Tomorrow in the United States is Thanksgiving, the American version of a harvest festival celebrating the bounty of the earth and preparing for the winter ahead. We trace the history of our holiday to a documented 1621 gathering of English Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag tribe in modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims had immigrated from England the previous year, looking to escape religious persecution. After a perilous journey across the Atlantic, the Pilgrims landed in America. First, they landed in modern-day Provincetown. The sandy soil wasn’t ideal for agriculture, so they boarded the Mayflower again and took the (relatively) short trip across Massachusetts Bay and landed in Plymouth. The first winter was horrific. Between scurvy from the long voyage and the harsh Massachusetts winters, half of the settlers did not live to see Spring.
The next year was more normal, but life was still difficult for the Pilgrims. Agrarian society is not an ideal way to live: backbreaking work all day long, and so much depends on the weather. I grew up in a small town just next door to Plymouth; the weather is as unpredictable as anything. But that year, they managed a successful harvest. As was tradition among most peoples of the world, after the harvest, they gathered to give thanks and share in the bounty.
The tradition of harvest festivals continues, formalized into this holiday of Thanksgiving. Of course, hunger remains a problem. There are numerous regulations that should be removed to promote better access to fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods. For example, sell-by dates lead to significant waste. Subsidies on corn and tariffs on sugar lead to the use of a lot of unhealthy additives. Food price supports lead to unnaturally high prices. Municipal regulations often prevent charities from distributing or providing food. Reducing these regulations will help increase access to food, lower the price of food, and reduce food waste.
In a recent EconLog post, Daniel Smith discussed how the FDA was used as a bludgeon against whiskey manufacturers. Daniel cites Jack High and Clayton Coppin in that story. Those same authors also wrote a book, The Politics of Purity, which examines the issue more broadly to include the food chain (I thank Econlib editor Pat Lynch for pointing me to the book).
There will be far too many who go without on a day when we celebrate how much we have. I do not wish to minimize their suffering, nor the suffering of those throughout the world who still live at or near subsistence level. The fight against hunger is not nearly done. But that does not mean we cannot celebrate the massive strides made against hunger, either.
The reason for the season has changed because it’s much more rare that food insecurity is a pressing concern. As a consequence, Thanksgiving has become a day to celebrate one’s blessings. Millions of Americans will criss-cross the nation to see friends, loved ones, and family. We celebrate our extraordinary abundance. We live in a place where less than 2% of our workers need to work in agriculture to provide the food we need. When there are droughts or other conditions that could previously have resulted in famine, we can import food, either from other places in the country or elsewhere in the world, to feed those who would have gone without because of lost crops. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, less than 2.5% of Americans die of malnutrition.1 We celebrate these blessings.
For those of you traveling, may your journeys be safe and may you return home. May you all enjoy the company of loved ones, wherever in the world you may be. And may you all enjoy the peace and comfort our shared and created abundance brings.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
[1] A note on the data from the source: “The FAO reports all values below 2.5% as ‘<2.5%’ due to high uncertainty at very low levels of undernourishment.”
READER COMMENTS
Monte
Nov 26 2025 at 11:36am
¡Bien dicho, Jon! ¡Gracias!
From Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1863:
Whatever your faith, may your feast be plentiful and your blessings abundant. Happy Thanksgiving!
nobody.really
Nov 26 2025 at 1:28pm
A fine sentiment.
We do. Yet Wikipedia offers some clarifications regarding the idea of the “Pilgrims” and “the first Thanksgiving.”
“Pilgrims”: The feast of 1621 was celebrated by people who called themselves Saints or Separatists (desiring to separate from the Church of England—distinct from the Puritans, who desired to reform the Church of England). In Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), the Separatist’s second governor, William Bradford, compared the Separatists to “strangers and pilgrims” akin to the Hebrews of the Old Testament. The first known occasion when someone referred to the colonists as Pilgrims, other than when quoting Bradford’s account, didn’t occur until 1789. Prior to that, people celebrating the Separatists referred to them as “Forefathers.”
“Thanksgiving”: As Englishmen, these colonists well understood the tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving—say, upon the successful completion of a war—with solemn prayers and fasting. The feast of 1621 was nothing of the kind, featuring games, secular songs, and, of course, feasting.
“The first Thanksgiving”: The first known “Thanksgiving” in North America was celebrated on December 4, 1619, by an earlier group of settlers in Virginia. They declared that this holy occasion would be celebrated annually, and it is celebrated to this day. In contrast, according to Wikipedia,
Finally, it is alleged that the colonists rejected the idea of settling in Provincetown due to the sandy soil. In fact, they just didn’t care for the flamboyant lifestyle. Just kidding. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
Juan Manuel Pérez Porrúa Pérez
Dec 1 2025 at 12:49am
We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Mexico, a country with strong Catholic traditions and suspicious of such an evidently Protestant celebration. It’s a shame, that such is the case. I do think it’s very good that, at least in the United States, there’s a specific holiday dedicated to gratitude, a virtue which, I’m afraid, becomes more and more rare as time passes and we are consumed with our own worries, often degenrating into despair or hopelessness that comes from a one-sided, overly pessimistic view of how things really are, how they really have been, how could be, and how they will be in the future.
Take the year 1863. Not a great year for the United States, nor for my own country, Mexico. That year the United States was literally split into two hostile, warring sections, and Mexico had been invaded and occupied by Napoléon III’s army, with the goal to set up an état fantoche under Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg–Lorraine. However, by 1865/67 the picture was entirely different: the United States was reunited again (the separatist Confederacy was defeated), Mexico’s constitutional republican government was restored after having defeated the French and their allies (with the diplomatic and even material support of the United States, by the way), and the Dominion of Canada, with significant autonomy from Great Britain and on the road to independence, was constituted. Who would’ve thought!
Anyway, I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans from Mexico City, and especially to those Americans who, for whatever reason, have chosen to make Mexico City their home.
john hare
Dec 1 2025 at 4:54am
I happen to be grateful for the Mexicans that choose to live in central Florida. Starting with my wife and coworkers.
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