There’s No Fighting Urge to Gorge

When we eat more than we need to on Thanksgiving, we’re making powerful statements about who we are, who we’re not and what we used to be.

“Eating is the single most important activity in which we engage,” says Sidney Mintz, an anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“Eating becomes attached to the notion of holidays, which are special days, and what we eat is bound up with two parts of our sense of history.”

First, we remember childhood. “Eating at holidays reawakens our attachment to the people who used to feed us,” Mintz says.

Second, what we eat defines our cultural identity. “You are a part of something when you celebrate,” he explains. “It’s like saying, ‘We are one people because of what we eat. They are not us because they don’t eat it.’ The foods of the holidays are the foods of distinction. They’re flags we raise to say, ‘This is who we are.’ ”

So while we could dine just as well on a Dover sole or chicken cacciatore, chances are we won’t. On Thanksgiving, we’re all descendants of the Pilgrims and Indians; the food we want is distinctively American.

Our habitual holiday overindulgence is reminiscent of our origins, too. In the old days, tribes for whom food normally was scarce celebrated special occasions with meals in which everyone ate to excess.

Actually, overeating might hark back to something even more basic than tribal behavior.

Like hibernating animals, we’re light-sensitive creatures. We don’t crawl into caves and sleep through the winter.

But some of us suffer from something called seasonal affective disorder, according to Dr. David Neubauer of the Francis Scott Key Medical Center in Baltimore.

This form of wintertime depression is accompanied by lethargy, sluggishness--and a craving for quick-energy food such as carbohydrates.

Neubauer notes that sweet potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie--the Thanksgiving foods we’re most likely to overindulge in--are all high in carbs.

Of course, holiday anthropology aside, the bottom line may be that we just like to eat.

Eatings “is our most powerful drive, more powerful than sex,” Mintz says. “If you don’t want to eat, you’re sick. If you stop altogether, you’re dead.