Dave Thomas wasn’t the first fast-food kingpin to pen (or hire a ghostwriter to pen) a book of tepid tips, self-congratulation and grumpy-old-man rants. He’s not the last, either. The sub-genre has waxed and waned in popularity, but altogether there have been dozens of these opinionated bios, presenting the well-earned wisdom of a man who invented a better hamburger or pioneered “30-minutes-or-less” pizza delivery.
Read enough of these, and patterns emerge. Even the funkier philosophical tangents have a similar ring. So here, in essence, is what the men who built America’s fast food industry — most of whom are dead now — want you to know about how our world works, and how to get the best of it.
While my father read out loud to us every night before bed (my childhood memory of one book he read — Jack London’s The Call of the Wild — disturbs me to this day), my mother was the one who spent her afternoons and evenings selfishly, joyfully, and openly reading to herself. I often returned home from kindergarten or elementary school to find her in her bathrobe (she called it a “housecoat”), stretched out on her bed or on an extendable Barcalounger-type chair in the living room, reading a well-creased mass-market paperback. There was usually a Salem cigarette smoldering in one hand and a glass of icy Seagram’s 7 in the other. While she read, she laughed out loud, sometimes so loud I could hear her as I came up the front stairs; at other times, she grew so absorbed by her book that she left our dinner burning in the oven, and we would have to call one of the really bad home-delivery options, such as Chicken Delite.
In “Baby, I Don’t Care,” one of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time, Minnis is not merely conducting a droll séance with the help of Turner Classic Movies. (She thanks TCM in her acknowledgments.)
As anyone who is familiar with her four earlier collections is aware, she’s a provocative thinker about gender and poetry and the erotics of dislike.
“This is a list of cultural touchstones, the things that define Jewishness,” she said. “How could we not include the one thing that is the most taboo, the most charged?”
So, bacon belongs here, alongside shrimp cocktail and cheeseburgers, in the entry for “treyf” — foods that are never acceptable for Jews who observe kosher laws, such as pork, shellfish and any combination of meat and dairy at the same meal.
Summery over the last few years, sparrows casting
Quarter and eighth notes on the mulberry leaves,