Ryan O’Hanlon nominates pumpkin, declaring that “without pumpkin pie, there would be no reason to continue with this elegiac revisionist-historical sham that is Thanksgiving”:

Pumpkin pie is our ultimate dessert. While your palate is certainly a subjective thing—and attempts at describing how food tastes can lead to disturbing, fanfic-esque nightmares like this—the actual goodness of pumpkin pie is pretty clearly real. If pumpkin pie didn’t taste like the gift from heaven that it is, we wouldn’t have this pumpkin-spice hysteria, would we? The flavor of pumpkin pie is everywhere because people love the way it tastes. And that is often why we eat food.

Is pumpkin pie lazy? Yes. Did it possibly not even exist as a Thanksgiving staple until the previous century? Also yes. Do either of those things matter? No. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and there are few things more American than dumping a can of pre-prepared mush into pie crust and calling it dessert.

(Photo by Liz Davis)