Holiday roasts from the Portland Food Co-op. Courtesy of the Portland Food Co-op The Thanksgiving email from the Portland Food Co-op featured six types of plant-based holiday roasts this year. Such abundance got me thinking about the 1980s, when vegetarians either cobbled together our own Thanksgiving roasts or served a baked, stuffed squash as a centerpiece.
How did we get here? The origins of vegetarian Thanksgiving date way back to the mid-19th century. Yet even before the first vegetable turkey was ever roasted, vegetarians had split into two camps. One favors bringing veggie dishes to Thanksgiving.
The other condemns the annual feast altogether. Both have shaped the vegetarian version of the holiday: the critics by encouraging lighter fare and a focus on gratitude, and the joiners by developing the recipes. Nationally famous back-to-the-land leader (and Mainer) Helen Nearing was a critic.
In her 1980 vegetarian cookbook “Simple Food for the Good Life,” she wrote that on Thanksgiving “when housewives are toiling and overfed eaters are stuffing, Scott (her husband Scott Nearing) and I give a vacation to the stomach and to the cook by going without solid food, just drinking water or juices.” While few others take that extreme ascetic approach, she was far from the first vegetarian to criticize or offer alternatives to the conventional Thanksgiving menu. Before 1863, when it became a national holiday, Thanksgiving was an irregular feast observed primarily in New Engl.
