Around 46 million turkeys are eaten every Thanksgiving. A large proportion of those turkeys come from Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Indiana. There is a very big chance that your sweet potatoes come from North Carolina. The state grows more than half of all America's sweet potato crop.
If you want to know more about the geography of your Thanksgiving meal then you should explore Esri's Mapping the Thanksgiving Harvest. This interactive map shows where your turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, potatoes, green beans, brussels sprouts, pumpkins and pecans were reared or grown.
What you actually eat for your traditional Thanksgiving meal will also be influenced by geography. For example if you live in the north or west then you will probably have cranberry sauce with your turkey; while those who live in the southern states will mostly be enjoying sweet potato casserole. Nearly everyone will be eating turkey. But how you prepare your turkey can also be shaped by where you live. Tell me if your turkey is smoked, roasted or fried and I can probably tell you if you come from the mid-west, the east coast or California.
If you want to know more about how where you live shapes your Thanksgiving menu then you should refer to the LA Times. The Los Angeles Times has used data from Google to determine the Thanksgiving foods searched for in different regions of the United States. You can read the results of their analysis in What will be on your Thanksgiving plate? It depends on where you’ll be. The article includes a little tool which can show you the Thanksgiving foods that are most searched for in any state.
Of course before sitting down to a Thanksgiving meal on Thursday many Americans will be traveling huge distances tomorrow in order to be with their loved ones for Thanksgiving. Back in 2015 Google Trends published an animated map showing people traveling across the USA to get to their Thanksgiving Day dinners. US Thanksgiving on Google Flights uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate domestic and international air travel on the eve of Thanksgiving booked through Google Flights.
You can use the playback control to navigate through the whole of the day's plane journeys. As the day plays out you can see a clear pattern of flights starting on the east coast in the early hours, spreading to the whole country, until the latter hours of the day when flights emanating from the east of the country die down, while flights from the west coast carry on until the early hours of Thursday.
The flight markers on the map are colored to represent the different airlines.
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