandpa will not be open minded enough to try your vegan fo-turkey? Who cares! He won’t be there anyway because of COVID safety precautions! Making your whole Thanksgiving meal vegan could also be a fun way for you and your immediate family or close group of friends to try something new and fun during these unprecedented times. Also, if it is too expensive for you to do the whole meal vegan, you can just make a few dishes that will help ease the strain on the environment that big holidays, like Thanksgiving, cause.
Turkey, and all meat products really, have such a detrimental effect on our environment. According to HuffPost, “the carbon footprint of a 16-pound turkey creates a total of 34.2 pounds of CO2 — the same amount produced by gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, rolled biscuits and apple pie combined.” Think about how many families there are in the United States. Then, think of how many turkeys will be killed, bought, and eaten by all those millions of families.. Now, think of the extreme damage that 34.2 pounds of CO2 multiplied by the number of turkeys American families consume every year on Thanksgiving. That environmental impact should scare you. It scares me.
But, you know what shouldn’t scare you? A vegan Thanksgiving! It’s really not as hard as it seems to cook vegan meals. To help you get started, down-below, I have shared two amazing vegan recipes I found online that correspond with popular American recipes, and they happen to also be my two personal favorite Thanksgiving goodies. There are plenty of online sites and recipes that you can follow step-by-step to cook more staple vegan Thanksgiving foods as well. Some of my favorite vegan cooking websites are: Nora Cooks, Oh She Glows, and Tasty has a great vegan section.
While you cook your sustainable meal, maybe you can think about how while Thanksgiving has evolved into a traditional American holiday where we give thanks for the blessings and gifts in our lives, it’s history is widely misunderstood. It is very important to remember that the first settlers in this country, the same people that started the tradition of Thanksgiving, were imperialists who killed hundreds of thousands of indigenous people. The story we were all taught about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans eating together happily and sharing their food was taught to us in a form of nationalism for the United States. That mild, children’s story has many historical inaccuracies and leaves out how the colonists brought deadly diseases over from Europe and how they massacred and slaughtered the “friendly Indians” that are depicted in the history books.