Planning a Sustainable Thanksgiving Meal: A Recipe for Joy
When autumn arrives, many families begin planning their holiday menus—a tradition that has a global impact, given that feeding ourselves accounts for over half of habitable land use and a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans. Whether you're just starting your sustainability journey or ready to dive deep into life-cycle analysis, you can make wise meal choices backed by environmental science. This guide will help you enjoy a feast that protects our planet, empowering you to choose the level of commitment that works for your delicious celebrations.
Beginner: Simple Starter Steps
For a traditional Thanksgiving meal, purchase a turkey, sized precisely to your guest count: one pound per adult for leftovers, three-quarters of a pound for a single meal. Measure portions of side dishes using USDA guidelines to minimize food waste: 3/4 cup vegetables and 1/2 cup starches per person. Preparing the proper portions prevents food waste.
Choose root vegetables that can be stored without refrigeration: parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. This saves energy and leaves room in the refrigerator for other items.
Look for seasonal fruits and vegetables grown closer to home when shopping in the grocery store. Often these items will be featured in a display and will be more affordable than when they are not in season in your area.
Have a plan to compost vegetable peels, cores, and other organic waste from your meal prep. Composting reduces methane emissions from landfills and enriches the soil.
Intermediate: Leveling Up Your Eco-Game
Seek out a heritage turkey breed raised on a nearby family farm rather than buying a production breed from an intensive indoor grow facility further away. Genetic diversity provides crucial natural resilience. Narragansett and Standard Bronze varieties are naturally resistant to common poultry diseases, reducing the need for antibiotics.
Visit a farmers market rather than a supermarket to buy food grown locally and with minimal packaging.
Cut back on the meat portions and increase the fruits, vegetables, and grains. For example, instead of serving a whole turkey and planning a pound of meat per person, serve a turkey pasta dish so you can cut the meat portion in half. Your meal will still incorporate a traditional turkey meat flavor but with a much lower environmental impact.
Cook your turkey in an oven with a convection fan and use a meat thermometer probe to know when your bird is perfectly done. This will reduce your cooking time and save energy.
Have a plan to compost all organic waste from your meal. Make it easy for anyone who wants to help with cleanup to scrape plates directly into a compost pail rather than into a garbage can or down a sink drain.
Advanced: The Environmentalist's Feast
Serve a plant-based meal with a centerpiece main dish such as a stuffed butternut squash tower, wild mushroom and chestnut Wellington, or a whole roasted pumpkin filled with wild rice pilaf.
Feature your own harvest: serve potatoes, apples, and greens you’ve grown yourself.
Strive for zero waste: buy nothing wrapped in plastic so that you produce no waste that needs to be sent to the landfill as you prepare, eat, and clean up after your holiday meal.
Expert: The Planet Hero's Table
Plan a menu that offers the most delicious flavors and nutritious dishes that make the best use of the resources provided by your local ecosystem, including items like seaweed, fungi, and insects that are often overlooked by many cuisines. Millions of Americans enjoy ice cream thickened with carrageenan, bread baked with yeast, and candy, colored with red cochineal dye, but few suspect that when they do, they are enjoying Chondrus crispus and other species of seaweed, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and other species of fungus, and Dactylopius coccus and other species of scale insect.
Source ingredients that were produced entirely in your local foodshed using regenerative methods.
Prepare your meal in a fully-electric solar-powered home, avoiding the need to burn any fuel.
Conclusion:
Every food choice matters. Up to three pounds of carbon pollution per pound of turkey can be prevented by better practices raising, distributing, processing, and preparing it, according to the author of How Bad Are Bananas? We can find ways to feast that promote ecosystem health, and the data show that we can significantly improve our environmental impact during the holiday season. So go ahead and invite sustainability as a Thanksgiving dinner guest: use our action steps to prepare your holiday meal!
Technical Note: Measuring Your Meal's Environmental Impact
Unless you’re using a sustainability app, it’s really hard to do a full lifecycle analysis of all ingredients when you’re doing your meal planning. So, instead of worrying about carbon footprints, which are cumbersome to calculate without a computer and largely impossible to verify, let's focus on what we, as consumers, can easily observe and measure ourselves when making food choices. Here are two more accessible, yet still scientifically sound, indicators of environmental impact:
1. Plant-Based versus Animal-Based Food
As consumers, we can easily observe:
The proportion of animal products versus plant foods in our meal plan
The specific types of animal products we're buying (e.g., chicken versus beef)
Why it matters:
More than six times more protein can be produced per acre of land growing plants rather than raising animals for humans to eat.
Raising beef and dairy cattle is much less efficient and much more polluting than other agricultural practices.
Action steps: Prioritize plant-based proteins over animal alternatives. Begin with one or two meals per week, focusing on legumes, whole grains, and nuts. When choosing animal products, opt for those with higher sustainability scores—per unit of nutrition, chicken is typically three times more sustainable than beef.
2. Amount of Food Purchased
We can observe:
How much food we buy relative to what we actually consume
Whether food spoils before we can use it
Our shopping list versus actual purchases
Why it matters:
Buying food we don’t eat wastes money and resources
Reducing our demand for food lowers prices for everyone else
Action steps: Plan meals in advance, make detailed shopping lists, and stick to them. Store food properly to maximize shelf life. Use smaller plates to control portions and freeze excess fresh foods before they spoil. Start a simple food waste log to track what gets thrown away and adjust purchasing accordingly.
These indicators are easy to apply to the food we eat, requiring no special knowledge or tools. Keeping two considerations in mind when you buy food, you can be sure your choices are at least a little environmentally wiser and more planet-friendly than they would be otherwise.
