How National Food Holidays Became a Thing
“President Clinton Trims the Tree At The First National Meatball-mas” Animated GIF by Erik S. Peterson
There are in America no fewer than eight individual days and two full months of celebration honoring the peanut and peanut-derived snacks—in the shell or bagged and seasoned, ground into butter, sandwiched with jelly, baked into a cookie or bars of fudge. This barely scratches the surface of “holidays” that celebrate food. The most exhaustive online calendar of such days—available on the personal website of a Texas-based rock-and-roll DJ known as “The Flying Dutchman“—lists a total of 635, varying in scope and weirdness from National Blueberry Month to National Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day. (Chase’s Calendar of Events is probably the most authoritative source in book form.)
Many of these arcane celebrations have made their ways into the mainstream dialogue. Last month, The New York Times gave prime real estate in its Diner’s Journal blog to National Meatball Day, highlighting meaty, orb-shaped menu items at restaurants throughout New York City (example: “a 10-ounce meatball that weighs as much as two baseballs, bathed in a tomato sauce and topped with goat cheese for $5″). Chicago’s Daily Herald ran a blurb about the day, too, as did news and lifestyle websites in New Jersey, California, and Washington, D.C.
So where the heck did these holidays originate? Are they actually sanctioned by the U.S. government? If so, why is our best resource listing them a KOOL 95.1 jockey named for a ghost ship of 17th century nautical folklore? What does it even mean to call something a national holiday?
In fact, we don’t technically have national holidays in the United States. Congress has the power to designate federal holidays–when federal institutions, like the Post Office, close–but these only apply to states if they choose to adopt them. (The 10th Amendment reserves the right of creating holidays for the states.) It’s fastidious but worth pointing out that the word holiday comes from the Old English, haligdaeg, literally “holy day,” implying both a religious celebration and a day of recreation. This is an appropriate term for federal holidays like Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, when most people have the day off from work, but not for a national food day.
National food days–and most celebrations that start in “National” and ends in “Day”–fit into a different category of observances created by the federal government, either through legislation in Congress or by presidential proclamation (but mostly by presidential proclamation since 1995, according to a report we dug up from the Congressional Research Service).
There are many of these. Father’s Day. America Recycles Day. Religious Freedom Day. Most are unrelated to food, but President Reagan proclaimed June 25, 1987, National Catfish Day, and President Clinton proclaimed February 21-27 American Wine Appreciation Week. As it turns out, executive departments also issue their own proclamations. Stephanie Chan, Deputy Press Secretary for the USDA, says the Agriculture Secretary issues about a dozen proclamations every year commemorating foods like peanuts or blueberries. The point of these is clear: to support a food or industry that’s important to the economy or to our national identity.
Back to the 10-ounce meatball bathed in sauce. How did we get a National Meatball Day–from a proclamation by the President or other government office? Unlikely. A search through the archive of presidential proclamations turns up nothing about meatballs. There is no archive of proclamations at the USDA, but our best guess is that it wouldn’t be there, either. The first reference to March 9 as National Meatball Day appears to be in 2010 on Pitch.com, a website for event listings and local news in Kansas City. It gained momentum in March 2011 following a press release issued by NYC-based marketing company, The Door, on behalf of its client, Mama Mancini’s, which makes gourmet prepared meatballs and “Sunday sauce.” Mama Mancini’s was offering all kinds of meatball freebies in honor of the holiday, and they garnered a fair amount of media attention. By March 2012, we all acted as if were a veritable haligdaeg.
So commercial enterprises and trade associations come up with all kinds of clever marketing campaigns to sell things (hence the pejorative term, Hallmark holiday). What’s important about the celebration of obscure food days is that they offer a window into how we perceive facts and authority in our media-saturated world. The excitement about meatballs might better be called a “trend,” and when trusted news sources cover trends using the same language as the marketers who (in many cases) created them, we end up having a hard time telling truth from fiction. Whether this matters is largely a personal question, but it’s worth considering next time you open a newspaper to an article about National Raisin and Spice Bar Day. –Jeremy Berger