Thanksgiving is a fine time to remember what we don’t eat.

Food that’s actually native to Alabama, to the South and to the United States rarely shows up on any menu, particularly ours. The turkey and cranberry combo at Thanksgiving is a rare shrine honoring our native North American foods. But most everything else on our plates has its origins someplace else.

It’s like we’re all tourists who packed in our food preferences from other places, and never even allowed ourselves a taste of the rich cuisine growing in the continent of forests, meadows and streams where we landed. No European country could begin to compete with Alabama in the richness of its native wild foods, but those food resources and their potential have been forgotten or remain unexplored.

As a result, traditional “Southern” food is almost entirely French or German or African or Asian or South American. Eating pork or chicken might seem like a genuine Southern fried thing, but these meats are as alien to our land as broccoli or bok choi.

Collards and turnips are distinctly European vegetables. Okra is African and sweet potatoes are South American.The so-called “Holy Trinity” of New Orleans cuisine – bell peppers, bulbing onions, celery – would never have been available or used together in Louisiana cooking prior to the advent of railroad-supplied grocery stores. Even “the three sisters” often touted as the cornerstones of native American foods – corn, squash and pole beans – are fairly recent additions to the Alabama diet, and don’t represent the foods that the first Americans ate for tens of thousands of years.

We’re fortunate we have inherited all of those foods from other places. I couldn’t imagine January dinners without collards or July without okra or either without cornbread. But what delicacies would the tourists be enjoying if they forgot their boxed lunches and sat down to appreciate the native cuisine?