Farts and fry jack.

So, true story:

When I was ten, I wrote a story as a birthday gift for my sister’s boyfriend, Lenny, who shared my family’s deep and abiding regard for scatalogical humor. The original story has been lost, but I found an early draft in an old notebook, and it went something like this: the Byrne family is gathered in the kitchen for Sunday brunch. Somebody farts. The fart cloud travels over to the frying pan, where, after some sizzling, a delicious savory pastry appears. The Byrne family inspects it cautiously. It turns out to be crispy yet chewy, and more importantly, cheap to make.

Scientists hold a global news conference in “a big field in Asia” where most of humanity is gathered. They announce that they have solved the problem of world hunger because it turns out that farts are edible when properly cooked. The crowd goes silent. Then a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders starts chanting “fart! fart! fart!” and the crowd takes it up and the chant spreads and then everyone is cheering because the problem of world hunger has been solved.

And I tell this story for no other reason than because, when I got to Belize and had fry jack for the first time, I was like, “…oh my God.”