We asked our readers for Thanksgiving menu suggestions. Pat McGovern from the Upper Valley Localvores responded with this turkeyless feast. Here's a way to celebrate the harvest and give thanks and make a few turkeys happy at the same time.

I realize that the potluck is the quintessential Vermont meal: Yankee frugality combined with communal creativity. When my partner and I combined households and invited everyone we knew to celebrate with us, there was no way we were going to cook for 75 people. Friends brought spinach dip, chocolate chip cookies, and strawberries straight from their garden. That was the best kind of potluck—not just because we saved ourselves a whole lot of money and labor, but because everyone brought a little bit of their home to christen ours.

Rabbits, they say, are the new chicken. They’re small, fast growing, feed efficiently, and are lower in fat and higher in protein than any other meat, yet you don’t see them much on Vermont farms. Why is that? The few rabbits raised in Vermont are literally out of sight, as in raised indoors, tightly caged and strictly dieted. That method didn’t suit our style of farming, so when we started with rabbits we raised them in chicken tractors, moving them to fresh grass twice daily. (Pasturing rabbits increases the omega fats in their meat.) But even though they were outdoors and on pasture, we still weren’t satisfied.

A strong regional food system—one in which the people of a region are participating in their own food production in both sustaining and sustainable ways—is community based. As much as this system grows food, it grows people, encouraging relationships of collaboration and mutual aid, respect and care. No longer at war with nature and each other, unburdened by that ancient power relationship of us over them, and having given up the self-destructive effort to control life, people actively work with life in a community-based food system. In this way, they practice “relational agriculture,” building the social fabric that leads to a truly sustainable food system for all.

When Vermont families sat down to Thanksgiving spreads a hundred years ago, their turkeys were a whole different animal. Quite literally. They were beautiful birds whose radiant feathers displayed hues of deep reddish brown, bronze, pure white, iridescent charcoal, or houndstooth patterns of black and white. Mobile and small, they were very distant cousins to the huge, white turkeys that fill supermarket coolers today.