Though I have many things to be thankful for each year, the traditional food served alongside the 4th Thursday of November is not one of them. Thanksgiving meals are less than satisfactory— let’s stick to roasting chestnuts on an open fire instead.
As a picky eater, these foods deserve to be ranked against each other— some are better than others, even though they’re all pretty bad to begin with.
- TURKEY
6/10 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
We’re starting off with a classic– the roasted thanksgiving turkey. The skin is clearly the best and most flavorful part of the turkey, but the rest of the meat tends to be dry and somewhat flavorless? It’s good but not great, and objectively, turkeys are the worst edible bird.
- MASHED POTATOES
2/10 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
I’ll face backlash for this one but I firmly believe that mashed potatoes taste like pulsified cardboard that’s a little wet. There’s no flavor! There’s little to no nutritional value! A waste of perfectly good potatoes is what it is— may as well shovel starch into your mouth while you’re at it. The texture is like chewing wet paper.
- CRANBERRY/CRANBERRY SAUCE
3/10 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Wannabe raisins. They taste worse in every way. Don’t even get me started on whoever thought Sprite Cranberry was a good idea. The “sauce” is like a chunky soup, too.
- PUMPKIN-FLAVORED ANYTHING
4/10 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
I am appalled by those who don’t think about retching when they think about gutting a pumpkin. It’s messy, it doesn’t smell pleasant— “AAAAA” is essentially my thought process whenever I see pumpkin guts; maybe it’s just that, but I cannot stand the smell/taste of pumpkin.
- STUFFING
8/10 ★★★★★★★★☆☆
My opinion on this matter is honestly unreliable. I’ve never actually had stuffing before, but so many people rave about how it’s the best part of a Thanksgiving meal, so I had to search up the recipe and some images. I’m rattled. All my years, I dread the annual, inevitable Thanksgiving meal, but this? This looks absolutely scrum-diddly-umptious. I must try it immediately.
- CORN ON THE COB
1/10 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Corn is officially the worst vegetable cultivated by mankind. Sure, if you drown it with Kosher salt and butter, it can be tolerable. But the moment you try to bite into it, the damn kernels get stuck in your teeth– and even beyond that, corn tastes like nothing. Pro tip, if you want to make an enemy of me, give me corn on the cob.
I could go on forever about the frustrating inadequacy of Thanksgiving meals– maybe I’m correct, maybe I “haven’t had a real Thanksgiving meal,” but at the end of the day, Thanksgiving food doesn’t live up to the hype.
