Is Mac and Cheese a Thanksgiving Food?

“A Brief Overview of Existing Literature”

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Also yes, but my mom doesn’t like it.

A couple days ago I went up north to visit my parents and my brother for the weekend, and my brother and my mom and I got into a conversation about what kinds of foods we would want to have at Thanksgiving this year. What with COVID, Thanksgiving celebrations will look very different, and for the first time in my memory, we won’t be having a thanksgiving celebration with large, extended family gatherings. But it does mark the first time that we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving at my grandfather’s house, so there is that. But just because the world is so different right now doesn’t mean that the foods we eat have to be different, too. We can restore some semblance of normalcy by downsizing Thanksgiving but retaining family favorites and staples that we’ve had for years. Things like turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and of course, mac and cheese.

My brother suggested mac and cheese during the food conversation, and my mother was more confused than I’ve seen her in recent memory. She could never recall having mac and cheese at a Thanksgiving meal, and if I’m being honest, neither can I. But Nick, my brother, says otherwise, and that every other family or friend he knows has mac and cheese at their Thanksgiving events. Actually, I retract my earlier statement; last year I did have mac and cheese at a Friendsgiving celebration. But then again the turkey was also replaced by buffalo chicken dip, so maybe it doesn’t really count as a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal. Anyway, my brother’s desire for mac and cheese at Thanksgiving, a desire which I second and fully support, prompted discussion over what it means to be a Thanksgiving food, as my mother was wholly against the consumption of cow-juice noodles. Did the Pilgrims have to have had it? Does it have to show up in the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special? I think not, for if those two mutually-exclusive assumptions held true, we’d only have bowls of pretzel, buttered toast, and the precursors to genocide to eat. Don’t forget that America profited off of the part-accidental, mostly-systematic murder of millions of people. And continues to profit off of. But that’s a story for another time. Though I could swear I’ve talked about it before, at length, though now I can’t find it. Strange.

Anyway, in attempted to get to the bottom of this disconnect between wanting mac and cheese and not actually having it, I looked up some traditional Thanksgiving foods, where tradition, of course, means an article written by delish that only contains five unique foods despite claiming to have over 35 suggestions. I’m only half joking; that article has about five different variations of Turkey, five different casseroles, some mashed potato options (one of which is literally just gravy without the potatoes), three states of yams, and an uncountable variety of stuffing that probably all taste exactly the same. And, of course, cranberries. Who the hell actually likes cranberries, and why do we keep eating them?

The strongest argument I have against cranberries, besides the fact that I just don’t really like them, is that they’re historically inaccurate; while cranberries were likely eaten at the first Thanksgiving, there would have been no sauce, as, according to this Smithsonian article, cranberry sauce wasn’t around yet. They also made me aware of the fact that there were no potatoes or sweet potatoes in that part of North America yet, nor was there enough wheat or sugar to make pies, pumpkin or otherwise. Though the first Thanksgiving did have a variety of squash. So if you want a true traditional thanksgiving, anything with wheat or potatoes is out, and you’d have to include shellfish and eels, apparently? Turkey wouldn’t even be the main dish, it would probably have to be ducks or geese or some other waterfowl. Huh. So there would not have been mac and cheese, either.

This other, incredibly poorly-titled delish article (it’s totally something I would expect), suggests that mac and cheese at Thanksgiving is, in fact, a southern tradition. And with me, the only connection I have to the southern United States is the occasional vacations to see my uncle and a brief time where I was 100% certain I would be going to the University of Alabama for undergrad. So it’s weird, then, that both my brother and I would feel this kinship to mac and cheese as a Thanksgiving food, despite it not really being culturally relevant here in the Midwest. So what gives?

I couldn’t really tell you. I don’t think there is a reason besides that Nick and I want mac and cheese, and we want to eat it at Thanksgiving. Maybe we’ve seen other people have it at their Thanksgiving via Instagram or something like that, but I think mac and cheese is a perfectly reasonable Thanksgiving food. In fact, I think that anything could be a Thanksgiving day food, if you eat it on Thanksgiving. Why bother limiting the foods you eat on a holiday to stuff that people don’t like? Like cranberry sauce boiled with cranberries inside of other cranberries? Or stuffing? For legal reasons, that’s a joke. I do like stuffing, most of the time. That Aldi Hawaiian roll stuffing is pretty damn good.

So I’d say that yes, mac and cheese is a Thanksgiving food. Maybe there is some value to keeping a tradition, though. People like things they’re familiar with, and turkey at Thanksgiving seems to be one of those things. Maybe replacing the turkey with a big plate of sushi would make some people uncomfortable, but hey, whatever floats your boat. That sushi would only be slightly less historically inaccurate than mashed potatoes. At least they had fish at the first Thanksgiving.