Cooking For Thanksgiving

   This year I will not be as efficient preparing things ahead of time. Because I am working through Wednesday, I will be doing everything Wednesday evening and Thanksgiving Day. If you cook Thanksgiving diner, how do you plan it? Do you have a system like I did, doing the cranberry sauce, pies, and squash a couple of days ahead, the stuffing the night before, and the rest on Thanksgiving day? Or is your system like mine this year… everything at the last minute?

Another thing Thanksgiving always does is to remind me of how much more expensive than conventionally produced food, organic food continues to be. Through most of the year I just buy what I want and don’t really compare the prices against each other. But I do look at the Turkey prices and this year also at the cranberry prices. Conventional turkeys were .79 to 1.29 per pound. The organic, free-range Turkey I bought was 3.99 a pound. Regular cranberries were 1.33 per pound. Organic cranberries were 8.99 per pound! Especially with the economics in most people’s lives right now, I can guess what 99.9% will be buying for their Thanksgiving dinner.

The high cost of organic food always gets me riled up. But then I remind myself that it is not 100% the grocery stores seeing organic food as a specialty item, meant to have a much higher profit margin. It is also that because of our big industrial, agribusiness food producers, conventional food prices are often artificially low. But low is relative. Most people have been hit hard by recent rising food prices. It is discouraging to see organic prices so high when you know people are often struggling to make their food budget balance.