Anyone who’s ever sat down to a Thanksgiving dinner in New England had to wonder at some point what the Pilgrims really ate. How did they survive on what they found here?

Slow Food Seacoast and Seacoast Eat Local are urging the community to try it out by taking part in the Internet-based “100-Mile Thanksgiving,” to create a fabulous feast out of food found within a 100-mile radius of your dinner table. Of course, we don’t have to scour the woods for our fare. Local farms, fish markets and grocers’ shelves provide a variety of options, if you know where to ask.

“It’s all about communities and an alternate way of looking at things,” says John Forti, co-founder of Slow Food Seacoast. “This challenge is one of the ways we can get this across. One of the things that’s become clear is that the larger the mainstream gets, the more room there is for strong undercurrents.”

To demonstrate, the group invited the public to a New England harvest-style potluck on Sunday, Nov. 12. About 50 people turned out for locally raised organic turkey and other food grown or raised within a few hours of the Seacoast.

“I haven’t eaten anything better than that feast last night in a very long time,” said Forti, a smile audible in his voice. Asked for a favorite, he enumerated several. “Someone brought stuffed squash with leeks and cranberries and nuts. The turkey had a cornbread chestnut cranberry stuffing with sumac—one of the native spices—and sage and rosemary in it.”

A multitude of seasonally available foods are associated with the Thanksgiving holiday tradition, including turkey, venison, pumpkin, parsnips, turnips, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, corn, beans, squash, potatoes, leeks, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, apples, onions, cranberries, chestnuts, black walnuts, oysters, cheese and butter, cider both sweet and hard, and maple syrup.

The goal of the endeavor is to highlight the pleasure and the social and environmental benefits of eating locally. Slow Food Seacoast reminds participants that statistics show that less than 6 percent of what’s eaten in New Hampshire is produced here. The discussion at the potluck revolved around the challenges associated with changing that paradigm.

“The woman who picked up the (organically raised) turkey had to drive to Barrington and wait for the turkey to get butchered and cleaned. Sometimes buying local is a process. We need to create new infrastructures for revitalizing local farming and processing of local foods so its not such a struggle to bring local food to the table,” Forti says.

Some may feel hesitant to politicize Thanksgiving, but in fact Thanksgiving itself originated as a grassroots effort to reunite the country after the Civil War, taking the country’s first harvest feast as inspiration. 

Slow Food Seacoast is partnering Seacoast Eat Local, which suggests sources of local food at www.seacoasteatlocal.org, and the 100-Mile Diet, which threw down the challenge at www.100milediet.org.

More sources of local food are listed at www.localharvest.org, and Plimoth Plantation offers Thanksgiving history and recipes  at www.plimoth.org.