A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a short story collection by Ethiopian writer Meron Hadero, first published in 2022. The stories in the collection detail various lives of African immigrants in America.
The stories tackle different aspects of the immigrant experience. In the story "The Wall," a young boy befriends an elderly German man who helps him improve his English. In "Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin' Newton," a young boy finds community and cultural understanding in a dance troupe as he tries to sort out his relationship to race in America. In the title story, two women survive various hardships by cooking comfort food from an American cookbook. Eventually, they open a restaurant together and seek to provide people with the same solace with their meals. The final story depicts a man's journey through Washington D.C. during the inauguration of Barack Obama. He describes his euphoria and excitement at witnessing the first Black president in America, as well as the joyful atmosphere there. In these contemplative stories, Hadero considers what each of his characters finds most essential about adjusting to life in an unfamiliar country, whether that is food, work, common language, or simply a well-packed suitcase.
The book has received significant praise from critics. It won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing and was named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, The Millions, and Electric Literature. Describing Hadero's work, NPR's Rachel Martin writes: "[The] idea, the one at the heart of Hadero's work, is displacement. Hadero was born in Ethiopia and raised in the U.S. She shares this with some of the characters in her stories. Though her protagonists exist in different parts of the world and at different points in history, they too share the experience of being outsiders in places that should feel like home."
