Comments on: Eat Like the Pilgrims

By: JP

JP — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:50:21 +0000

@Alice, your link is a 404.

By: Marshcroft

Marshcroft — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:14:40 +0000

Miss Cellania,

Point taken on the Lobster, living in New England I for one think we should make Lobster the traditional now :-)

By: Miss Cellania

Miss Cellania — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:21:49 +0000

Marshcroft, I suppose the cachet of a certain food has to do with how plentiful and easy to catch it is, so that would change in different historical eras. With 150 people to feed, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag probably brought everything they had.

By: Marshcroft

Marshcroft — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:08:25 +0000

If I am not mistaken on a previous Mental Floss snippet it pointed out how Lobster was not seen as a luxury but more of a poor mans food and they used to feed it to prisoners back in the day, so why would it have been on the menu?

By: Steve from San Diego

Steve from San Diego — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:01:15 +0000

Kinda funny – last year, there was an Iron Chef America Thanksgiving challenge where the chefs had to use ingredients found in the first Thanksgiving. I don’t think seal meat was one of the ingredients the chefs had on hand, though.

By: Moth

Moth — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:41:07 +0000

Thanks for the great article! Very interesting to read and lovely pictures.

In regards to the “First Thanksgiving”, yes there was a feast of thanksgiving at Berkley Plantation first, but what we celebrate as Thanksgiving is a decendent of the harvest festival between Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621. So Berkley Plantation did have *a* thanksgiving first, and there were possibly more celebrations of thanksgiving at various times even before that, but that’s not what the current Thanksgiving is a derivative of.

By: Miss Cellania

Miss Cellania — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:11:33 +0000

Joe, lifespan statistics are misleading because they usually average out ages at death. Infant mortality always skews them younger. In most cases, if you can manage to live to age 5, you’ll have a long life ahead of you.

That’s one reason people back in the old days had way more babies than they really wanted or needed.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:58:15 +0000

hey ms. c, great post but i have one objection. the life span of europeans living in new england was well into adulthood. According to the research of alison games, there were people all the way into their late 70′s by the early 1640′s only two decades following the arrival of the mayflower. it was in the south that people had little chance of making it past their 30th birthday. especially the men.

By: ovaryacting

ovaryacting — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:43:00 +0000

Oh God, I just got the name thing too.

By: Alice

Alice — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:23:00 +0000

Click on my name to see info about the real first Thanksgiving. It was in Berkley Planation, Virginia.