We were sharing a small fourth-floor walk-up, 102 steps, to be exact, across from Ladbroke Square Park. Pete and I had just moved in together. We were new to London, having just moved our few belongings across the Channel from Paris, with our prized possessions being a painting I bartered for proudly in French at the Marché des Puces in the 18^th arrondisement, Pete’s handwritten notes from business school, a case of champagne from a small family grower and the full West Wing series on DVD.

The prospect of London as new home felt like a precious gift. It was pure thrill to again live in a city that spoke English, served ketchup with fries (or crisps, as we learned to call them), and featured extensive gardens and parks with grass on which it was actually permitted to walk. Still, we found the days in London to be dark, damp and expensive. Existence seemed like a blur of tube journeys, desk work, heavy happy hour and tube journeys back home. Our free time was limited, and our budget was tight. Who knew this thing called Council Tax was so expensive?

We were happy.

It was November. So what to do as two in-love shacked-up half-Americans living in England? On the fourth Thursday of the month, we took ‘holiday’ from work and invited more friends than could comfortably fit in our home over for Thanksgiving dinner.

I hadn’t appreciated that sourcing a turkey would be so challenging. My choices were few, probably because I didn’t know my way around, and in part, to be sure, because the English as a norm do not celebrate Thanksgiving. Still, there was a pre-ordered turkey option from my local Marks & Spencer’s – but if you’ve ever spent time in an M&S store, you’ll have left with the distinct sensation that nothing in there conveys freshness. That is not to say, however, that the biscuit selection isn’t excellent.

My next best option was necessarily one that did not involve lugging a turkey across London via tube, and so C Lidgates it was. Lidgates was a very British family-run shop on Holland Park Road, just east of the tube station. With five generations of experience, the Lidgates certainly knew more than we did about good turkey. And so we entrusted them to source the bird that would be the centerpiece of our festivities. This blew a considerable hole in our monthly food budget.

The butcher explained I was to pick up the bird the Wednesday before our feast. It would need to be ‘prepared’ in advance, which sounded more like a dubious beauty ritual than culinary prep.

By Thanksgiving Eve, I regretted the entire initiative. Who knew turkeys were so high-maintenance?  The problem, I am told, is that the bird we bought was organic, which is why it came with feathers. So I found myself at 10 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, plucking feathers from the goosebumpy breasts of a cold, dead bird with tweezers typically reserved for my own eyebrows, instead of watching that week’s episode of Downton Abbey.

I lifted the bird onto a large tray to brine it. Google insisted that brining was essential to making a roasted turkey that could eventually classify as edible. As I lifted the bird, its weight was heavy on my hands. Bones jutted in unlikely directions – here the thigh, here the wing – with translucent skin that clung half-heartedly to the meat it sought to contain.  I poured saline herb solution over the turkey, with the feeling I was bathing a newborn: carefully, half-afraid. I drew a line at the rectal cavity: while stuffing it with a mixture of herbs and bread crumbs might have been the tastiest way to cook the bird, by that point I was having considerable difficulty containing my reflex to gag. I stayed away from the rectal cavity entirely.

It was a full-hearted Thanksgiving dinner in the sense of friendship. Amy Winehouse on the speaker, candles at the table, pinot noir in our glasses and foggy windows looking out to Ladbroke Square Park. Our small flat felt that much smaller when crammed with our guests, and this, in turn, made us feel all the more gratitude that I suppose is part of the essence of Thanksgiving.

It was a half-hearted Thanksgiving from a culinary perspective: I had not the appetite to even pretend to eat the bird. I can now see that our guests might have found this dubious behavior.

That first London Thanksgiving was the accidental end of my omnivorous life. It birthed a new sensation: a complete repulsion at the idea of eating something that once had its own digestive and excretive systems.

Perhaps because my renunciation of the omnivorous life was accidental, my eating habits have suffered from a mild crisis of identity. I have vacillated, from vegetarian to vegan to pescatarian and back. But if what’s in question has legs or wings or an anus? I’m more likely to eat a cracker that’s fallen on my kitchen floor. (Unless we’re talking sushi: here I suspend my understanding of fish physiology and delight in soy sauce-bathed sashimi – I told you I vacillate).

A few weeks ago, a friend (real, not the digital kind) shared a video with me (shared over espresso, not Facebook). It features a child, now infant celebrity, that professes to the camera that she “will not eat animals.” The video has gone viral. The subject in question was a Thanksgiving turkey.

“And ham? Will you eat ham?” entreats the mother-filmographer.

“Is ham an animal?”

The mother concedes that yes, ham comes from an animal, and the child shakes her head violently in opposition. “Then I will not eat it!”  (A child after my own heart: I relate to a girl with a strong sense of self and stubborn disposition).

The girl has a whole future as a vegan. I, on the other hand, am confused as to how I’ve found myself there.