To its critics, Thanksgiving is a darkly ironic holiday: Europeans showed up in North America, took advantage of the harvest, gave thanks, and then slaughtered the native inhabitants and took over their land. Kurt Michael Friese acknowledges the troubling history of the holiday but wants to retrieve it from its brutal associations. Giving thanks for food, he says, is a fundamental human act; and here in fast-food nation, devoting a day to focusing on dinner just might point the way to a revival in food culture.