The time to consume preposterous amounts of food, sit around with your family and offer token examples of your gratitude. People get off work and school to spend the day toiling in the kitchen, preparing dinner for their families. Small plastic turkeys cover nearly everything in sight.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be a warm, fuzzy holiday where family members get together to celebrate loving familial ties, share thoughts of thankfulness and eat pie… Right?

Thanksgiving food sucks.

Let’s be clear. I love food. I guarantee that I eat more food by volume than any other person. It’s not worth debating, it’s just true. I love fine dining, I love fast food, I love homemade food, I love restaurant food.

But Thanksgiving food is the actual worst.

Let me head off the most common response to this—”You must never have had good thanksgiving food. My family is so perfect and makes it all so amazing by doing x, y, and z.”

First of all, I’ve eaten a wide variety of quality in thanksgiving food. True, the high quality is better than the low quality, but such a large percent of the thanksgiving food that people eat and love are just the most basic versions, and it sucks no matter how well you cook it.

Turkey can be done well if you get lucky or are very good, but what’s the point? It’s like the crappiest animal you can eat.

That’s why the Indians gave the pilgrims their turkeys. They weren’t gonna give them their deer or bison or blue crabs if they could just give them their old turkeys instead. Can you imagine how bad turkey was when they didn’t have salt?

All Thanksgiving vegetables are the worst, blandest, folksiest things you can think of.

Stuffing can be good but everyone always tries to put their special touch on it (YOU DON’T NEED MANDARIN ORANGES OR QUINOA FOR THIS MEAL) and it ends up tasting just as mushy and bland as everything else.

Honestly I feel like I’m eating at a truck stop buffet every year.

I can’t go on. It’s too upsetting. A holiday devoted to being thankful yet seeming more to be about eating as much as possible, and everyone sitting around bragging about how much they eat. And I’m just sitting there knowing I can eat more if the food didn’t blow but can’t say anything.

Note: I am honestly one of the most thankful people you will meet and I love the idea of devoting a day of each year to being thankful, but I’ve never experienced a good Thanksgiving strictly because of the food. Please don’t freak out after reading this article. I have nothing against the holiday, just the food. This is my personal opinion and I am open to any and all responses regarding Thanksgiving food.