Thanksgiving is coming, which means a lot of us are about to spend a long weekend arguing about stuffing, falling asleep halfway through a parade, and pretending the turkey is “actually really moist this year.” Before we get there, we wanted to talk about the meals that ruined regular food for us: the fictional feasts we’d actually sit down and demolish, and a few we’d skip even if the cook was armed.

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The Hogwarts start-of-term feast

The first time Harry walks into the Great Hall in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — Sorcerer’s Stone if you grew up with the Scholastic cover — the tables fill themselves. Roast beef, chicken, pork and lamb chops, potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, and a dessert spread that includes treacle tart, chocolate éclairs, and rice pudding. J.K. Rowling’s book came out in the U.K. in 1997. The movie landed in 2001. I still think about that treacle tart every November.

It’s a school dinner, sure, but it’s a school dinner with no lunch lady, no mystery meat, and a ceiling full of stars. We would absolutely embarrass ourselves at that table. Pass the gravy, refill the plate, and don’t talk to us until the puddings show up.

A Redwall Abbey spread

If you read Brian Jacques as a kid, you already know. The Redwall books, starting with Redwall in 1986, spend an almost suspicious amount of time on food. Deeper’n’Ever Turnip’n’Tater’n’Beetroot Pie. Shrimp ‘n’ Hotroot Soup. October Ale. Candied chestnuts, oatfarls, meadowcream — anything a mouse Abbey could pull out of a woodland pantry and make look like a royal banquet.

Jacques wrote hungry. You can feel it. These are not “taste the richness of this world” food descriptions. These are “I would like a second slice, and then a third” food descriptions. If a badger ever invites you to dinner, you say yes. Bring stretchy pants.

Second breakfast

Hobbits do not mess around. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien notes that hobbits will eat six meals a day when they can get them. In The Hobbit, Bilbo actually has a second breakfast the morning he leaves Bag End for the Quest of Erebor. Then Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) gave us the line that launched a thousand brunch memes, with Pippin asking Strider about second breakfast, then elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper.

Merry’s diagnosis is still correct: a lot of people do not know about second breakfast. We do. We’d eat it. Cold chicken, bread, cheese, a little something from the pantry, no royalty required. If your Thanksgiving has a leftovers window at 10 a.m. the next day, congratulations. You’re doing it right. If you want the hobbits’ version on the shelf for leftover-day, the current remastered extended-edition Blu-ray trilogy is in print.

The Lost Boys feast in Hook

Steven Spielberg’s Hook came out in 1991, and the Lost Boys feast is still the most honest food scene in a kids’ movie. The table looks empty until the kids start pretending, and then the color hits: pies, puddings, mountains of whatever a child would invent if you handed them a blank plate and no vegetables. Then it turns into a food fight, because of course it does. Robin Williams is in there having the time of his life.

We would eat it. We would also leave that table looking like a crime scene. Some traditions are worth the laundry. The official trailer is up top, from Sony Pictures’ own channel, if you need a reminder of how feral that sequence is.

The ones we’d skip

Not every fictional meal is a gift.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, from 1984, serves the Pankot Palace banquet, which is a greatest-hits collection of things you should not put in your mouth: snakes, beetles, eyeball soup, and the chilled monkey brains that launched a thousand playground rumors. Spielberg was having a laugh. We are not going back for seconds.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) has a feast that looks incredible until Chihiro’s parents can’t stop eating and turn into pigs. That’s not a food coma. That’s a cautionary tale with a side of sake.

Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) has those little protein blocks the tail-car passengers live on. They’re made from cockroaches. Plenty of people would still eat them to survive. We are talking about a holiday meal, not a train at the end of the world. We’ll pass.

And then there’s Soylent Green (1973). If you know, you know. If you don’t, we’re not going to wreck a 50-year-old movie in a Thanksgiving piece, but we are also not putting it on the table. The Matrix (1999) has the gray slop they eat on the ship, which is nutritionally complete and spiritually depressing. After a real Thanksgiving, it might feel familiar. That does not mean we want it.

Our take

Look, our actual Thanksgiving is going to be turkey, some sides that may have come from a can, and a pie we may or may not have baked ourselves. That’s fine. The point of these feasts isn’t that we can recreate a Great Hall in a New Jersey dining room. It’s that the best genre stories understand something very simple: food is how you tell the audience this place is real, and these people are worth sitting with.

So eat. Go back for second breakfast. Leave the monkey brains alone. And if anyone at your table starts pretending the mashed potatoes are Neverland pudding, let them. The food fight is optional. The leftovers are not.