On Thanksgiving

If I had a penny for every time someone tells me “Did you know that the Thanksgiving story is made up?!?!?!” upon finding out that I am a food historian of Colonial America I would probably have enough money to cover a subway ride. My response is always sarcastic, a language in which I’m fluent. “No! I had no idea! Tell me more!” They usually don’t, and we move on.

Going by the frequency with which I’ve had these interactions in the past, you would think that Americans are well aware that the Thanksgiving story is, indeed, a myth. But you’d be wrong. I don’t have hard data or statistics to back this up, but I do have a long list of recent(ish) articles dedicated to debunking the myth of Thanksgiving.