My Thanksgiving Was Different, Too.

This Thanksgiving I, too, thought differently about the food my family ate, the reasons for our celebration and the origins of the customs we enact automatically. One of the elements I was particularly interested in researching was the origins of some of our favorite foods. As a lover of side dishes, I focused on a few of the things we always prepare for Thanksgiving dinner: green beans, corn, and baked squash. This brought to mind the Three Sisters of Iroquois deep history. The cultivation of beans, corn and squash in mounds together is an ancient and highly effective practice: the corn stalks grow tall and act as trellises for the beans while the squash vines spread over the ground keeping out weeds and hungry four-leggeds. These co-habitating plants also enriched the soil with the nutrients each needs and the other supplies: truly an example of an original symbiotic relationship.We have gone far from this type of relationship with the growth of our food....in fact, it seems almost everything about food sourcing in this industrial world is about distance from the source. As I researched these three important crops I had an "ah-ha" moment at the complexity of it all, so easily understood in the terms set forth by the original instructions of this land. And it seems to me that perhaps a reminent of this way of thinking still exists today, even if in the smallest of ways, in the foods we still pair together.~M.J. Spring