News

Giving Thanks: What’s on your plate?

Rachel Hoki, Senior Writer
November 18, 2022

Mashed potatoes, bread rolls, turkey, pie, gravy – these were the most popular “essential Thanksgiving foods” in a survey of 62 Liberty students.

If taking into account the near 46 million turkeys or 214 million pounds of potatoes that Americans use each year to prepare these classic Thanksgiving dishes, one can’t help but ask the question: Where does all this food come from?

For starters, let’s consider the origins of mashed potatoes, which were the most popular Thanksgiving food in the student survey.

Mashed potatoes aren’t complete without the potatoes themselves, so where are they from?

It all starts in a field where the humble leaf harnesses months’ worth of sunlight energy to feed its growing potato roots. The potatoes we eat almost always come from farms in either Idaho or Washington, which are the two biggest potato producers in the US.

Most mashed potato recipes also call for milk. Indeed, milk comes from cows, but that’s not the entire story.

In a factory setting, fresh-from-the-cow milk is sent through a precise process of rapid heating and cooling to kill harmful bacteria – a procedure known as pasteurization. It is then homogenized, pumped under high pressure to evenly disperse fat throughout the milk, making for a smooth and creamy texture.

Even an ingredient as simple as table salt has a story behind it.

When old bodies of water – some dating back to the time of dinosaurs – dried up, they left behind salt deposits which are now deep underground. Salt is obtained from these reservoirs in a variety of ways.

The Morton salt company in particular extracts most table salt by pumping water in and out of these deposits, pulling saturated salt water from underground. This brine is then evaporated in huge commercial boilers, leaving behind the typical salt crystals found in ordinary kitchens.

These are just some of the complex scientific processes and large-scale industrial practices used to make a few ingredients in one Thanksgiving dish. Just think about the amount of work it takes to grow, harvest, transport, process, package, store, and cook all our other food!

In fact, when plugged into a carbon footprint calculator which accounts for these production factors, a single serving of Thanksgiving turkey uses about 1205 grams of CO2 emissions to make. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of driving a standard gas car from Liberty to RVC three and a half times.

As Thanksgiving approaches and we are encouraged to think about what we are grateful for, remember to thank the photosynthesis, underground salt deposits, long-distance truck drivers, grocery store employees, and everything else that makes all our meals possible!

Liberty’s Top 5 Thanksgiving Foods