Because it is Thanksgiving Again

For the first few years after I came to the US, I was interested in learning about everything here, including the holidays, so I ate turkey and went to traditional Thanksgiving dinners. But gradually, I have come to detest Thanksgivng, as I wrote in my blog over a year ago about the Thanksgiving trip we took to Mexico to avoid having to spend it in the US, eating turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, which I would avoid even on non-holidays.

It is Thanksgiving again. This year, because my little boy Winston is not even 6 months old and the flu season makes me (an already obsessive mother)want to hide him in a germ-free environment for the entire winter, I did not go anywhere. I still did not have turkey though. Instead, I have the nanny from Sichuan cook a Chinese banquet and invited a friend’s family over. Meanwhile, I could not help lamenting about the American cuisine to a friend who lives in culinary heaven – Shanghai.

I wrote, “I can’t believe that the best meal of the year is turkey. It really says something about the American cuisine.”

He answered,

“Cuisine-wise, the USA has not outgrown its frontier outpost primitiveness, and will probably never do so.

Come to think of it, most Northern tier countries have bad food - UK, Germany, Sweden, Russia, etc. Deep thinking seems to go hand in hand with bad weather and bland food. People in warm weather and with good food are too busy being happy to have profound thinking...”

That observation intrigued me, and I thought more and replied:

“Regarding the correlation between cuisine and thinking, I agree with you. But how about the Chinese then? The Chinese cuisine (or cuisines to be more accurate) is very good, but the Chinese have produced a lot of philosophers too. Besides, how about the Greeks and the Romans then? They have produced a lot of thinkers too…

However, when I think more carefully, I realize that the Greek, Roman and Chinese thinkers/philosophers were all from two thousand years ago, whereas the German, English, Scandinavian and Russian thinkers were from the past few centuries. Perhaps that means most people were starving to death over 2000 years ago, and the condition for thinking deeply is to not think constantly about the next meal. That’s why where the climate was okay and the food was more abundant (at least relatively speaking) there were at least some intellectual people whose stomachs were full enough to think.

In the past few centuries, I suppose in most regions/countries, at least in the intelligentsia class, getting enough to eat was not an issue any more. Therefore, if the cuisines were too good and there were too many distractions, they would never bother to think, and they would be too happy to think, as you said. In cold climate where the food was bland, people had nothing else to do (no indoor swimming pools in Germany, no central heating in England, and no TV/movies in Scandinavia) so they ended up thinking.

That explains why the Greeks and Romans had Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, but the later Greeks and Italians stopped thinking altogether. Also, all the schools of thoughts in China (Confucius, Mencius, Daoism, etc) were all from over 2000 years ago, and after that, the Chinese culture gave away to romantic poets such as Li Bai writing about getting drunk all the time…”

I thought that I was quite clever! 