How to Give Thanks by Cooking Food No One Knows How to Cook and Eating Food No One Likes to Eat

To remind everyone how grateful we should be for all the readily available, appealing food that is easy to prepare and that everyone enjoys eating, take one day every year to spend fourteen hours laboring over food so terrible it can only be stomached once annually.

Think of everything you like about chicken: its moistness, its versatility, its ability to absorb the flavors of whatever is cooked adjacent to it. Now try to imagine a food that’s similar to chicken, except without any of those good qualities. Imagine flake-dry poultry served as slices of sawdust whose flavor can best be described as literally nothing or, at best, vaguely bird-ish. This nightmare cousin of chicken is called turkey, and turkey will be the shriveled centerpiece of your Thanksgiving meal.

If you’ve accumulated enough grocery points, your local grocery store might give you the turkey for free because they simply cannot believe anyone will pay actual money for a turkey. They may also offer to swap it out for a free ham but don’t fall for it because ham actually tastes good.

You can buy a turkey deep fryer for $100. It will only make your turkey taste $1 better, but it will have been a worthwhile purchase if you do it for 100 years. You can also shove a can of Dr. Pepper into the turkey carcass, which doesn’t make it taste better but will make you grateful for something to talk about with the stiff assemblage of distant relatives gathered around it.

Another way to attempt to make turkey more palatable is to pour a salty sauce onto it. This sauce will be gray. It is the only gray food that humans ever consume, and your instinct to avoid it is mostly trustworthy; we eat gray gravy this one day only to remind us how happy we should be that most human food doesn’t resemble dog food.

Your most desperate option is to spread a sweet sauce onto the turkey. This sauce is made from cranberries, a food that alarmingly comes from something called a “bog.” The flavor of cranberry is most closely associated with puking after your first time drinking vodka as a teen or possibly with attempting to cure the increasingly common UTIs you’re suffering as you age. Sometimes cranberry sauce comes from a can and is served in ribbed, gelatinous slices, but to fully remember how grateful we should be for non-Thanksgiving food, have someone prepare cranberry sauce from scratch, a painstaking chore that somehow results in slop much worse than canned magenta plasma.

Know how much you like bread? Instead of eating bread on Thanksgiving, you’ll be cutting it into several thousand tiny cubes and soaking it in salty liquid, then re-baking it. Stuffing is wet bread with pieces of wet celery stuck to it. Everyone says they love it, but they never prepare it on any other day of the year.

The majority of the other side dishes are factory-rejected baby food.

To remind you how awesome potatoes are, several of the veggies will be other, less familiar root vegetables, ones so gnarled and strangely colored they look like Tim Burton invented them for an animated Thanksgiving film meant to frighten children. You’ll become grateful for your left wrist after your right wrist snaps in half trying to cut through a turnip. Some of the vegetables you’ll make for Thanksgiving are so gross they can only be consumed if hidden under 500 mini marshmallows.

In fact, nearly every vegetable will be prepared casserole-style, with a completely unrelated food product crushed up on top to create a processed food crust that hides the nauseating vegetable beneath. Crumbled Ritz crackers work well for this purpose, or fried onions—not real fried onions, but salted powdered cardboard chips meant to inspire fond memories of actually fried onions. You might want to mix the casserole vegetable with another stomach-turning food product you eat on no other day of the year, like condensed cream of mushroom soup.

After dinner, to remind us to be grateful for real desserts, we eat pie. You may serve the pie with ice cream so everyone can think about how grateful they would be if they were eating ice cream without pie.