Update: Gregg Easterbrook adds more. Excerpt:

In other NFL news, Thanksgiving has become Throwback Day, with teams to wear
old-fashioned uniforms and old logos on the NFL.com home page. TMQ suggests this
menu for your own personal Throwback Thanksgiving:

• Wild turkey, shot with a musket and hand-plucked.
  
• Dried maize; no corn-on-the-cob.
  
• Ample, overflowing servings of lobster. (The Pilgrims considered lobster
  tasteless and complained in their diaries of having to eat it so often.)
  
• Seal meat.
  
• Hard apple cider. (Till the early 1800s or so, hard cider was in rural
  North America considered the only totally safe beverage, because the alcohol
  killed waterborne pathogens; children often drank diluted hard cider and went
  through the day slightly tipsy.)
  
• For desert: plums, grapes and stewed pumpkin. (There is no chance the
  Pilgrims ate pie at the first Thanksgiving, because they had no refined sugar.
  Until the 1800s, most Americans rarely tasted anything containing refined
  sugar.)

As you dig into your turkey, stuffing and pecan pie, washed down with a $10
bottle of wine superior in quality to any wine available to the 17th-century
kings of France, remember how hard your ancestors worked, and how they
sacrificed, in the dream that someday their descendants would be warm, well-fed
and secure against nature. Considering that your forebears just a century ago
had an average lifespan of 46 years and often shivered during winters while
eating mostly salt-preserved food, try to get through turkey day without
complaining about anything, okay? Happy Throwback Thanksgiving!

Posted by: Physics Geek at 05:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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