Arthur Aumann

Casserole

The worst Thanksgiving food is without a doubt casserole.

It doesn’t even matter what kind of casserole — broccoli, ham, cheese — because it’s all the same. There’s always that obscure relative who claims he or she has the best casserole. It’s a lie. All casserole is bad — shockingly bad, quasar bad.

Casserole should be ashamed to call itself Thanksgiving food. Every casserole is horrifyingly reminiscent of Claywell Elementary School’s “Tuesday surprise,” a terrifying hodgepodge of “food” that was served every Tuesday in the cafeteria. It’s almost some sort of great cosmic injustice that on every fourth Thursday in November I’m forced to relive this childhood trauma.

Thanksgiving is filled with palatable options like turkey, mashed potatoes and corn, but casserole certainly isn’t among them. You’ve been warned.

Alexis Malapitan

Pumpkin pie

There are some foods for Thanksgiving that I refuse to eat, touch and even look at on the few holidays that are supposed to bring family together. Maybe it’s because I’m a picky eater or maybe it’s because I just don’t like anything pumpkin-flavored, but on the one holiday when dieting doesn’t exist, I refuse to eat pumpkin pie.

First of all, the color and overall appearance of the dessert are just plain ugly. The pie is a medium-brown, almost to the point where it looks like a bad shade of — well, you know.

Instead of sending my taste buds on a spicy ride, the spice in pumpkin pie does the complete opposite. The spice adds too much flavor on a dessert that is otherwise extremely bland.

Although I am a huge pie fan, pumpkin pie is definitely not in my top five must-haves when it comes to Thanksgiving sweet treats.

Andrew Roberts

Stuffing

For as long as I can remember, I have loathed the dry and unholy spawn of bread that is stuffing.

This vile creation eliminates whatever shred of dignity the beloved dinner-table turkey had by being shoved right where the sun don’t shine. Stuffing is an insult to bread and spices; it is somehow simultaneously dry and moist in a mixture that, based on my calculations, goes against the very laws of the kitchen. This hideous monstrosity does not even deserve to be fed to the dog as table-time scraps, with its array of browns implying its true nature as sacrificial material to the porcelain throne.

Turkey stuffing is the cruel evil to turkey’s true good. This Thanksgiving, I send out a call to arms to those whose taste buds have been insulted by turkey’s so-called companion. A world without stuffing is one of food tranquility. Its evil must be eliminated once and for all.

Sabreena Saleem | @BreeSaleem

Canned cranberry sauce

My friends are going to roll their eyes and call me “bourgeois” for this one, but I will absolutely not put canned cranberry sauce on my plate.

I’m on board with canned veggies, soups and questionable ravioli, but there’s something extremely off-putting about canned cranberry sauce. Perhaps it’s the cylinder shape it maintains when emptied from the can, with line indents that remind you it came from aluminum.

Or, maybe it’s the repulsive heaping spoonful of cranberry sauce I took when I was 8 years old and mistook it for Jell-O.

Regardless, I’d throw away a few extra minutes of my life any day to smash together some fresh cranberries and save myself from the mental pain canned cranberry sauce induces. My family eats it only one day out of the year, so I don’t think a fresh, flavorful cranberry sauce is too much to ask for.

Kevin Bartelt | @KBJournalism

Turkey

I take a Melatonin and listen to a podcast — that’s how I sleep at night. I’m a vegetarian, so Thanksgiving is like a turkey Holocaust, which is a complicated simile being Hitler was a vegetarian.

I don’t want an ornate veggie platter; I just don’t want turkey. And no, Aunt Mary, fish is not a replacement. Even if I ate fish, stop bringing it on Thanksgiving — it’s not a festive dish.

Forty-five million turkeys are killed every Thanksgiving, according to psychologytoday.com, but what are psychologists doing counting the amount of turkeys killed every year? Shouldn’t they ask the turkeys how they feel about the slaughtering and if they’ve had dreams about marrying their mother and killing their father?

Nonetheless, I feel guilty about the annual slaughtering. Each bite a family member takes of turkey, I hear a poor animal whispering in my ear, “I never got to go to Vegas.”