Why should we give thanks on Thanksgiving?
We live in a system much bigger than we are. Our foods come to us courtesy of a sun 95 million miles away, and courtesy of life’s 3.5 billion year evolution.
What’s more, our foods don’t just come from California, Florida, Brazil and Africa. Our turkey comes to us courtesy of breeders in Mexico 2,000 years ago. Today’s turkey comes from Minnesota, North Carolina, and Arkansas.
Our potatoes were cross-bred into existence by farmers in the South American Andes Mountains 7,000 years ago. Today, those potatoes come from Idaho. Our beef comes to us courtesy of the inventors of cattle herding in the Middle East and China 10,600 years ago. Today our ground sirloin comes from Texas.
Our chicken comes from breeders in Thailand 3,500 years ago. And the secrets of how to make beef and chicken tasty come from the corporate headquarters of McDonalds in Chicago and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Louisville, Kentucky.
If we are believers, we may call this giant system in which we live God. If we are unbelievers, we may call it nature. But one way or the other, we owe it thanks. It gives us our meals, our clothing, and the materials for our housing.
But there’s more to thank for all we’ve got. We owe growing our own food to an agricultural revolution over 11,000 years ago in Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. We owe the long distance trade that brings us our food, to our ancestors in Africa who began trading over distances of hundreds of miles 200,000 years ago.
We owe our dinner tables to the craftsmen in Africa’s Zambia who first used wood as building materials 476,000 years ago. And we owe the flooring on which our table legs stand to the builders of the first two-story apartment complexes in Turkey 9,000 years ago. Builders who invented not just the second story, but the brick.
What’s more, we owe the oxygen in the air we breathe, the oxygen that nourishes and energizes us, the oxygen without which we couldn’t survive, to bacterial colonies that took in what was food for them but burped out their toxic waste 3.5 billion years ago. Their toxic waste is the oxygen we breathe today.
We owe even the soil in which our foods are grown to the first creators of massive layers of waste 350 million years ago, trees. Trees were among this planet’s first users of materialism, consumerism, and the one-use throwaway.
What did trees carelessly toss out? Leaves. And every average tree created 200,000 of these solar-panels, these leaves, every season, then threw them away in the fall. Threw them where their neighbors, bacteria, could digest these once-green solar panels and turn them into what we call top soil.
We also owe that top soil to the contribution 110 million years ago of plants that battled with the trees for sunshine, plants that, in addition, produced astonishing billboards to attract their pollinators, insects. These flamboyant plants also threw their billboards away in the fall and built new ones when the spring came.
The materialist, consumerist, show-offs were flowering plants. And when they tossed their blossoms out, those miracle makers, bacteria, ate the discarded flower petals and turned them, too, into the richness we figured out how to use 11,000 years ago—more top soil.
And you and I owe thanks to the hundred trillion bacteria in our guts, bacteria who, when you sit back with a round belly and wipe the gravy off your mouth with a napkin, will go to work digesting your Thanksgiving dinner for you, turning it from a mere slurry into the substances that nourish you.
So when it comes time to give thanks, give thanks for the four-billion-year evolutionary history that led to the turkey on your table, to the vegetables in the dishes you pass around, to the invention of those dishes themselves, to the table at which you sit, and to the chairs on which you settle your bum.
Give thanks for the bacteria in your gut who turn your thanksgiving dinner into a feast your body can actually use. Give thanks to the solar system, that gave birth to a planet named for its fruitful waste, earth.
Give thanks to the sun above and to the chemical systems below. Chemical systems that would someday give birth to life. And would someday give birth to you and me.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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