There is not much known about the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621.

From the little that is known, roughly 90 Wampanoag and 50 pilgrims came together for a three-day feast, and the women did all the waiting on the table. The major foods at the feast were most likely venison and cornmeal mush. Accounts are they went out hunting several days before the feast and brought in a bag of mixed game birds -- ducks, geese, swans, passenger pigeons -- and seafood -- lobster, mussels, clams and eels.

That's according to Rebecca Rupp, an author and food blogger for National Geographic, in an exclusive interview with Latin Post.

There may have been cranberries to accompany all the meat dishes, brought by the Native Americans, in the form of pemmican-dried venison, animal fat and cranberries pounded and mushed together. Rupp said it was the power bar of the day, and it was travel food.

The pilgrims said Rupp weren't too taken with cranberries, and it was only when sugar was introduced to the West through the slave trade was when cranberries took off in the later 1600s, while in the early 1700s there were all kinds of recipes for cranberry tart, pie, cranberry sauce, loaded with sugar.

No one is really certain how the turkey came to play such a massive part in annual Thanksgiving celebrations. One story is Benjamin Franklin promoted the turkey, was pro-turkey, and wanted it to be the national bird instead of the Bald Eagle. Reasoning is that it is a big bird and makes for a great central serving for a feast.

"Thanksgiving is really relatively new. It only became a national holiday in 1863, with Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the American Civil War, and he took the time to give us Thanksgiving," said Rupp. "Prior to that, New England always celebrated Thanksgiving, but the South ignored it and various other states would have Thanksgiving feasts at random times, September and October."

Gathering for a meal with family and friends is not just about food and drink -- although that is very enjoyable -- but psychologists tell us it has innumerable benefits from creating and bonding friendships to sharing family and tribal traditions. Increasingly, however, social scientists find that for the average American family, one in every five meals is eaten in a car, and one of four people eat fast food every day.

"It is clear for us that food is social glue, it really pulls us together, and we're the only animals that share meals in the way that we do and we have been doing it for hundreds of thousands if not a million more years, sitting down together and sharing meals," says Rupp.

"There is a big anthropological argument that is possible that all of civilization came out of our habit of sitting down together and sharing food," she added. "Kinship ties, communication and ethics, sharing food ... you have to have some way of divvying it up to make it fair, so sharing food for a long, long time has meant a lot to us and meant a lot more than getting a mouthful to eat. It represents trust, friendship, and interconnection."

Rupp has an article out this month to celebrate Thanksgiving, titled "Eat, Drink and Be Merry."