Cou-Cou at the Edge of the Solar System
Caribbean food, portable culture, and Dwain Worrell's *Otherworldly*
I picked up Otherworldly on a whim as part of Amazon First Reads, actually my first time using the program. I had just finished Asimov’s The End of Eternity and was on the prowl for something newer and fresher.
Now, this blog post is not a full review of Otherworldly but rather a chance for me to nerd out about the anthropology of food and the kinds of details that I love when I read science-fiction.
There is a lot to love about the premise of the book: a Caribbean space program with everything to prove, a mysterious ninth planet, and the dismal discovery that we are alone in the universe (I don’t think these are major spoilers — they all occur very early on in the book).
I was drawn to this premise because I, too, am from a small island nation, although not the Caribbean. I am used to my country just not evolving on the same stage as the big world powers, and I can see how it has shaped me.
But the thing that I appreciated most was Worrell’s attention to detail when it came to food. From the packed MREs to the small allotment of comfort foods allowed each crew member, Caribbean cuisine and treats shine: cou-cou and flying fish, chicken roti, sweet bread, sugar cakes.
Makes sense to me. What we eat, how we eat it, when we eat it, and who we eat it with are strongly linked to culture and identity. This is what foodways scholarship has always understood, and what Otherworldly does well: food is not simply fuel. It is culture made portable.
Portable culture
The cuisines of Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica are not ancient, monolithic traditions rooted in a single soil. They begin with the islands’ Indigenous peoples — the Taíno, the Kalinago — whose foodways were already in place when Europeans arrived: cassava domesticated and patiently detoxified, maize, peppers, allspice, and the technique of slow-smoking meat over a wooden frame the Taíno called barbacoa.[1] Onto that foundation came centuries of forced and unfree convergence: West Africans who brought okra and the pounded-starch cooking that became cou-cou, indentured Indians who brought curry and roti, Chinese migrants who contributed noodles and stir-fry, European colonizers who brought their own provisions and a plantation economy that ran on sugar.[2] A few ingredients were here already; most arrived with someone, carried across an ocean. Caribbean cuisine is born of this layering — of conquest, displacement, and adaptation — maintained through the insistence that the flavors of home survive even when home itself has been violently remade.
The food traditions that traveled from around the world to coalesce in the Caribbean, adding to the existing ones? That’s portable culture.
So when Worrell’s crew members fill their personal allowances for a three-year journey to the edge of the solar system with all the foods that personally remind them of home, they’re continuing a long human tradition.
The MRE and the sweetbread
Here’s a quote from the book: “The meals ready-to-eat, MREs, came in a variety of flavors: cou-cou and flying fish, shepherd’s pie, dandan noodles, and chicken roti, among others. The calcium, iron, and all the vitamin ABCs were hidden between their spices. The crew was also allotted a small compartment for “comfort foods.” Cleo had loaded her space with desserts: sweetbread, sugar cakes, and turnovers.”[3]
Read that list again. Cou-cou and flying fish — a Bajan staple, the cornmeal-and-okra dish that anchors Barbadian home cooking. Chicken roti — the Indo-Caribbean wrap that arrived with indentured laborers and became Caribbean. Dandan noodles — Chinese. Shepherd’s pie — colonial British. These are not random menu items. They are the entire history of Caribbean migration compressed into an MRE pouch. Every crew member who opens one of these meals is eating the story of how people from multiple continents ended up on the same small islands, and how their descendants ended up on a spacecraft.
And then there are Cleo’s desserts. Sweetbread, sugar cakes, turnovers — the comfort foods she loads into her personal compartment. These are the foods she reaches for when things go wrong, the ones that boost her mood and keep her going. Sidney Mintz spent a career tracing how sugar reshaped the world — how the Caribbean’s plantation economy made sugar cheap and ubiquitous, and how that cheapness made sweetness central to working-class diets across the industrializing West.[4] Cleo’s sugar cakes are the distant echo of that history. The same commodity that was extracted from Caribbean labor now returns, in transformed form, as emotional sustenance.
Foodways scholars have long understood that food becomes most legible as cultural identity precisely when it is disrupted — when migration forces you to choose what to carry and what to leave behind.[5] In orbit, with Earth shrinking behind the crew, those choices become existential. These aren’t comforts in the ordinary sense. They’re proof that you come from somewhere specific. That you belong to a people. That the vastness of space hasn’t dissolved you into a generic astronaut.
What Otherworldly offers
Science fiction has been carrying food across space for a long time, and usually for exactly this reason. Ursula K. Le Guin — the daughter of an anthropologist, and it shows — made food carry the whole moral argument of The Dispossessed: the lean communal refectories of anarchist Anarres set against the rich, excessive tables of capitalist Urras, ideology you could taste. Even Star Trek, for all its replicator-enabled post-scarcity, still gave us Sisko’s father refusing to give up a real kitchen in New Orleans, as if a civilization that can synthesize any meal still needs someone to cook gumbo by hand.
The genre returns to food because food is simultaneously worldbuilding and kinship, memory, and economy.
What Otherworldly does that feels fresh is narrow the aperture. It treats a regional, creolized, historically particular cuisine as worth preserving across light-years — and the specificity is the entire point.
Of course, Otherworldly isn’t about food. If you’ve read it, you might be surprised that I wanted to write a whole blog post about something that is not a focal point of the book, but rather something that simply adds flavor (ha!) to the characters’ experiences. The journey is long, the crew is small, and the planet they arrive at is hostile in ways that have nothing to do with cuisine. The food brought from home exists in tension with all of this: a small, specific comfort in a landscape that is aggressively, fundamentally alien.
But here’s what the novel understands, and what food scholars have documented for decades: the act of carrying food into the unknown is never just about eating. David Sutton’s work on food and memory argues that taste and smell are the senses most directly tied to autobiographical memory — that a specific flavor can collapse time and distance, placing you back in a kitchen you left years ago.[6] When Cleo reaches for a sugar cake in the middle of a crisis on an alien world, she isn’t just feeding herself. She’s performing an act of cultural continuity. She’s saying: I remember where I’m from. I remember who I am.
For readers who grew up watching their grandparents refuse to travel without their own provisions — the seasoning, the hot sauce, the thing nobody else would think to pack — Otherworldly is a mirror held up to something they always understood but rarely saw on a page. For readers who’ve never thought about food as a cultural technology, it’s an education. And for anyone who has ever wondered what it would mean to carry a civilization’s worth of culinary knowledge to another planet, Worrell gives you Caribbean astronauts doing exactly that — not because they were tasked with preserving culture, but because culture is what you bring when everything else is uncertain.
That’s the best thing a novel can do. It takes a pattern that has been running through human history for centuries — the movement of peoples and the food that moves with them — and extends it, just a little further, to the stars.
Otherworldly by Dwain Worrell
47North (Amazon Publishing), 2026
On Indigenous Caribbean foodways — including the Taíno cultivation and detoxification of bitter cassava — see B.W. Higman, Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture (University of the West Indies Press, 2008).↩︎
For a comprehensive overview of Caribbean food cultures as products of colonial displacement, indenture, and creolization, see Hanna Garth, ed., Food and Identity in the Caribbean (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). On the role of Indian indentured labor in shaping Caribbean foodways, see N. Jayaram, From Indians in Trinidad to Indo-Trinidadians: The Making of a Girmitiya Diaspora (Springer, 2022).↩︎
This passage is from Otherworldly by Dwain Worrell (47North, 2026).↩︎
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1985).↩︎
Jennifer Sweeney Tookes, “’The food represents’: Barbadian foodways in the diaspora,” Appetite 90 (2015): 65–73.↩︎
David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001).↩︎
Finn Agler is the blogging pen name of R.G. Luchmun, a cultural anthropologist writing science fiction about first contact, time travel, and the places where cultures collide. Follow along for more intersections of anthropology and speculative fiction.