Food Fight

If you thought HBO’s Succession was unbelievable, just an outrageous satire, The Phelan Feud will be a revelation. In the television series, with each child vying for their dad’s love and corporate kingdom, it feels implausible that family intrigue and personal madness can so engulf a company and its senior executives. Who’s running the show so that the cash that fuels these high-octane lives keeps flowing? Or maybe you will simply not believe that siblings would be so cruel to each other but regularly sit down together at their father’s dinner table or take luxurious trips en famille. Yet truth is even stranger than fiction, as Stephen Kimber’s The Phelan Feud proves.

The book begins at a pivotal moment in the Phelan saga: the morning of May 12, 1988, when one of Canada’s wealthiest families dramatically confronted the issue of who would eventually control Cara, a food service behemoth with 36,000 employees. Paul Phelan, the...