No, You Can't Actually Buy An Entire Canned Thanksgiving Dinner
One of the best things about a Thanksgiving feast is how well each dish goes together. If you get some cranberry sauce on your turkey, that's great. If your stuffing mingles with your mashed potatoes and there is a dollop of marshmallow in every bite, c'est la vie. Despite this, and despite the perfectly acceptable Thanksgiving dishes you can buy pre-made at the grocery store, you cannot buy an entire Thanksgiving dinner that's been compressed into a single can and labeled for human consumption. That is something to be thankful for.
The same can't be said for Christmas dinner in England. In 2013, the U.K. video game retailer GAME presented its customers with the canned Christmas dinner they never asked for. The three-course meal, cheekily dubbed Christmas Tinner, was allegedly created for avid gamers who can't break away for a holiday meal.
The product claimed to pack nine layers of food into one compact cylinder of sustenance, including scrambled eggs and bacon; mince pies; turkey and potatoes; gravy; bread sauce; cranberry sauce; sprouts or broccoli with stuffing; roast carrots and parsnips; and, to cap it all off, Christmas pudding. The company even advertised a vegan version in 2019, replacing the meaty layers with mushroom Wellington and meatless pigs in aubergine blankets. But was it any of it real?
'Tastes like feet'
Due to the elusive release schedule and objectively absurd premise of GAME's Christmas Tinner, many people have questioned whether or not the product even existed in the first place. The mystery fascinated one subreddit user so much that he made a 20-minute documentary about it on YouTube. He deduced that it was, in fact, real but that not enough cans were made for an actual mass sale. A little yuletide hoax, if you will. Of the unfortunate few who did get to taste the vegan version of the product, one said it "tastes like feet," as seen in the video.
In 2021, Heinz took a more legitimate — but no less perplexing — approach with its Big Soup, otherwise billed as "Christmas dinner in a can." The product promised relief from the food shortages and inflation that were ubiquitous in supermarkets at the time. "Any soup that includes pigs in blankets and roasties is a winner in our eyes," Heinz brand manager Anke von Hanstein told The Guardian. Honk if you agree.
The cans than can
While an entire Thanksgiving in a single can is thankfully a nonexistent product (no offense to Heinz's elaborate soup), there's absolutely nothing wrong with crafting a Thanksgiving feast from individually canned foods.
The titan of the genre is most certainly cranberry sauce. While some people will always prefer the homemade cranberry sauce, others would argue that there is a time and a place for the jellied stuff, which slides from its aluminum shell with such pleasing uniformity and holds up to neat little slices. Canned cranberry also comes in non-jelly form, with bits of the tart fruit nestled inside. Break it up with a wooden spoon before serving, and no one will know the difference. Canned sweet potatoes and green beans are also a safe bet, as they make particularly quick work of casseroles. If you do happen to find a Thanksgiving feast in a can at your local grocery store, don't eat it; it's for dogs.