America's Most Hated Thanksgiving Foods (2024)

FAQs

What is the top disliked Thanksgiving food? ›

Cranberry sauce

For the third year running, cranberry sauce comes in as the most-hated Thanksgiving food, receiving a dislike from 31.49 of participants. But despite not wanting to eat the stuff, Americans seem to believe that no holiday table is complete without it.

"For the third year in a row, cranberry sauce takes first place as the most disliked traditional Thanksgiving food. Over 31% of respondents, 82 million American adults, do not want cranberry sauce for their Thanksgiving dinner.

It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America. There was no gravy either, since the colonists didn't yet have mills to produce flour.

While the survey found a variety of dishes ranking the highest in each state, one dish stands out collectively as the nation's favorite ― mashed potatoes.

Unhealthy: Stuffing

“Bacon, sausage, mince meat, giblets, and a variety of similar ingredients find their way into many a stuffing, which takes an already unhealthy dish — often topping 500 calories per serving, depending on the recipe — to an entirely new level of unhealthy,” she said.

As far as what everyone considers their favorite Thanksgiving food, stuffing was the winner by a landslide, followed by turkey, mashed potatoes/gravy, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes/casserole, cranberries and last but not least, pumpkin pie.

Thomas Jefferson was famously the only Founding Father and early president who refused to declare days of thanksgiving and fasting in the United States.

What did the Native Americans not eat on the first Thanksgiving? ›

Although turkeys were indigenous, there's no record of a big, roasted bird at the feast. The Wampanoag brought deer and there would have been lots of local seafood (mussels, lobster, bass) plus the fruits of the first pilgrim harvest, including pumpkin. No mashed potatoes, though.

While live cows and hens were useful as long as they were producing milk and eggs, respectively, turkeys were generally raised only for their meat and thus could be readily killed. Third, a single turkey was usually big enough to feed a family.

For the third year in a row, cranberry sauce takes the cake as the least favorite Thanksgiving food.

Turkey is the most common main dish of a Thanksgiving dinner, to the point that Thanksgiving is sometimes colloquially called "Turkey Day." Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that "no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day", and Benjamin Franklin had high regard for the wild turkey as an ...

Mashed potatoes are a traditional Thanksgiving side dish for a reason, and we definitely look forward to serving up this delicious dish every November.

For many Native Americans Thanksgiving is not a heartwarming holiday marked by gathering with family and serving others, but rather “a reminder of genocide, colonialism, and oppression, it's a symbol of smallpox blankets, Christianity, land grabs and manifest destiny,” artist Tony Abeyta says.