Before the big dinner, debunk the myths—for starters, the first "real" U.S. Thanksgiving wasn't until the 1800s—and get to the roots of Thanksgiving 2012.
Thanksgiving Dinner: Recipe for Food Coma?
Key to any Thanksgiving Day menu are a fat turkey and cranberry sauce.
An estimated 254 million turkeys will be raised for slaughter in the U.S. during 2012, up 2 percent from 2011's total, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Last year's birds were worth about five billion dollars.
About 46 million turkeys ended up on U.S. dinner tables last Thanksgiving—or about 736 million pounds (334 million kilograms) of turkey meat, according to estimates from the National Turkey Federation.
Minnesota is the United States' top turkey-producing state, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Indiana.
These "big six" states produce two of every three U.S.-raised birds, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
U.S. farmers will also produce 768 million pounds (348 million kilograms) of cranberries in 2012, which, like turkeys, are native to the Americas. The top producers are Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
The U.S. will also grow 2.7 billion pounds (1.22 billion kilograms) of sweet potatoes—many in North Carolina, Mississippi, California, and Louisiana—and will produce more than 1.1 billion pounds (499 million kilograms) of pumpkins.
Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio grow the most U.S. pumpkins.
But if you overeat at Thanksgiving dinner, there's a price to be paid for all this plenty: the Thanksgiving "food coma." The post-meal fatigue may be real, but the condition is giving turkeys a bad rap.
Contrary to myth, the amount of the organic amino acid tryptophan in most turkeys isn't responsible for drowsiness.
Instead, scientists blame booze, the sheer caloric size of an average feast, or just plain-old relaxing after stressful work schedules.
First Thanksgiving Not a True Thanksgiving?
Long before the first Thanksgiving, American Indian peoples, Europeans, and other cultures around the world had often celebrated the harvest season with feasts to offer thanks to higher powers for their sustenance and survival.
In 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a "Thanksgiving" while searching for New World gold in what is now the Texas Panhandle.
Later such feasts were held by French Huguenot colonists in present-day Jacksonville, Florida (1564), by English colonists and Abnaki Indians at Maine's Kennebec River (1607), and in Jamestown, Virginia (1610), when the arrival of a food-laden ship ended a brutal famine.
Courtesy: NGC
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