Thursday, November 25, 2004

convenient thanksgiving dinner

Convenience foods have become so entrenched and available in North America that entire feasts can be prepared from them. Thanksgiving, the quintessential American "banquet" meal, something that home cooks tend to aspire to, a holiday which is only celebrated officially in the U.S. (4th Thursday in November), Argentina (same as Brazil's since the 1990s), Canada (second Monday in October), Japan (Kinro-Kansha-no-hi November 23), Liberia, and Korea (Ch'usok), can be duplicated entirely with prepared foods for about the same cost as two large pizzas. One should note that Thanksgiving is celebrated differently in the Americas than in Asia.
The implications to the American-Macro culture is astounding and indicates an even greater reliance of the culture on convenience foods and is hard for many to take. Even more astounding is that in many urban areas some families will rely completely on fast food?in 2003 at least one national fast food chain was selling deep fried whole turkey in November, or use even easier to prepare convenience foods such as TV dinners for Thanksgiving dinners.
Modern U.S. young adults, especially college students who for various reasons can not travel home for the holiday, typically are not familiar with cooking their own food as a result of fast food restaurants and convenience foods. Young adults, separated by distance from their extended families, in the US may be tempted into purchasing expensive precooked Thanksgiving dinners or going to restaurants such as Denny's on Thanksgiving, both further signs of dependence on the food processing and restaurant industries. Convenience foods created the situation and can be used to correct this to some extent by creating the image of a home-cooked meal, which normally would take hours to prepare. Inexpensive frozen pre-cooked whole turkey breasts became widely available in the late 1990s allowing a Thanksgiving dinner consisting completely of convenience food.
As of 2003, the cost of such a dinner (for 6-8 people) is about $20, less money than it takes to feed the same amount of people pizza. Likewise if the same number of people would go to a Denny's restaurant on Thanksgiving it would cost more than preparing this.

2 comments:

Banjo Jones said...

what happened to TF?

Lake Jackson Citizen said...

Banjo,
I was totally destroyed by the election and had no will to continue the blog. I "deleted" it from my list of blogs with Blogger and someone came along and claimed the title and contents for their own. One piece remains here that I wrote--the one about TX high school football teams from small towns. I now see that "Cute Buddy" claims it as his own. Think I could sue him/her?
Sorry you closed your shop. I enjoyed reading it.
TF