Every Thanksgiving, we engage in an annual tradition where we watch parades sponsored by department stores trying to capture the attention of consumers at the beginning of the holiday shopping season and we then consume more food than we really need. Others spend their time writing screeds encouraging us to look at a Native America view of the day.

Then there are always the efforts to get people to think about, and do something about hunger and homelessness, in Philadelphia, in Westport, CT and in Williamstown, MA for example.

For me, I am looking at Thanksgiving from new perspectives. Are you having a ‘low carbon’ Thanksgiving? Recently, I heard a global warming activist claim that the average bite of food travels 2000 miles to get to our mouths. He spoke about how this was yet another aspect of our dependence on foreign oil. To put things into perspective, that is just about as far as the pilgrims traveled to get to the new world.

Since then, I’ve found people talking about a lower carbon diet. A great example is from TerraBlog about Low Carbon Beer.

Kim and I are now searching for various low carbon foods. We set out to find a turkey that was raised locally. The closest we got this time around was one raised in Pennsylvania. We did get some honey from an apiary a few towns away, and we are searching for other food that is closer to home. Hopefully our Christmas goose will come from a place even closer to home.

This thanksgiving I am thankful for the food I will receive. I am thankful people that have helped me think in new ways about our country, the people who were here before us and the people that will be here generations later. I am thankful for everyone who is out trying to make the lives of the people around them a little bit better, and I’m thankful for my wife cooking, what I trust will be a great lower carbon turkey.