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Sweet Thanks

Jackie Skrypnek

mashed sweet potatoes in olive green bowl












This coming Monday is set aside for the express purpose of giving thanks. Thanksgiving: a holiday that's synonymous with gratitude – how lovely is that? And while we can be thankful for any number of things – people who are dear to us, a body that functions, autumn light shining golden through the leaves – the fruits of the harvest earn a special nod at this time of year.



Wheat, cranberries, onions. It's harvest time, no matter the scale.



For those doing the hands-on work of threshing and digging, plucking chickens, or piling squash and root vegetables into cold storage, this sentiment probably comes quite naturally. But for the rest of us, the gifts of the land can feel remote, and gratitude for them requires a conscious effort, a little prompting.


So let's imagine this:

It's early April and somewhere in the southern US, sweet potato slips are being tucked into the ground. The slips themselves (growth shoots from a seed tuber) were already coaxed to life in warm, sandy beds some weeks earlier, possibly at another farm altogether. Apparently these tubers are a vulnerable lot so the fields have been fumigated in an attempt to keep nematodes and viruses at bay, and now it's up to the rest of the soil life, the sun, and the rain to work their magic.


Belowground, root tendrils extend as per the wisdom somehow held in those little shoot bodies and a new generation of sweet potatoes begins to take shape. Aboveground, weeds are subdued either by cutting or by chemical means; water and fertilizer are dispensed via drip tubing in every row. Months pass with leaves synthesizing photons into tuber growth, the gnarly orange veggies maturing slowly, hour by sunny hour. Finally they're deemed ready to be unearthed. Thousands of seasonal workers are enlisted; according to one job listing, the work involves prolonged stooping, bending, and kneeling in all types of weather and labourers "must be able to lift 75 lbs to shoulder height repetitively throughout the workday". (One single day of that – or, let's be honest, probably one hour – and I'd be spent).



labourers harvesting sweet potatoes


Several days of curing, temperature- and humidity-controlled storage, washing and drying, more chemicals (post-harvest fungicide is common), sorting and grading...all this before the tubers can be loaded for transport. A typical truck route might angle from California through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, then to Alberta where, 2,000 -3,000 km later, presto! Six months from their leafy beginnings, they show up for sale at the grocery store just in time for Thanksgiving dinner.


If I think through the full provenance of those sweet potatoes, gratitude flows pretty easily. It takes an act of imagination to trace the life of one food item, yet none of it is, in fact, imaginary. All that time and land, all those people and tractors and trucks and fuel, all that sun, all the growth-work the plant itself did – that's all real. And that's just the sweet potato! We can take a little mental journey for every ingredient on our plate – the cranberries, the turkey, the wheat in the bread stuffing. It becomes mind-boggling if we extend the exercise as far as the butter, the nutmeg, the salt. And that's because it is mind-boggling what goes into a standard holiday dinner, or any meal for that matter.



Left: Nutmeg growing (I couldn't even have pictured this until I looked it up. Mace is the just-visible red part enveloping the nutmeg seed). Right: Loading of Himalayan salt for processing.



Consider the drilling and mining for fuel and fertilizers, the manufacturing of blades and equipment, the soil microorganisms and pollinators, the all-manner-of-things required for packaging everything from the foil butter wrapper to the bread bag to the spice jar. You could dig further and further only to reveal an ever-expanding web of resources, inputs, organisms, and elements that culminate in a food product we swallow with nary a thought. It seems really fitting and beautiful, then, to say thank you. Or maybe more than that, it's beautiful to realize how we're folded in to this whole complex chain of events, how the sweet potato on our fork connects us to the web of efforts that produced it and how it, in turn, will be folded into the very fabric of our tissues. The kind of gratitude that flows from that acknowledgment feels very true.


There's plenty in this chain of events we may wish to alter (the chemicals, the distance, the underpaid labour...heck, the whole industrial food paradigm), but that needn't keep us from being so very thankful to receive the sustenance. Though what could and should be might become apparent in the process, this meditation is all about what is. This Thanksgiving, whether the ingredients were the work of our own hands or of far-flung origins, may we be bowled over by the near-miracle gifts that they are.



holiday meal with sweet potatoes in foreground

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