Appendix: Down the rabbit hole. (Additional topic references).

This appendix consists of additional labels for this entry:

Down the rabbit hole.

December 21, 1620. The Mayflower Passengers Land.

 That is, exactly 400 years ago.

The landing was partially precipitated by the fact that the Mayflower had run out of beer, which was a more important matter than it might sound.  The English were overall used to drinking beer, but the reason was that beer, because of the way that it was made, was safe to drink. Running out of things to drink is bad anyway you look at it.

In modern times its become common to levy all sort of criticism and virtue signaling on this event, noting how "horrible" Europeans were for colonizing North America.  All of that views the world from was the comfortable late 20th and early 21st Century prospective which has only been shook up a little by the visitation of a plague upon is, something that people in the 17th Century regarded as one of life's norms.  It is true, of course, that the Mayflower passengers were essentially landing where they weren't invited to take land that wasn't theirs, but they didn't see it that way. And its important to remember that the native residents of the land that they were essentially if unknowingly invading viewed the world much differently than anyone in North America does today, through eyes that tended to regard their own tribes as "the people" with everyone else being some sort of alien people.

Indeed, the Mayflower passengers were only in possession of marginally technically superior implements than their unwilling hosts, who themselves were a more or less constant state of war, near war, or soon to be war, with their neighbors.  It's not true, as some have suggested as a reactionary counterfactual, that the Europeans were regarded as one more tribe. They were definitely different. But early on the technological advantage that's so often assumed to be there simply wasn't.  In warfare the natives were every bit the equals, and maybe the superiors in every sense to the new arrivals.

And none of this is to suggest the old grade school version of the "pilgrims" either. They were religious bigots whose situation was brought about by the fact that they couldn't get along at all with the Church of England or darned near anyone else.  They would have regarded Catholics, which all the British had been less than a century ago, as heretics and they didn't view the Church of England cheerfully.  They had adopted very rigorous concepts of Calvinism and regarded most people damned by God to Hell from the moment of their conception, a novelty that no  Christian had held before the Reformation.  Our concept of them and what they approved of and didn't approve of is accordingly massively off the mark.  They approved of piety, but because it was temporal proof of their predestination. As noted, unlike many who look back to them now as religious ancestors, they approved of alcohol as well.  They were also huge supporters of marital sex, which is something we don't associate their piety with.

They disapproved of most forms of entertainment, which was another thing that had gotten them in trouble in Europe.  They required church attendance on Sunday by law, but then that was also a legal norm in much of Europe. They'd approved of the Calvinist ban of sports on Sunday in England during the Cromwell era.

Not everyone on board the Mayflower was a member of their group by any means.  Indeed, the "pilgrim" passengers.  The ship held 102 passengers but some were just that, not religious dissenters.  Be that as it may, the puritans dominated the ship in culture and conduct, and as colonist.

Their journey was no doubt arduous, and coming in winter, risky in more ways than one.  One person died on the way, and another was born.

I personally have no known connection with them.  The first of my ancestors to set sail across the Atlantic for the New World left from Normandy, not Holland, and arrived in Quebec, not New England.  I'm completely comfortable with that.  But my much more American by ancestry wife has a demonstrated ancestral connection with the 102 passengers of the Mayflower but, as her curiosity on historical matters is much lower than mine, if I asked her right now who it was, she wouldn't recall, and wouldn't be interested in looking it up. Still, that means my two children likewise have ancestors who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

And its important to note, that really was something, no matter how human or failed those people may have been.  I can't say, as I look around, that people are doing much better in any segment of human conduct today.

I think I'll have a steak, rare.

Bar har har!

A  note, this is one of those threads (well actually now two combined threads) I started along time ago (in October, to be exact), and I'm just getting back around to it.

Anyhow. . . it's back on my radar, and for some amusing and not so amusing reasons.

Almost every single aspect of dietary advice that's existed in the course of my lifetime has turned out to be flat out wrong, so why would this be surprising?

A lot of health advice has to be taken with a grain, or even a bucket, of salt.  And I've tended to do that with the constant "don't eat meat" which is the deceptive morphed view of "don't eat red meat".

I've also tended to take the real advice, which I've ignored, to be don't eat fatty red meat, which is different advice actually, and as stockmen have responded to the demand, fat red meat is harder to get than it used to be anyhow.  A steak, even a prime cut, can be fat or lean.  If you order one now, unless you are specially ordering a steak in some place that's really old timey, is not going to be anywhere near as fatty as one you might have ordered in the 1970s.

Now, I'm not a dietitian, and nobody should take eating advice from me, but frankly, if your spouse would let you get by, and some will, on deer, elk, moose, antelope (particularly that) I think you could skip this entire topic.

But assuming not, you are now left with this:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

Hee hee hee.

Well, of course everyone who has a vested interest in the existing state of things is countering it. "What?  That can't be true!  I've been saying the opposite."

Well, consider this, from the NYT:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

Of course, by this point the public's trust in dietary advice is pretty eroded anyway, which may explain why so many Americans are practitioners of the Diet Of The Week, no matter what it may be, combined with a lot of non scientific baloney about eating this or that substance not approved by the FDA for anything.  

And as I've long stated, a lot of American's dietary habits de jour are based not on science, but on our national cultural history and the sad state of our society.

Puritans, they didn't have any food hang ups, but were pretty much opposed to almost everything fun.  Modern Americans have largely dumped their theology as they prefer to believe that God personally approves of anything they do, but they've oddly kept the strong instinct to suffer.

The best dietary advice a person could give would be to grow your own food, and hunt for your own meat, to the extent you can.  That dovetails with the best health advice a person can give, which is get regular exercise. We basically ignore all of that as we want to rationalize the modern urban lifestyle we largely detest, find an explanation for the reasons we're unhappy that don't involve making any really tough or disciplined decisions, and also, oddly enough, punish ourselves in some ritual manner that makes  us miserable but also makes us feel morally superior. It's a combination of the effects of our Fourth Law of Behavior, modern conditions, and our cultures ongoing Puritanism.

This would explain the change over the years from diet to a sort of secular Jainism.  Contrary to widespread belief, Hindus can and do eat meat, but the related Jain's do not and claim not to eat anything that lives (which they do, as almost everything in a real human diet was alive at one time and you can't live on the few things, like salt, which are not).  The Jain diet is a religiously imposed one and a very odd one at that, the underlying roots of which we'll not go into, but as odd as it is, the American vegan diet that's come up in recent years is stranger yet.  It's deeply, deeply unnatural, not good for its practitioners, and bad for the environment in spades, but it allows its adulterants to suffer with a sense of misplaced moral superiority while not having to observe any of the strict moral codes such disciplines require.  By way of a more familiar example, some Christian monastic orders or individual monks also ate strict vegetarian diets or nearly vegetarian diets, as a form of fasting, but they also pray without ceasing and completely abstain from sex, something most emaciated vegans none the less would recoil from following even though its a lot more likely to bestow real virtue upon them. But then, that requires real concentration and sacrifice, not just ordering the vegan special at dinner and then lording it over your friends.

More recently yet, now armed with a scene of benighted superiority, the followers of such diets in the west have been on a full blown Cromwellian campaign to compel it on everyone else, the most recent example of which was the really absurd example of the Golden Globes serving a vegan dinner in the name of the environment.  Well, dear vegans, your diet is arguably  the most destructive one on the planet ever imagined.

Let's be blunt.  If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.

Let's start with some basic facts, something Americans in particular do not like interjected into their public discourse.  Beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions.  That means 98% are from something else, and farming (i.e., plant farming) contributes its share to that.  And of that 2%, a fair amount of it would be there anyway.

Eh?

Yes.  A fair amount would be there anyway.

Cattle get picked on as the cattle industry has been the whipping boy of ill informed environmentalist going back at least until the 1970s.  Themes have varied, but generally a lot of urbancentrntric or relocated urbanites took up picking on the cattle industry in the west under the strange assumption that it was responsible for the decline of everything that they loved, and if it wasn't there, things would be 100% Granola Perfect.  The basic gist of the argument was, if you boiled it down, cattlemen came in and shoved out the Indians (which is not the way that happened) and put their dirty dirty cows on the range which displaced the super clean and nifty buffalo.  If the cattle were removed, all the good old days would return.

Navajo horsemen, 1904. They weren't vegans.

The big fallacy to that, of course, is that the Indians tribes who fought so hard to retain their lands (quite a few of whom now raise cattle) would require these same lily white Granolas to also remove themselves from the range in order to achieve that natural status.  That's not part of the proposal. 

Navajo sheep.

Indeed, it doesn't even begin to grasp that the wide open spaces in the West are here today as they're livestock ranges.  The degree to which people are deluded on a topic such as this is perhaps best symbolized by an article once written by a University of Wyoming professor decrying seeing cattle out of her house windows in Laramie, when in fact the reason such a person can see that is that they must in one of the newer houses on the edge of Laramie.  Building houses destroys wild lands like nothing else.

High altitude prairie.  Ranching keeps it as such.

Next to it, ironically, is farming.

I love farming, but a farmed field is not a natural field. We'll get back to that in a moment.

That's because we're not done discussing gassy cows.

As noted, only 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases derive from cattle, and much of that is due to the way they're fed out on corn.  If you don't don that, and simply eat grass fed beef, the figure drops.

It'd never drop to 0% as ungulates fart. . . including wild ungulates.

Buffalo, in this case ones that are being raised as livestock.

One of the cherished tales of the Granola set is to recount how before the millions of cows, there were millions of buffalo.  Millions.  And those millions of buffalo. . . well. . . they farted too.

It could be pointed out that there are no doubt more cattle today than there were buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo and they were gassy. That's the way ungulates are, to a small extent.  So, even in the Granola dream, those millions of domestic ungulates, were they gone, would be replaced, in a pure state of nature, by millions of wild ungulates.

Indeed, it might be noted, cattle themselves were a wild species originally, although not in North America. They certainly were all over Europe, Asia and Africa, however.  Indeed, they still are in Africa.

Environmentalist Ernest Hemingway with a gas contributor in Africa.

This brings us around to farming.

One of the things that's become really obvious about modern Americans is that very few of them have any concept whatsoever of how food gets on their tables.  Not even remotely.  It just appears there. 

Vegans and other vegetarians seem to have the concept that agriculture exists in the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic era.  That is, a farmer goes out of his stone hut and roots in the ground with a sharp stick (note, such sticks were often sharpened and then hardened with fire, so we'll presume our super environmental neolithic farmer doesn't use flame. . . just more sticks).  Having done that, he plants his seeds by hand and waters them with a clay jug throughout the growing season.  Once that's completed, he carriers his food to market by hand, where it's sold in Free Trade Farmers' Markets.

No, that's not even close to how that happens.

Even this would be an advanced state of agriculture compared to the one that vegans and vegetarians seem to imagine exists.

Modern farming is petroleum dependent in a major way in reality.  Much more so than livestock production.  Every farm of any substantial size uses really heavy rolling equipment that consume buckets of diesel fuel and expel CO2 exhaust, among other things.  In addition to that, even watering systems simply to water crops depend quite often on gasoline or diesel engines, or electricity supplied by a power plant that may well be fossil fuel using. From planting to harvest there isn't a day that doesn't go buy that uses a lot of fuel.

And that crop doesn't get to wherever its going, either to be processed or to market, with out more fuel.  It's trucked to one place, and then shipped to another, and in the U.S. that's by truck.  When Jimmy Hoffa declared back in the 60s and 70s:

If you have it, a truck brought it

he was right.

And this assumes that you are restricting yourself to crops grown in North America.  If you are enjoying feasting on third world plantains or nuts or whatever, that came by a diesel powered ship and was grown in a place where the concern for fuel consumption was likely low and the environment even lower.

Indeed, the beauty of animal consumption is that animals feed themselves on what they eat, and you usually can't eat it.  Cattle live on grass, and you can't eat grass. Even cattle fed out on corn are eating something that humans are extremely inefficient at digesting (and frankly cattle aren't great at digesting, but which are better than  we are).   They water themselves and while cattlemen do use fuel to be sure, in much of hte US cattle are left to themselves to a surprising degree much of the year and another ungulate, horses, remain used for transportation much more than a person might imagine.

And to add to that, agriculture is a great killer.

Vegans and vegetarians like to imagine that by having that bowl of rice they've avoided hurting animals, but they're simply fooling themselves.  For one thing, every farm field has displaced natural habitat.  But for another, agriculture itself results in the death of a lot of animals simply by accident and occasionally by design.

All of which leads to this.  Veganism and vegetarianism aren't supported by your evolutionary biology.  That doesn't mean your current diet does either.  Ideally, you'd plant a garden and hunt for meat, or buy local lean meat if you can't hunt for it all.  That's what you'd do if you really were concerned about your diet.  If you aren't, chances are you are concerned about something else. With some, that's a frightened knowledge that they'll die combined with a primitive belief that day can be pushed back endlessly through ritual.  For many others, it's a lack of knowledge combined with, or even simply dominated by, a retained Puritanism that's become secular in nature and which demands that you must suffer, for which you may regard yourself as superior to others.

Really health or healthy environment?  Not so much.

Indeed this topic has been well explored by some other blogs, which were once going to be the topic of a separate blog entry here but now have been combined with this one.  One really interesting one is this one below, by the self styled "Buzzard", a young woman rancher in Kansas:

Changing Your Diet Won't Help the Environment but these 5 Changes Sure Will.

A big part of Buzzards point here has to do with greenhouse gases, which I'm only addressing here because of the claim that switching to vegan burgers or something is going to address that in any meaningful way.  This isn't a post on the climate, it's a post on diet, or more specifically meat.

Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these:  1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.

The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:

A Burger Won't Negate an Airplane.

I won't comment on all of those, and I think you ought to read the blog entry if you are interested.  But I'd note that the really interesting one of those is "Stop buying so much stuff".

Buying stuff is the modern American thing.  Even people who claim not to buy stuff, buy a lot of stuff.  The entire modern American economy is based on buying stuff.  Americans buy stuff just for something to do.  I  know more than one person who is cognizant of this that they'll choose working over an idle day as if they have an idle day, they'll buy stuff.  Indeed buying stuff is now so vital to the American economy that after the U.S. was hit by terrorist on September 11, 2001, politicians urged the American public to spend, so as to keep the economy rolling.  Americans themselves are routinely referred to by their leaders by the insulting term "consumers".

An economy based on stuff purchasing is sort of odd in a way.  I'm not arguing against buying stuff and indeed shopkeepers and manufacturers are depending upon the sale of things for their living, and always have. But the level of stuff consumption is something I haven't ever addressed on the blog and probably ought to just as an interesting societal matter.

The reason I haven't addressed it is that I don't have a good command on the consumer culture.  I've read widely that it started to come about in t he early 20th Century, but simply reviewing old ads and newspapers I suspect it came about at least as early as the post Civil War period.  Already by the turn of the prior century there were a lot of advertisements aimed at consumer spending during the Christmas period, for example, and Christmas Season advertising of a century ago is very familiar to what we see today.  Economists worry like crazy if people stop buying stuff, even while encouraging people to save, as if everyone quits buying stuff, the result is an economic depression.

Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it.  Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it.  Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.

The point there is that even while we can disagree with Buzzard on items on her list, your diet probably isn't contributing that much to greenhouse gases unless, ironically, you are a vegan or vegetarian, as the amount of fuel needed to produce what you are eating in the modern farm economy is enormous.  

So, what to do if you really want to be a dietary steward of the environment?  Well we could add to her list with 6) plant a garden and 7) go hunting and fishing.  Or you could just make that your list and maybe add being careful about what you buy and how much of it you buy. Stop participating in a throw away society in other words, if you are.  Buy local if you can, including local foods.

I'd add a bit, before going on, that if Buzzard's blog hits a little too hard, you can find a lot of the same type of content on the twitter feed of one Sarah Mcnaughton in a very well presented and scientific way.  Mcnaughton, a young woman agriculturalist in North Dakota also has a blog, Sarah's NoDak Living, which is worth checking out.

Indeed, both of these blogs are connected into our blog feed under the agricultural heading on this site.

Anyhow, go hunting or fishing, preferably both, and plant a garden.  If you can't do those, you might, or might not, be able to get a fair amount of your meat and vegetables locally.  But don't go vegan, your DNA will hate you and it doesn't achieve anything other than to make you weak, crabby and make everyone view you like Oliver Cromwell dropping into a Christmas Party.

Oliver Cromwell.  Don't be Oliver Cromwell.

It's "_______________" Friday!

"___________"?

Christmas shopping crowds, Alabama, 1941.

Yes.

Today provides a really interesting example of global tensions in all sorts of things, consumerism and anti-consumerism among them.

In the United States today is often called "Black Friday", as its the day of the year a lot of businesses make a profit for the first time in a year, i.e., go into the black. That's because of Christmas shopping.  A lot of people (not me) who have this day off use it to go to post Thanksgiving Day sales for Christmas.

It'd be tempting to decry this as a feature of the current era alone, but in truth Christmas shopping has been a huge deal for well over a century.  Indeed the fact that this is so much the case belies the claims occasionally seen that consumerism didn't exist a century ago.  It did.

What's new about Black Friday is the huge emphasis on a single day. That's come about in recent years.

And also coming about in recent years are reactions to that.  In much of the Western world this day is also Buy Nothing Day, a day whose goals I'll observe simply by default.

Started as a protest against consumerism by an American family in 1968, Buy Nothing Day in that context is part of a larger Buy Nothing For Christmas movement. That no doubt in fact is an intellectual strike against consumerism, but it's also part of latent American puritanism which we've addressed here before.  The Puritans were a joyless lot and opposed almost every public expression of fun (as we've noted before, they were not opposed to drinking, which a lot of their followers in later years have been, and they were very okay with private marital bedroom fun).  They banned Christmas.

Something that urges people not to buy anything for Christmas at all and to just give gifts that don't involve purchasing are basically urging people to give nothing for Christmas at all, as people don't really have the time or skills in the modern world to knit socks for something for Christmas.  Hence the joyless Puritan goal would be achieved, I suspect, and people observing it can accordingly be self smug about it.

Taking another approach is Small Business Saturday which always falls the day after Black Friday.  The goal of it is to have people shop locally.  It's goal is a consumerist one, but sort of a distributist consumerist one.

Black Friday now coincides with something called Green Friday, which appears to have varying goals depending upon where you are.  For some, it's simply the first day of a weekend of environmental activism.  For others, in other places, it's focused on sustainable, hence green, products.

In Ireland, however, it's a day to shop local, like Small Business Saturday, but within Ireland.  I.e., it coincides with Black Friday, but with a "shop local" emphasis.

One of the interesting things about all of this is how its all hinged on American Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving Day in the United States is morphed from the European Catholic tradition of giving thanks for the fall harvest.  Nothing consumerist about it at all.  It survived the reformation no doubt in part because the very early Church of England simply carried forward, nearly intact, the Catholic faith although that didn't last long and was falling apart by the time Queen Elizabeth I took office.  The overall surprising thing is that it survived the Puritans, which makes a person suspect that its somewhat disorganized nature didn't put in in their scopes for elimination.  It was, and really remains, a pretty simple holiday and even now most people grasp that they're giving thanks for something.

The big consumer launch that follows Thanksgiving is sort of a calendar accident that has taken place simply due to when American Thanksgiving is.  Other countries that still observe something like Thanksgiving don't have the same calendar date, of course.  Indeed, the American date floated around for years.  Canada's Thanksgiving, for example, is in October.  Their harvest is also in October.  German Erntedankfest is the fist Sunday of October. Poles have their Święto Dziękczynienia but it's been put on top of Thanksgiving in the US.  Most countries had a Thanksgiving Day that was largely the same as the original American one, although quite a few no longer do.  In a lot of countries that retain one, it's a day on their local liturgical calendar that falls on a Sunday.

It says something about American consumer muscle that Black Friday is something that exists clean across the globe now.  Europeans who are observing a Buy Nothing Friday or a Green Friday (outside of the Irish example), are noting and participating, in some fashion, in an post American Thanksgiving economic boost even if Thanksgiving is foreign to their calendars in the American sense.  It's another example of how American culture, and even counter culture, have become so dominant.

Thanksgiving Reflections

Puritans on their way to church.

It's become sort of an odd tradition in the US in recent years to either criticize a holiday in general or to lament how weakened its become in the modern observance of it. The two are diametrically opposed feelings of course, but they seem to be equally present.

In regard to Thanksgiving, the trend has been by some to comment on how we just don't grasp how the very first Thanksgiving is misunderstood.  This commentary takes the form of the mild, in noting that the Mayflower immigrants and their Indian guests were just as likely to have had deer on the table as they were to have turkey (although there's frankly no reason not to suppose they had turkey. . . or maybe goose), to hardcore comments on their being nasty colonialist.  The commentary on the early menu is historically interesting but latent prejudging of their overall natures is seemingly rarely done accurately and opens up moderns to criticism as well.

Of course, this website itself hasn't been immune to that as we've noted more than once that the "first Thanksgiving" wasn't that.  Thanksgiving feasts are common feature of every society that farms, which means almost every society.  Those feasts are, it should be noted, uniformly religious in nature.

We noted all of that in our first posts here, in 2012, that dealt with the holiday:

When we were kids were taught, back in the old days, that the holiday was thought up by the Pilgrims, those Puritan colonist who landed at Plymouth Rock, as an original day, celebrated with their Indian neighbors, to give thanks for their first harvest.  That's not really true.  I'm sure it's true that they celebrated a Thanksgiving, but then they would have for a variety of reasons. The most significant of those would have been that a Thanksgiving was the European norm.

Thanksgiving was a universally recognized religious celebration recognized in every European country.  The holiday gave thanks to God for the harvest.  At some point in Europe the celebration came to be formally recognized in the Catholic Church, centered date wise around the harvest in southern Europe, by a few days of fasting prior to the Church recognized holiday.  How the Reformation effected this I do not know, but I am certain that the Puritan colonists would have celebrated Thanksgiving in England and in Holland prior to every having celebrated it in the New World.  Indeed, as is sometimes missed, not all of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans by any means, and this is no less true for the other passengers on that vessel. They all would have come from a relatively rural English background and they all would have been familiar with a Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving remained a generally recognized religious based holiday in North America well before it was established as a national holiday in the United States, and in Canada (on a different day).  In the United States, the first Federal recognition of the holiday came during the Civil War, during which time Abraham Lincoln sought fit to note it, in the context of the terrible national tragedy then ongoing.  While that may seem odd to us now, there were real efforts even while the war was raging to try to fit what was occurring into context, which would eventually lead to Decoration Day and Memorial Day (essentially the same holiday). During the war, noting what was occurring on Thanksgiving seemed fitting.  The holiday was seemingly moved around endlessly for many years, and even as late as Franklin Roosevelt's administration new dates for it were fixed, all generally in November. States got into the act too, such as Wyoming, with governors occasionally fixing the date.  The current date stems from a 1941 statutory provision.

We also noted there, regarding its religious nature:

It's interesting to note that up until the mid 20th Century the norm was to take a turkey home alive, and dispatch it at home.  This is rare now, as people have become somewhat delusional and wimpy about food, with some even going so far to believe that if they abstain from meat entirely, that they're not killing anything, a delusion which demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of any kind of farming or food transportation (more animals die smacked by trucks on the road than most can begin to imagine).  That meant that the turkey was no doubt pretty darned fresh, as well as tasty.

Man bringing home Thanksgiving dinner.

Boy with plucked Thanksgiving dinner.

Connecticut farmer plucking turkey for sale.

Outside of a big gathering, for many people a church service was part of Thanksgiving, and for quite a few it still is.  Other than that, activities that occurred were, according to what I've read, games.  Various types of games seemed quite popular for such gatherings.  Thanksgiving football goes back amazingly far in the United States, and I've seen a poster advertising a college game that dates back to 1903.  If it dated back to 1903, I'd presume it went back somewhat further than that.

What all of this tells us, as noted before, is that the observance of the holiday has been incredibly consistent for an extremely long time.

Efforts to formalize it as a national holiday, only dealt with in part, really came about during the Civil War and it was clear right from that time that effort, which built upon an already existing civil custom, were both familial in nature, tied to the harvest, and had an emphasis on giving thanks to God.

Indeed, on that latter point, Thanksgiving is one of those days like Christmas that frankly makes no sense whatsoever outside of a religious context.  While I'm well aware that there are people who don't make it a religious observation and have the holiday anyhow, it seems weird and even hollow if they don't.  I've been, for example, to Thanksgiving dinners in which no prayer of thanksgiving was done and they seem really lacking. And not only is something lacking, but it's obviously lacking.  Be that as it may, in spite of feeling that way, I come across poorly as I never make a personal attempt to intervene and offer one.  I say one to myself.

Anyhow, with this in mind it strikes me for an odd reason how this holiday, celebrated across the US and in every culture, is one that is really carried over from a distinctly Protestant tradition, and indeed a tradition within a tradition.  I'll not go into it too deep, but its associated with the Puritans for a reason.

The "Pilgrims" as we used to hear them called more often, where Calvinist Puritans who had very distinct and strict religious views.  They didn't practice religious tolerance whatsoever, although at that first English Thanksgiving in North America they no doubt had to as they were a religious minority at the time, something rarely noted about them.

Indeed, the English colonist who came over on the Mayflower were buy and large not Puritans, a religious sect that had grown up in the early English Reformation and which was hostile to the Church of England, with the Church of England being in turn hostile to it.  The history of the early English Reformation is something we'll not deal with here, but we'll note that the early Church of England reflected a schism, rather than an outright separation, from the Catholic Church.  The first Bishops and Priests of the Church of England had all been ordained as Catholic Priest and they all had Catholic theology as their primary view in spite of following Henry VIII into schism on the question of his claimed right to head the church.  Indeed, it's really doubtful that many of them took his claims all that seriously, quite frankly, and the Church of England as a Protestant Church didn't really come about until some time later.  Henry had advisers who were Protestant in their views right from the onset (at least one lost his head for heresy) and he had one wife, if I recall correctly, who was hardcore Protestant, so the door was open.   But he no doubt went to his death in 1547 at age 55 thinking he was a Catholic.

After that the period of turmoil he'd unleashed in his country really ramped up and as we've addressed elsewhere the Elizabethan Religious Settlement ultimately came about through the imposition of certain views by Queen Elizabeth I.  The degree to which she herself agreed with them is open to question, at least one unconformable story holds that she rejected her own clerics on her deathbed as being false clerics, but the settlement was only partially that. While England would become rabidly anti Catholic in later years, that would take years and years and it would have at least two Catholic monarchs after Elizabeth's death, thereby making her sister Mary not the last one.

Oliver Cromwell, Puritan Lord Protector.

One party that didn't accept the settlement was the Puritans.  With no really definable origin, they came up originally as a party within the Church of England that was steadfastly opposed to all of its retained Catholic nature.  Hitting their high water mark during the dictatorship of Puritan Oliver Cromwell, they fit in with the group of British Protestants who were darned near opposed to every sort of religious and even civil custom that the English had. That operated to make them really hated and when the Restoration came about not too surprisingly they were suppressed by an English population that was sick to death of them.  That caused some to relocate to the Netherlands which had religious tolerance due to a religious split existing in that country between a Catholic and Protestant population, but even the Dutch grew sick of them pretty darned quickly.

Mary Dyer, Puritan evangelist, going off to execution in Boston in 1660.

And that caused them to relocate to North America.  Or more properly, for some of them to undertake to do that.

As this isn't a history of the Puritans in North America, we'll basically stop their history there, other than to note that they became really unpopular in the colonies as well. So much so, that even some female Puritan evangelist were executed for returning to a colony from which they'd been earlier expelled.

Anyhow, all of that is noted for a simple reason.

The Puritans were amazing opposed to almost every form of human celebration as we'd recognize it.  Religious holidays that were deeply ingrained in Christianity and which Protestant religions kept right on observing after the start of the Reformation were banned in Puritan regions, including all of England while the dictatorship was ongoing.  Attendance at church on Sundays was compulsory and omission of attendance was punishable as a crime, but Christmas and Easter were banned and actually outlaws.  Sports on Sunday, an English tradition, was also banned.  Certain sorts of sports were completely banned.  May Day was banned.

But Thanksgiving, a day of thanks for a bountiful harvest, never was.  And that's really remarkable.

Thanksgiving was a feature of England's Catholic culture that survived the Reformation and continued to survive into the Puritan era.  It seems to be the one pre Reformation religious observation they were okay with, perhaps because it was a custom, rather than a Canon.

So we now have a civil holiday in the United States with deep religious roots. A Catholic origin, but Protestantized, and proving resistant to real secularization.

With that noted, one thing that's interesting in addition to note is how its a Western tradition, by which we mean that came up in the Latin Rite of the Church as a cultural institution, but not in the Eastern one. And that really shows as its in November.

Having the holiday in October, which Canada does, would actually make just as much sense as having it in November.  Maybe more sense actually.  Most places have actually harvested by late October at the latest.  When I used to have a large garden, which I continue to think I'll do again every year, I'd harvest anything not already harvested on the opening day of deer season, which is in early November.

In the West, the Christmas Season really opens up with Thanksgiving.  Indeed, the setting of the holiday in its current calendar setting was partially influenced by the Christmas shopping seasons.

The time leading up to Christmas is, of course, advent.  This year Advent starts on December 1.

In the west, Advent has become a time of celebratory anticipation of Christmas, and this custom is the case everywhere in the west.  Advent also exists in the East, but the focus is really different.

Indeed, in the East, the forty days prior to Christmas is a second Lent featuring a Nativity Fast.  For Byzantine and other Eastern Rite Catholics as well as the Orthodox that is going on right now.

The rigor of the fast varies by Rite and location and I'm not qualified to really comment on it.  As I understand it, and I may not understand it correctly, in the U.S. the fast basically applies to Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Like other Eastern fasts, its more strict than the ones that have come to exist in the Latin Rite.

This expresses the view that "there is no feast without the fast", a quote that I'm sure others know the source of but which I do not.  There is a lot to it. Father Michael O'Loughlin, of Catholic Stuff You Should Know fame, holds that the cycle of fasting and feasting puts things in order.  And indeed it might.

Cycling back to Thanksgiving, the Puritans, in spite of their hostility to all things Catholic, and the nation, during the tragedy of the Civil War during which the holiday was first somewhat instituted as a national holiday, got that.  Indeed, both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, in taking steps to institutionalize it on the nation's civil calendar, got that as well.  It's not an accident that all of those event took place during periods during which there was something equivalent to a vast national fast going on.

Something to consider.

Gluten and the American diet. A blog mirror rambling journey.

Wheat field, Walla Walla Washington, 1941.

This interesting item appeared on the always interesting A Hundred Years Ago blog just recently:

1919 Farwell & Rhines Gluten Flour Advertisement

As folks here know, I'll riff off of the excellent blog A Hundred Years Ago from time to time. When I do, I usually have already posted on the thread there and I usually post a link to my item here, if I build one based on one of the many interesting topics there.

In this case, I didn't comment and I'm not going to post a link back, as I want to avoid unintentionally offending, which would be easy to do with this post.

That's because I'm a "Gluten Skeptic", if you will, and somebody there has already noted in a comment to this post that they've had to give up foods with gluten.  I'm frankly of the opinion that most people who give up foods with gluten don't need to, just as I'm of the opinion that about 90% of our modern "must give up" food fads is not only a fad, it's part of the remaining Puritan DNA in our American culture.*  If we're not suffering we're just not living right.

Before we look at this, what the heck is gluten anyway?  Well, here's a snipped from an article in Scientific American:

Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, rye and barley. It's found in most breads, cereals, pastas and many processed foods, according to WebMD. People who have a condition called celiac disease develop an immune reaction to gluten that damages the intestine, and so they need to avoid the protein. About 1 percent of the population has celiac disease.

Wait a minute. . . not only do we now know what gluten is, but did that say 1% of the population has celiac disease?

Yes it did.

1%.

Now, in a country that is as populated as the United States is, 1% is not a small number.  It'd mean something like 3,600,000 people.  That's a lot.

But if you go through the store and read the articles and talk to people who really follow the latest trends in things, you'd be left with the impression that something like 30% of the population is wheat intolerant now, and that's just flat out bull.

The headline of that article was, by the way, the following:

Most People Shouldn't Eat Gluten-Free

Gluten-free products made with refined grains can be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals

Yup, most people ought to knock that off.

The article further noted:

For most other people, a gluten-free diet won't provide a benefit, said Katherine Tallmadge, a dietitian and the author of "Diet Simple" (LifeLine Press, 2011). What's more, people who unnecessarily shun gluten may do so at the expense of their health, Tallmadge said.

This article, I'd note, is kind.  I've seen others that just flat out state that most of the people who are dead set convinced they have some sort of intolerance to gluten are just flat out wrong.

While I'll not go into it, I'll also note that there's some speculation why we've arrived at a point where this is a concern when it wasn't previously.  If it hasn't always been the case that 1% of the population has been so afflicted, then there's something going on. And nearly anyone over 30 years of age can recall a time when there was no concern in this area whatsoever. That would suggest that this is a disease, for those who actually have it that has come on in very modern times. Why?

The same has been noted for allergies, I'll note.  The percentage of the population that suffers from allergies is higher today than at any time in t he past, and I'm in that group.  Why?

In my case, I'm certain its genetic.  I didn't lead a sheltered life indoors as a kid prior to my developing asthma, and my mother didn't douse the house with more anti biologic agents than are used in a biological weapons lab like most modern mothers seem to do (Americans are insanely germ phobic).  It's in my DNA, darn it.  And so is the case, no doubt for most of those with celiac disease. 

But if more people than the historical norm are developing this condition otherwise. . . something is going on.

Humans have eaten grains, we now know, back to the neolithic age.  For years and years archaeologists and anthropologists used to have the nonsensical idea, which a lot of them still advance, that there were hunters and gathers and then suddenly one day farmers sprang up and everyone moved to the farm.  That never made any sense and we now know that hunters and gatherers, in the regions friendly to grains, started cultivating it.  They did that for an extremely long, long time, before they settled on farms.  While that's another story, one we've already told, what that also tells us is that humans have been eating grains for a really long time, although not necessarily wheat for the whole time, but other grasses in addition to, or in place of, wheat.  Wheat has been cultivated, according to archaeologists from between 9,000 and 8,000 years ago, which means that in reality it's almost certainly been cultivated for 10,000 to 14,000 years.

It's never been grown everywhere, and that's important to note. The reason for this is that it's also fairly clear, but widely ignored, that individual human populations are evolved to eat certain foods more than others, or even where others are not. This is the entire basis of certain people being lactose intolerant. Cultures that have drank cow's milk for a long time are not lactose intolerant, as evolution operated against that condition.  Where cow's milk was not drunk, it wouldn't matter, and when the ancestors of people from those cultures encounter milk it can be unpleasant.

Mediterranean cultures have been growing wheat forever and it spread all over the grain growing regions of Europe in antiquity.  It was grown way out in the steppes, all over North Africa, as far north as Greenland, and into regions of Africa that are deserts and grow nothing today.  But that isn't everywhere.  That alone may explain the rise in gluten, which is in wheat of course, but also in rye and barely.  It isn't in rice, which is the other major grain spread all over the world.

But it isn't in simply everything either, and if its a much bigger problem now than it once was, there's a reason for that. The reason may not be there and it might not be a much bigger problem than it once was.  Or, if it is there, there's an explanation, but what is it?

One of the hypothesis that was advanced is that modern wheat flours had more gluten in them.  Indeed, the item noted above had been blended to triple the amount of gluten in the what in issue.  At least one study, however, has been skeptical of that explanation.

In response to the suggestion that an increase in the incidence of celiac disease might be attributable to an increase in the gluten content of wheat resulting from wheat breeding, a survey of data from the 20th and 21st centuries for the United States was carried out. The results do not support the likelihood that wheat breeding has increased the protein content (proportional to gluten content) of wheat in the United States. Possible roles for changes in the per capita consumption of wheat flour and the use of vital gluten as a food additive are discussed.

None of which gets back to the item originally linked in. . . or does it? 

A century ago, we find an advertisement, amazingly, for something with added gluten.  Why was that?

One thing is that it changed the consistency of bread, improving it.  It also boosted protein, but I don't know that this was the reason.  Indeed, I don't know what the real reason for really adding gluten was.

Quite a change from what we see today, of course, at the grocery store, where there are things you darned well know never had gluten in them, advertised as "gluten free".

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*The Puritan comment alone is likely to offend some and be cheered by others for the wrong reasons, but its meant sincerely.  One of the real offshoots of the Reformation was that certain strands of Protestant theology that rapidly developed contained a very strong sense of suffering and double predestination which provided no relief from it.  The Puritans, if recalled today positively for their "work ethic" and various virtues, were notable in this regard, although contrary to what people imagine, they weren't opposed to alcohol and they were very much not opposed to marital sex (something nearly completely forgotten about them).

This post doesn't deal with their theology in any meaningful sense, and it's not going to.  There are still those who fairly closely adhere to some variants of it, and this isn't intended to debate them. Rather, what it notes is that their early views and developed ones had a very strong influence on current cultural views, and likewise strains of thought developed during the Reformation continue to have an influence on European secular thought as well, even though those holding them would hardly recognize that and in fact would likely deny it.  A certain irony exists here, however, as the cliches of "Catholic guilt" and "Jewish guilt" are in fact largely wholesale myths, whereas the inherited need for suffering that springs to some degree from the Reformation isn't even really recognized.

The Puritans, whom we used to cite, and did cite up until very recently, as the foundational cultural pioneers of America, were opposed to all other religions and religious tolerance itself, and they were also extremely strictly opposed to a lot of activities that average people enjoyed, including sports, for example.  Activities on Sundays were extremely strictly limited where they held sway.  All this caused them to really be hated by people who had to deal with them who were not Puritans, including outright banning their presence in some areas of Colonial North America, but none the less,  as time developed in the United States, offshoots of their lines of thought continued to be influential and highly opposed to certain things.  Added to this, a very literal reading of certain portions of the New Testament, and the omission of study of others, lead to a sense that everything was foreordained and that most people were going to Hell, which made suffering on Earth the basic norm.  This line of thought, we should note, was by no means limited to the Puritans and it spread to some other Protestant regions during the Reformation, although it did not characterize all of them by any means and it has very much waned even among those Protestant faiths that descend from denominations that were sympathetic to that view.  Of interest to an upcoming post, it spread to Scandinavia late but took hold very strongly there, which has an impact on certain things today.

Be all that as it may, and without intending to offend anyone, in the modern United States the Puritan heritage in particular, and certain reformation strains elsewhere in Europe in general, while very much cast off by the population in religious terms continues to express itself in the idea that we must suffer, and suffering in diet is a good way to do that.  It also expresses itself in a certain desire to spread the suffering in a puritanical cultural way.  A person can hardly go to a restaurant, for example, in a group without somebody who has chosen to endure food deprivation of some sort making it public in the group and basically casting implied aspersions on those who don't join in the culinary grief.  We like to imagine that all of this is very much past us, but it isn't.  A person ordering a steak with a big side of wheat rolls is just as welcome at a lot of dinner tables in 2019 as a person ordering a bucket of beer would have been in 1919, or a person suggesting in a that everyone go enjoy a football game in England in 1645.

Again, this isn't intended to be a religious comment.  There remain those who hold views very close to those held by the Puritans, the Congregationalist is a direct descendant of them, and there are those who hold views that are close to theirs on most things or even stricter in regard to some.  The theological points that could be debated regarding those views aren't going to be debated here now or at any time. Rather, what's interesting about this is that the United States, culturally, is a very Protestant country, as are some European countries, even among those who don't recognize that or who are not Protestants of any kind.  It gets back to our Third Law of History.