For many of us, leftovers are the best parts of life.

Most people won’t give you the evil eye if you’re going for what remains. I learned early if you focus your appetite on what others don’t want, you can feast every day.

I live for scraps. I want the burnt parts, the crispiest pieces, the gravy and the bones.

Delicacies have to be consumed the moment they’re presented or else they can kill you. Would you like salmon mousse served on thinly sliced avocado seven hours after it was plated? Not if you want to spend the next day upright. How about if I throw some stuffing into the gravy and heat it up? Want that for a snack?

Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday, is about leftovers. Celebrating gratitude, bounty and harvest, Thanksgiving is about the relief you feel when you have more than enough. That signature sense of satisfaction is braided with the recognition of community and interdependence.

Thanksgiving is, of course, about imitating the first feast offered by native people to uninvited visitors who ended up surprising them by being the People Who Would Never Leave. In this manner, they set the pattern. Thanksgiving is indeed the holiday of people who never know when it’s time for them to go. One of the primary reasons you want them to go is so that you can start on the leftovers.

With leftovers you can help yourself. Helping yourself to leftovers means not waiting to be served. To eat leftovers, you don’t even have to sit down. The food is up for grabs. Turkey that was served beautifully, eaten gracefully, savored and discussed as a delicacy Thursday can, by Friday, be eaten while held in one fist while the other hand is grabbing a can of diet soda from the fridge.

If Thanksgiving is about following recipes and cooking inside the lines, leftovers are about cooking and eating outside the lines.

While nobody wants food that’s been around so long it can be labeled “collectible,” a lot of leftovers have some serious shelf life. Mistakes in preparation of leftovers, far less serious than errors in the original main meal, can lead to delicious inventions.

There are, in fact, a number of book series called “Second Chance at Love.”

Personally, I’d like to start an imprint called “Second Chance at Lasagna.” Let’s just say that it would have a wider audience. We could modify the food themes as well. For St. Patrick’s Day, there’d be “Second Chance at Beer” and the obvious choice for Thanksgiving would be “Second Chance at Giblets.”

Second helpings can lead to serendipitous pairings: they’re the blind dates and meeting cutes of the food world.

Sustaining works or art can be created from what’s been put aside, thrown away or left over. Help yourself.

— Gina Barreca is a board of trustees distinguished professor of English literature at University of Connecticut and the author of 10 books.