Re-heating the “First” Thanksgiving: the Thanksgiving episode as settler colonial narrative

Frame 1: reification of ‘tradition’ and the primary place of the nuclear family

Thanksgiving-themed episodes of culinary television reify monolithic conceptions of holiday rituals via continual appeals to a transhistorical conception of ‘tradition’. Despite the fact that practices associated with Thanksgiving are ‘historically and socially particularistic’, television programmes often present these practices as ‘universalistic and unchanging’ (Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991: 23). In other words, it is not that Thanksgiving tradition is actually universal and historically durable, so much as it is narrativized as such, both in the domestic, everyday practices of ordinary people and in media texts. In the episodes included in my sample, tradition is primarily communicated through the central positioning of particular decorative and/or food objects such as ‘the Thanksgiving table’ or roast turkey, which come to function as signifiers for the idea of the holiday more generally through their repetition.

In particular, the Thanksgiving episode figures certain elements of the monolithic Thanksgiving dinner—turkey, stuffing, potatoes, pie, etc.—as symbols of tradition and family, which are imagined as inextricably linked with the image of the family table upon which the Thanksgiving meal is served. Throughout the episodes included in my sample, Thanksgiving ‘tablescapes’ utilizing “traditional” foods and autumnal colors are visually foregrounded, particularly in episode intro packages, calling upon culinary iconographies of abundance traditionally associated with the holiday. As Siskind describes, part of the comforting milieu facilitated by the ‘traditional’ Thanksgiving family table is that ‘across the nation members of every other household are simultaneously feasting on stuffed turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. The experience is part of feeling oneself a member of the nation, of the imagined community, taking part in a 400-year tradition’ (1992: 169). The conflation between food objects and the holiday table with the idea of ‘tradition’ and ‘the family’ as well as ‘the nation’ and ‘the imagined community’ illuminates how food comes to metonymically stand for heteropatriarchal, colonial understandings of the family, which, drawing from Fanon (1967) and Rifkin (2010, 2017), are themselves sites of negotiation for the idea of ‘the nation’. While many holidays may facilitate such feelings of national belonging or citizenship, Thanksgiving in particular constructs a sense of continuity with the United States as a nation through its callbacks to the nation’s own history. Thanksgiving, its ‘traditional’ foods, the ‘family’ table and indeed the family itself, and nationhood/national belonging are deeply intertwined and mutually reified through repeated, quotidian practices.

Throughout the episodes included in my sample, the linkage between Thanksgiving and family (as symbolically represented by the food upon the table, as well as tablescape decorations) is centralised. For instance, in the Iron Chef America episode ‘Thanksgiving: Past and Present’, host/commentator Alton Brown states early in the episode that ‘this battle is rich in tradition’, and celebrity chef Bobby Flay declares ‘when you think Thanksgiving, you think family’. Brown and Flay’s statements reiterate Thanksgiving as a space in which ‘tradition’ plays a central role, but also position Thanksgiving as a familial culinary affair. Flay’s statement, in particular, expressly links the tradition of the Thanksgiving holiday with the nuclear family. Returning to Siskind, ‘Thanksgiving…invest[s] the set of meanings incorporated in being an American with the emotional intensity and significance of family’ (1992: 167). Siskind’s analysis illuminates how Thanksgiving entwines the idea of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family with the categories of American citizenship and the identity of the nation as a whole. Flay’s centralisation of ‘family’ as the primary association with Thanksgiving literalises Rifkin’s claim that ‘bourgeois kin-making and homemaking function as a topos for the boundaries of the nation-state’ (2010: 50); while ‘family’ may be the central associative category tied to the idea of the Thanksgiving holiday, the idea of ‘family’, particularly in the context of the settler-colonial and nationalist origins of Thanksgiving, is not ideologically neutral. The foregrounding of family within the discursive scene of Iron Chef America demonstrates how reality food television participates in wider discursive constructions of family and the nation in relation to Thanksgiving.

Furthermore, Flay’s and Brown’s comments represent a related pattern across Thanksgiving episodes: the role of the expert (often a host or judge) in narrating the programme’s content for viewers. The formal conventions of reality competitions often require a host, whose primary job is to describe/interpret the programme, as well as to represent authority and expertise. Figures like Flay and Brown interpret the meaning of the action for the audience within the context of the capitalist-driven food competition; this framework seems particularly relevant when most of these hosts are men, most are US American, and almost all are white. (Across the eight programmes I studied, every host except for Top Chef’s host-judge Padma Lakshmi and Iron Chef America’s [largely sidelined] chairman Mark Dacascos are white, and every host aside from Lakshmi, Ultimate Thanksgiving Challenge’s host Giada De Laurentiis, and Battle for the Bird’s co-host Anne Burrell are male.) Consistently, figures like Brown, Ted Allen, Tom Colicchio, or Carson Cressley (all white men) occupy the role of guide and interpretive authority. In the reality cooking competition’s structure, the role of the host seems analogous to the stereotypical role of the head of the Thanksgiving table: orienting participants to the ritual, managing the flow of meaning even as the ritual depends upon the work of others. While Flay’s statement that ‘when you think Thanksgiving, you think family’ perhaps does not inherently call to mind the ways that the family does ideological work for conceptions of the boundaries of the nation, his words nonetheless participate in the larger semiotic chain of meanings that ultimately work to ‘encourage[] submission, not to a sovereign providence, but to the project of the nation’ (Willis, 2003: 154). The ‘domestic occasion’ of Thanksgiving is also then certainly a national occasion, one articulated through the symbolic set of food objects and the centralisation of particular forms of expertise and interpretive authority focalised upon the Thanksgiving table.

In the Cutthroat Kitchen episode ‘I’m Thanksgiving Up’, which features Thanksgiving-themed ‘sabotage’ challenges for the contestants to navigate, the restrictions of the Thanksgiving table become literal. The central sabotage of the episode’s first challenge required three out of four contestants to be fastened to and execute their mise en place upon a Thanksgiving family table. Alongside ‘sabotages’ featuring turkey, football, and sweet potatoes, the inclusion of the family table sabotage—a challenge that literally attaches contestants’ bodies and labour to the table itself—symbolically positions the table as one of Thanksgiving’s central signifiers. The table links the two key aspects of ‘traditional’ Thanksgiving—food and family—as both the surface food is served on and the site around which the family gathers. As August explains, culinary idioms demonstrate ‘residues of some of the internally contested contradictions of the community, such as the imaginations of race, home, and belonging’ (2012: 99). By focalising the Thanksgiving family table as a key symbol that represents the holiday as a whole, Cutthroat Kitchen reiterates the centrality of the family/the domestic to how Thanksgiving ‘tradition’ manifests, while also positing a kind of transhistorical quality to that ‘tradition’ in ways that occlude both the variety of human practices of the holiday in the present as well as the colonial, nationalist histories that undergird its past.

At the same time, as the chaining of the contestant to the table suggests, the ‘Thanksgiving family table’ carries the spectre of conflict, or what August calls ‘the internally contested contradictions of the community’ (2012: 99). Throughout ‘I’m Thanksgiving Up’, Alton Brown (who hosts both Cutthroat Kitchen and Iron Chef America) connects the Thanksgiving table and family to ideas of conflict or ‘issues’, making statements such as ‘we get all of our issues out on the table’, ‘you can’t choose your family’, and ‘the Thanksgiving table: the one place from which you can never escape’. In making such statements, Brown surfaces another common discourse associated with Thanksgiving: family conflict, instability, and strife. Brown’s utterances about the Thanksgiving table not only being a site of tradition and family, but also as the place where ‘we get issues out’ and the place ‘from which you can never escape’ echo larger cultural narratives about conflict at Thanksgiving—particularly around US national politics. As headlines reading ‘All Ages, Genders, Races Avoid Discussing Politics At Thanksgiving’(Buchholz, 2021) or ‘Americans Seek To Avoid Politics At the Thanksgiving Table’ (Stuart, 2021) from outlets like Forbes and NBC demonstrate, intra-family ideological conflict is also closely associated with the Thanksgiving table.

The forced family table sabotage from Cutthroat Kitchen illuminates some of the ideological work that the tradition-family frame accomplishes. In this frame, surfacing the instabilities and contradictions of the nuclear family structure (which, as Rifkin reminds us, ‘can provide a ‘naturally’ insulated model that creates a sense of boundedness for the nation’ [2010: 80]) can be the very mechanism by which those contradictions are recuperated and then disposed of. Throughout the Thanksgiving episodes, even as potential for conflict is highlighted, it is often treated as a source of humour, rather than as evidence of inconsistency, instability, or genuine struggle. In fact, the reasons for conflict are rarely, if ever, named. The existence of ‘issues’ or ‘conflict’ as an aspect of the family table is merely acknowledged so that it can be then incorporated and concealed, echoing the ways in which reality television often treats topics related to history and politics (Stowell, 2022). The tradition-family frame not only serves to reify ‘tradition’ and ‘family’ as transhistorical constructs, but also to recuperate and incorporate the thornier aspects of those same constructs, often defanging them through humour.

Further, it is important to note that both ‘tradition’ and ‘family’ across the episodes not only are imagined in transhistorical, overly simplistic ways, but also often in colonial ways that occlude the ways in which ‘tradition’ and ‘family’ serve colonialist/nationalist purposes, not only in the context of Thanksgiving but also in wider cultural discourse in the United States. ‘Tradition’ is always assumed to mean the same things—often, very normative, universalising constructions of holiday behaviours and practices—and ‘family’ almost never indicates anything other than a multi-generational, heterosexual, heteropatriarchal nuclear family. As Jodi Byrd describes, the ‘settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy’ (2011: 122-3) requires imagining colonialism as confined to the past tense, without ongoing significance in the present. References to ‘family’ and ‘tradition’ within the Thanksgiving episode, then, of course do not engage with the ways that both concepts have been historically deployed in relation to Thanksgiving to construct a particular kind of national identity that depends upon the strategic forgetting of the violences of colonialism, and the rewriting of history to suit national metanarratives.

Frame 2: reenacting the historical, occluding colonialism

The rewriting of the history of Thanksgiving (as well as the history of the United States as a nation) particularly comes to the fore in the second recurring theme in the reality cooking competition Thanksgiving episode: claims to ‘historical accuracy’ or ‘historical reenactment’, which particularly manifest through the use of particular food ingredients, or what I term here ‘culinary cosplay.’ ² Across a variety of the episodes surveyed here, a common challenge is to cook not with the ingredients or dishes ‘traditionally’ associated with Thanksgiving (such as turkey, russet potatoes, or pie), but rather with ‘historically accurate’ ingredients such as venison, clams, and ramps (and sometimes also using ‘historically accurate’ cooking methods and/or cooking in outdoor venues). The material differences in what is eaten at contemporary American Thanksgiving celebrations and what may have been historically eaten in the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries also highlights the material-ecological changes that settler colonialism has wrought over centuries in the US. As William Cronon highlights, ‘the replacement of Indians by predominantly European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution’ (1983: 6); similarly, Michael D. Wise concurs that ‘food and agriculture are two of the primary lenses through which Americans have long been trained to see the world from a settler-colonial perspective, a logic of erasure and replacement that seeks to confine Native lives to the past in order to legitimise the dispossession of Native land and labor in the present’ (2023: 7). The move from venison, clams, and ramps to turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie thus also gestures toward settler colonialism’s ecological histories. As an index of such ecological-agricultural change, these challenges that call back to a ‘historically accurate’ Thanksgiving meal move toward an acknowledgement of such logics of erasure and displacement. However, such gestures of acknowledgement often functions primarily to conceal historical-material realities of violence (Stowell, 2022). The fact that the two most common frames for Thanksgiving episodes in reality cooking television are, on the one hand, appeals to ‘tradition’ as transhistorical and universal, and on the other hand, appeals to the very historical inaccuracy and specificity of those traditions, demonstrates the ways that reality television surfaces and negotiates ideological-historical contradictions.

In Iron Chef America’s ‘Thanksgiving: Past and Present’, the challenge is to unite and meld the ‘historically accurate’ past with the ‘tradition’ of the present. As Brown describes, the challenge brings together both ‘foods believed to be at the first Thanksgiving and foods found at the modern Thanksgiving table.’ The structure of the ‘Thanksgiving: Past and Present’ challenge demonstrates both an acknowledgement that the ‘tradition’ narrative is inaccurate and a choice to acknowledge/recuperate the ‘reality’ of the past in limited and particular ways. Even as the structure of the episode’s challenge destabilises the kinds of appeals to transhistorical tradition that appear within the episode’s discourse, there is no actual investigation of the historical reality of ‘Thanksgiving’ and the colonial violences of the founding of the United States. As James Robertson describes, ‘modern celebration of Thanksgiving Day is a ritual affirmation of what Americans believe was the Pilgrim experience, the particularly American experience of confronting, settling, adapting to, and civilizing the New World’ (1980: 15). Thus, celebrating Thanksgiving is about ritually re-affirming what Americans believe about the founding of the nation, in ways that allow them to claim that founding and recuperate its contradictions. Siskind similarly describes how despite the fact that ‘for the great majority of Americans, of course, their relation to these Pilgrims is neither biological nor cultural, neither ethnic nor religious’ Thanksgiving nonetheless creates the opportunity to ‘establish, affirm and believe that this [the story of the Pilgrims at Thanksgiving] is their culture history’ (1992: 168) in ways that facilitate feelings of national-cultural belonging.

This national-cultural belonging, of course, comes at the expense of those for whom settler colonial violence is most acutely felt, both historically and in the present moment: Indigenous people. Indigenous people are almost never represented within the context of the reality television Thanksgiving episode, and when they are, they are often represented in ways that acknowledge them only to then conceal them. The prevalence of representations that seek to elide the colonial violences of the past and present supports Catherine R. Squires’s claim that ‘the idea of racial innocence is reinforced in contemporary media, which suggest that there really is no more work to be done by the everyday citizen to reduce inequalities’ (2014: 201). The kind of historical cosplay that occurs via ‘historically accurate’ ingredients in reality food television participates in narratives of racial innocence that work to evade the responsibility and work required to rectify the colonial violences of the past, as well as the colonial structures of the present.

The historical-culinary cosplay frame, which uses food ingredients as a representation of historical accuracy even as actual historical accuracy with regard to Indigenous people and settler colonialism is entirely or almost-entirely absent, perhaps finds its limit case in the sixth episode of the twelfth season of Top Chef, aptly titled ‘The First Thanksgiving’. In this episode, contestants are tasked with cooking a ‘historically accurate’ Thanksgiving meal using historically accurate foods and tools, and to serve it to the Top Chef judges as well as members of the Wampanoag tribe and descendants of the Pilgrims. As host Padma Lakshmi describes, the contestants will ‘head to Plymouth Plantation and experience what life was like in the 1600s’ and they will ‘only have access to native ingredients and what the colonists brought with them on the Mayflower’. Lakshmi’s description of the challenge repeatedly indicates the historical accuracy of the cooking conditions and the food they will be cooking, even going so far as to suggest that the contestants will experience what life was like in the seventeenth century. Later in the episode, as they cook, contestant Adam Harvey steps back from his open wood fire and declares ‘I think I smell like a settler’. Harvey’s statement illuminates the kinds of logics at play in the culinary cosplay frame: he declares he smells like a settler because he is reenacting the actions of historical settlers; his words do not acknowledge or leave any space for an understanding of himself as a settler, present-tense. The culinary cosplay frame positions the act of ‘settling’ as definitively past-tense, so confined to historical that it can now be role-played and cosplayed from the safe distance of the present, as though the United States is no longer a settler colony. The food and tools used in this episode participate in this work, serving as the ‘settler dress-up’ that allows the Top Chef contestants to perform ‘putting on’ the identity of settler—the very act of which makes them discursively appear as though they are not themselves settlers.

While the ‘First Thanksgiving’ episode is particularly egregious in its use of ‘historically accurate’ food and tools to rewrite history, it represents trends that appear throughout reality television Thanksgiving episodes. Lakshmi opens the judging segment by saying ‘It’s an honor to eat with the descendants of the Wampanoag tribe, as well as the descendants of the colonists’. Even as Top Chef is rigorous in its commitment to historically accurate foods and tools, it remains committed to retelling the cultural narrative of the ‘unity’ of Indigenous people and colonisers at the ‘First Thanksgiving’, even going so far as to replicate that fictional historical scene with the descendants of the Wampanoag tribe and of settler colonists. In this episode, the appeals to historical accuracy via foods and tools works to confer the fabricated scene of a unified dinner table of colonised and colonisers with a fictive patina of historical authenticity.

Furthermore, this episode demonstrates how representations of Indigenous people on reality television are constrained by the ideological boundaries of what is possible within the reality television form. Lakshmi asks Wampanoag tribe member Phillip Wynne how it feels to represent his people on television, opening up a space for Indigenous self-representation and meta-dialogue on the affective terrain of that representation. Wynne responds: ‘All about continuance, making sure I’m doing the last generation good’. On the one hand, Wynne’s very presence stands as one small counterexample against the predominant symbolic annihilation (Gerbner and Gross, 1976: 182) of Indigenous people in the media landscape of the United States. Wynne speaks for himself, and his words indicate the continued presence, present-tense, of the Wampanoag tribe in the Boston area. When Wynne says ‘all about continuance’ he demonstrates a commitment to the ongoing life of the Wampanoag tribe; this is the first response we hear in answer to Lakshmi’s question of how representation feels. Wynne’s presence itself complicates limited narratives about Indigenous peoples in the United States, which often figure Indigenous people as confined to a purely historical existence, and deploy the trope of ‘firsting’, in which ‘settlers displace indigenous peoples in order to become “native”’ (O’Brien, 2010: 52–53). On the other hand, Top Chef expressly equivocates the roles of the historical Indigenous people and settler colonists, and uses Wynne’s presence to do so. By placing these two sets of ‘descendants’ at the same table, Top Chef uses contemporary Wampanoag tribe members in service of a narrative that obscures the power structures of the past and of the present. The engagement with pseudo-historical accuracy across several of these Thanksgiving episodes exemplifies a thorny awareness of the entanglements of tradition with historical narrative. The very idea of a ‘historically accurate’ Thanksgiving meal requires at least some awareness of the inaccuracies of how Thanksgiving has ritualised history; it resolves this tension by offering an alternative yet still fundamentally flawed corrective. Top Chef’s inclusion of members of the Wampanoag tribe—a rare instance of Indigenous inclusion across the episodes in my sample—alongside its culinary cosplay suggests a kind of deadened seed of resistance to the dominant narratives surrounding Thanksgiving.