G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” I find this quote mostly terrifying because if we allowed my ancestors to vote on our current dinner menu, we would all be eating hardtack and salted cod while dying of treatable infections at age thirty.
This relevant bit of philosophy came to mind when I received a text this morning asking a seemingly innocent question. It simply read, “What is your favorite pie?”
For a normal person, this is merely a preamble to a grocery list. For me, it serves as an immediate plunge into ancestral guilt and a theological debate regarding the definition of dessert. My immediate and visceral response is Banana Cream. I stand by this because there is a specific kind of bravery in a pie that is essentially ninety percent pudding and ten percent structural hope. It represents a culinary tightrope walk that defies physics. It requires us to pretend that mush inside a crust constitutes a stable entity. It is also delightfully and frivolously modern.
My rationale for this choice is quite simple. My Mayflower ancestors did not cross an ocean driven by religious zealotry, dodging scurvy in a leaking wooden boat across the freezing Atlantic, just so their descendant could turn around four hundred years later and eat a squash for dessert.
Choosing a vegetable-based pie like pumpkin feels like a betrayal of centuries of human progress. I choose to honor their grim Puritanism by selecting something entirely unnecessary that would have likely gotten me accused of witchcraft in 1620. As H.L. Mencken famously defined it, Puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” I can think of no better way to combat that generational curse than by consuming a slice of pie that serves no nutritional purpose whatsoever.
However, context is a stubborn thing. The text came from a friend with Native American ancestry.
Suddenly, my rejection of the traditional harvest squash felt loaded with geopolitical weight. Considering those same hardy ancestors of mine immediately established a legacy of genocide and land theft upon arrival, for which I formally apologize on behalf of my problematic DNA, maybe I should force myself to choke down a pumpkin pie. It could serve as a mild form of historical penance. It would be a culinary hairshirt for the modern age.
It is a noble thought. Truly it is. But humanism teaches us to accept our flaws and be honest about our nature. Let us be real because I am just not that noble. I acknowledge the historical atrocities. I strive to be better. I work to dismantle the systems my ancestors built. Yet pudding is objectively delicious.
We can wrestle with the darkness of our history while acknowledging that whipped cream is one of the few things we actually got right. So I will eat the banana cream, but I will do it with a somber awareness of my privilege.
Happy Thanksgiving, I guess.
Justin Lockridge 
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