The Sustainable Thanksgiving - Planning a Celebration of Food, Environment and Spirit

You can make this year's Thanksgiving more meaningful by making your celebration more healthful, environmentally friendly and authentic. If you plan ahead and keep things simple, this more sustainable type of Thanksgiving doesn't have to involve more work or expense, so it can satisfy your appetite, your spirit and your conscience.

First, start with a local harvest. The first Thanksgiving featured a regional bounty of fruits, vegetables, grains and meats native to the 17th Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, landscape, such as deer, lobster, dried gooseberries, pumpkin (though probably not pumpkin pie as we know it) and rabbit. While that menu might not please the modern holiday crowd, you can celebrate your own area's bounty by buying as many fixings - potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, apples, pumpkins, squash and more - at your local farmer's market instead of at a chain grocery store, where much of the food is trucked from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Second, make the centerpiece of your dinner table a sustainably, humanely raised turkey. Check your local food co-ops or farmer's markets, or search online for organic poultry farms in your area (be sure to start looking well ahead of time). And if you can find a heritage turkey producer (someone who raises historic American turkey sub-breeds, as opposed to the Large White variety that dominates industrial farms) in your area, all the better; people who choose these types of birds claim they are firmer, richer and more flavorful than standard turkeys.

Third, invest in a nice set of cloth dinner napkins. A set of four sateen-finish, organic cotton napkins might set you back $12 to $19 or more, but you won't have to buy attractive paper napkins for the rest of the holidays … or the coming year. Even if you figure you spend only $2.50 every two months on ordinary paper napkins, that amounts to $15 for the year, and contributes a lot of waste to the environment as well.

Fourth, serve organic juices, milk, beer or wine with dinner, as opposed to standard beverages. Your local food co-op should offer a variety of organic beverages, and you can often find a few organic beers and wines at your larger grocery or liquor stores. Among the breweries and vineyards that produce organic beverages are Dogfish Head Brewing Co., Frey Vineyards, Silver Thread Vineyard and Sprecher Brewery, which also creates natural sodas.

Finally, if you usually cook with and serve bottled water, try tap water instead. In most metropolitan areas, the tap water is just as filtered - sometimes even more pure - than bottled water, and it tastes just as good, while producing much less waste and costing far less money. If you doubt that, check out Corporate Accountability International's "Think Outside the Bottle" campaign, which - using blind taste-tests like those used in soft-drink marketing - has found that most people can't distinguish tap water from bottled. In fact, about one-fourth of bottled water actually comes from municipal tap water sources. And, while tap water in the U.S. is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, bottled water transported in-state (as opposed to between states) is controlled primarily by state agencies, whose regulations might be more or less strict than the EPA's.