It’s not always an easy feat to walk the line between food poisoning and bankruptcy when choosing a new go-to takeaway place, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. And so, the humble California roll lives on in my heart. Not as something I seek to consume, but as a dependable and trustworthy guide. A roll that will take my tender hand and lead me to my next meal. A roll that steers me clear of foodborne illness and financial ruin. A roll that will usher me to the comforting pleasure of a reliable meal.
Neither I nor any of my seven siblings can recall how we came to be Pop-Tart critics, and my parents aren’t alive to tell us. But I have a theory: My mother was resourceful and, with eight children to feed, she probably saw an appeal for tasters somewhere and thought: “Oh, boy. Free dessert.”
For more than four decades, four words in fast food have captured the appetite and imagination of millions around the world who have craved a guilty pleasure for a limited time only: The McRib is back.
While the barbecue-flavored pork sandwich did not find immediate success for McDonald’s, and seemed destined for doom, something unusual happened that signaled that the McRib would not be easy to kill off: There weren’t enough chickens to keep up with the wild success of the Chicken McNuggets. McDonald’s needed another hot item for its locations to promote, and René Arend, the executive chef for McDonald’s, knew it was time to push the McRib as a viable alternative in 1981.
Loss, departures, reunions, ghosts — “Family Meal” is a novel about what it means to leave, and how even when it seems we’ve moved on, there are some things that can never be left behind.
“Mourning and melancholia are rituals of settler possession,” Evelyn Araulen wrote recently. Edenglassie, glinting with love, force and narrative glee, lays out a masterclass in the alternative. This novel, fiercely invested in a collective future, challenges any version of history that, to quote Nita, “looks in the other direction at what’s easy to see”. And issues that painful, bemusing reminder: it didn’t have to be like this.
In the opening scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a pack of male hominids gather, screech and chase one another around Stanley Kubrick’s set. Then one picks up an animal bone and starts dominating. Humanity has dawned. Ta-da!
If this tableau is newly familiar, it may be because Greta Gerwig restaged it in “Barbie,” imagining the moment with a doll instead of a weapon. But when Cat Bohannon, a narrative theorist and poet, rewrites the same scene, she has grander ambitions. She wants to change how we understand all of human evolution — to tear our eyes away from “the clever ape — always male” — and force us to consider the female of the species. How did our needs, and our anatomy, spark pivotal breakthroughs? What about the Dawn of Woman?
But what Dent really wants to write about, it seems to me, is nostalgia. This is a book shot through with a certain kind of recollection of northern, working-class family life in all its funny and poignant detail. As Dent puts it herself: “There’s nothing about life in late 20th-century north-west England that isn’t faintly hilarious in print, and I would not swap a single, solitary second.”