Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction 3031191676, 9783031191671

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Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction

Katarina Labudova

Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction

Katarina Labudova

Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction

Katarina Labudova Faculty of Arts and Letters, Department of English Language and Literature Catholic University in Ruzomberok Ruzomberok, Slovakia

ISBN 978-3-031-19167-1 ISBN 978-3-031-19168-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of my fascination with food and Margaret Atwood’s fiction. I would like to thank the following: to the ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries and Eger Journal of English Studies for their kind permission to reuse and update the material that appears first as articles in “Testimonies in The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Images of Food in Gilead.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries. 17.1 (2020): 97–110 and “Paradice Redesigned: PostApocalyptic Visions of Urban and Rural Spaces in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy.” Eger Journal of English Studies XIII (2013): 27– 36. The first time I wrote about food in Margaret Atwood’s fiction was in my article “Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 65.4 (2017): 413–427. I owe thanks to the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the Catholic University in Ruzomberok for providing me with a publishing grant. I am grateful to the many friends, students and colleagues who have encouraged me in my work on Margaret Atwood. A huge debt of gratitude is due to Roger Heyes for his help and support during the development of this textbook. Finally, my best thanks as always to Pavol and Jakub.

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Contents

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Fasting and Feasting: Food in Speculative Fiction Novels by Margaret Atwood 1.1 Feasting on Genres: Genre Hybridity 1.2 Crumbs of Hope in Atwood’s Post-Apocalyptic Scenarios 1.3 Edible Atwood: Food and Atwood’s Fiction 1.4 Atwood’s Dystopian Cuisine Works Cited

1 4 9 11 17 21

Women as White Meat: The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments 2.1 Milk and Eggs: Women and Food 2.2 Cooking Women and Cooking the Women 2.3 Hunger Pangs: Food and Freedom 2.4 Butter and Sugar: Food and Rebellion Works Cited

25 27 32 35 38 45

Canned Food and Canned Death: Oryx and Crake 3.1 Frankenfood, Ersatz Food, Pseudo-Food: Food and Technology 3.2 Eating Death: Food and Disgust 3.3 Pharmakon: Food and Poison 3.4 Enter Oryx: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism Works Cited

47 49 55 57 59 62

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Corporate Cannibalism: The Year of the Flood 4.1 Saved by Bees and Plants: Food and Medicine 4.2 Eating Fear and Violence: Food and Emotions 4.3 Vegetarian Revolution: Food as a Subversive Act 4.4 Sex Toy You Can Eat: Food and Sex Works Cited

65 68 72 74 78 86

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Eating and Storytelling: MaddAddam 5.1 Crisis in Paradice: Food and Hunger 5.2 Coffee, Stories and Funerals: Food and Rituals 5.3 Kiss Your Morning Toast Goodbye: Food and Manners Must Evolve 5.4 Eating the Words: Food and Mouth Works Cited

89 92 96

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Junk Food and Prison Food: The Heart Goes Last 6.1 Starving for You: Food and Romance 6.2 Dystopian and Utopian Undertones: Food and Place 6.3 Fasting Freedom and Feasting Prison: Food and Propaganda 6.4 Prison Carnival: Fantastic Feasts and Alcohol Haze Works Cited Hybrid Genres: Festive Intertextuality and Hungry Reality Works Cited

99 104 105 109 111 113 115 119 123 125 133

Works Cited

135

Index

145

Abbreviations

BH BQ EW HGL HT MA OC T YF

Bodily Harm Burning Questions The Edible Woman The Heart Goes Last The Handmaid’s Tale MaddAddam Oryx and Crake The Testaments The Year of the Flood

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CHAPTER 1

Fasting and Feasting: Food in Speculative Fiction Novels by Margaret Atwood

Abstract The chapter introduces Atwood’s speculative fiction and discusses the hybridization of genres in her novels. Atwood sees literary genres as porous and she maps the fertile hybridization of utopias and dystopias, slipstream and fantasy. In this context, the food element can be a map of the complex maze of intertextual layers and hybrid genres in her works, it signals shifts and also crossing/subverting of genre boundaries. Her relationship with the science fiction and/or speculative fiction genres, radical cross-pollination with popular genres and engagement with themes of food and survival seem to have become key foci for the late twentieth and twenty-first-century writing. Keyword Margaret Atwood · Speculative fiction · Dystopia · Utopia · Post-apocalyptic novel · Food · Genre

Food consumption habits are not simply tied to biological needs but serve to mark boundaries between social classes, geographic regions, nations, cultures, genders, life- cycle stages, religions and occupations, to distinguish rituals, traditions, festivals, seasons and times of day. (Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self , 1)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_1

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He clutches on to the reality of those cakes; he closes his eyes, conjures them up, hovering all in a row, their candles alight, giving off their sweet, comforting scent of vanilla, like Dolores herself . (OC 50)

Several of Margaret Atwood’s novels—in particular The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments , the MaddAddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last —articulate possible future scenarios for humanity’s (humble) survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Since Atwood crosses genre boundaries, not sticking to one single genre in particular, it is a challenge to label her hybrid genre fiction. One of the major challenges for a critic approaching Atwood’s novels is how to situate them in relation to other novels, which includes determining the genre of which they form a part. The question is urgent because the genre question is often part of what her novels are about—juxtaposition of genres and creation of hybrids, games played with genre expectations. Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction proposes that food is one of the crucial thematic elements that readers can trace through the palimpsest of intertextual layers and hybridity in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction. It has special relevance in her dystopian and postapocalyptic books, where the characters’ hunger, limited food choices and culinary creativity and eating rituals are embedded in the hostile environments of oppressive regimes, post-nuclear catastrophe, pandemics, and prisons. This book shows that food and eating in Atwood’s works characterize, define, subvert, construct, and/or reconstruct identities and their gender-specific, class, (post)human, psychological, and bodily issues. Themes of food, hunger, cannibalism, manners of eating/non-eating are explored in the (collapsing) dystopian environments Margaret Atwood builds in her fiction. Moreover, this book argues that Atwood’s treatment of food may point not only to the biological link between eating and being/survival, but also to key links between rituals of eating and power. Atwood’s post-apocalyptic and dystopian fictions offer a recipe for human survival through rituals of food and storytelling. The novels mentioned above are usually discussed as dystopias, and/or science fiction novels, although Margaret Atwood herself defines them as speculative fiction1 rather than science fiction per se (Atwood 2011, 1 Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for the stories that transgress the strict genre boundaries of science fiction. Lucas (2010) argues that “speculative fiction will often answer an implied ‘What if?’ question that posits an alternative reality as its primary

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6). Nevertheless, Atwood’s more recent writings often go deeper into areas associated with science fiction, exploring technological advances (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, MaddAddam, The Heart Goes Last ), science experiments, genetic engineering, environmental issues and technologies (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, The Heart Goes Last ), and new ways of organizing society (The Heart Goes Last , The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments ). Atwood’s fiction has a disturbing effect because it challenges the genre conventions but also because, by revealing the hidden links between food and death, food and power, women and food, (non)-eating and cannibalism, her writing confronts the power structures of our contemporary consumerist society. Atwood sees literary genres as porous and she maps the fertile hybridization of utopias and dystopias, slipstream and fantasy. In this context, the food element can be a map of the complex maze of intertextual layers and hybrid genres in her works, it signals shifts and also crossing/subverting of genre boundaries. In Burning Questions, Atwood herself discusses the role of food in particular genres. She claims that in utopias “we are likely to find the kinds of things we are thought to like and appreciate: personal freedom, delicious and wholesome food, lovely natural surroundings, friendly animal life, beautiful people who are also kind, long life, jolly and risk-averse sex, attractive clothing, an absence of disease and famine, a strange lack of liars, cheaters, stealers, and murderers, and not a single war in sight” (BQ 209). On the other hand, in dystopias, “we find all the things we are thought to dislike, including totalitarianisms, torture, starvation, gruesome food, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of those who don’t like us, horrible and usually coerced sex, bad smells, inferior decorative schemes, the destruction of nature, discordant sounds, and every other thing that we find repellent” (BQ 209). Therefore, dystopias are typically associated with food shortages, rationing, and bad quality/taste of food. Moreover, a change in the protagonists’ diet can signal a shift to a different genre as is evident in The Heart Goes Last, where prison food is of gourmet quality and thus signals a shift to a comedy. Furthermore, prison fights with cakes and scrambled eggs prepare the reader for a further shift to the grotesque.

narrative drive” (4). This book uses the terms post-apocalyptic, dystopia, science fiction to point to a great variety of prevailing genres in Atwood’s writing.

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In the post-apocalyptic genre, food occupies a dual role: a significant part of the day must be dedicated to scavenging to allow survival. Food and eating/preparing food are not pleasurable. Cannibalism is another typical feature of the post-apocalyptic experience. Junk food is emblematic of this genre because high levels of non-natural chemicals and preservatives allow energy bars and cans to stay intact in various catastrophic scenarios. For example, Snowman lives on Joltbars, cans of No-Meat Sausages, and bottled alcohol. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food, Lorna PiattiFarnell and Donna Lee Brien argue that [c]onnected as they are to the ritual structures of both celebration and the everyday, and refusing to be taken as simple supplements to add realism to the narrative, food, cooking, and eating are linked to both cultural anxieties and desires in relation to human experience, from economic and political constructs, to symbolic transmigrations of gender, class, ethnicity, family, race, and, of course, the body. (2018, 3)

In Atwood’s novels, however, food, cooking, and eating function as both literal and symbolic representations of dystopian worlds on the brink of ecological, economic, and moral collapse. The treatment of food is a good example of Atwood’s ambiguity: “Atwood views everything through her double vision, where on the one hand, her fiction focuses on contemporary socio-political and ethical issues, and on the other, she destabilises realism by hinting at hidden worlds and dark psychological impulses beneath civilised surfaces” (Howells 2020, 21). Thus, food is used as more than a realistic touch in her speculative scenarios; it is much more complex because she deals in symbolic and metaphorical aspects of food, too. Before we move to analysing the thematic and metaphorical uses of food, it is necessary to reflect a little on the genre relations and specific characteristics of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels that we discuss under the umbrella term as speculative fiction novels.

1.1

Feasting on Genres: Genre Hybridity

Despite the focus of science fiction on space and “intergalactic gun-fights” (Makinen 2001, 129) in its post-WWII age, postmodernist writers have transformed the genre with extensive repatterning and highly personal dashes of humour. Atwood has used ironic strategies to refashion the

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traditional characters of the genre, such as the mad scientist or dictator, into very dynamic and ambiguous postmodern versions of themselves. While her texts can be classified at least partly as science fiction since they contain elements of speculation, they do not represent the hard science fiction genre. Atwood’s novels transgress genre boundaries and resist rigid categorization. Atwood also saturates her genre writing with “a political slant that offsets the conventions and boundaries that the genres initially suggest” (Macpherson 2010, 25). Literary scholars have identified speculative fiction elements (“What if…?” questions) in Atwood’s works, and especially in the novels that form the focus of Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction— The Handmaid’s Tale [1985], The Testaments [2019], Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009]), as well as MaddAddam [2013], and The Heart Goes Last [2016]—which all resemble “a pastiche of genres and styles” as Fiona Tolan puts it (2007, 118). For Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as well as for Oryx and Crake (and, consequently, Year of the Flood), Howells, following Atwood’s resistance of the “ghetto of science fiction,” suggests using the term dystopia and speculative fiction, “which rehearses possible futures on the basis of historical and contemporary evidence” (2006, 162). I agree with Howells’s description of the genre because the novels clearly refer to the contemporary world and, moreover, the novels reflect on contemporary ethical questions, which is one of Atwood’s greatest contributions to speculative fiction. Atwood has also indicated dissatisfaction with the “dystopian” label. In her own reflection on her work, the essay “Dire Cartographies,” she coined the term “ustopia” to combine “utopia and dystopia—the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other” (2011, 66). In Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, the most important genre category, however, blurred its boundaries, will be such “ustopian” writing, which I interpret as speculative fiction concerning a coming (or already occurring) apocalypse and humanity’s survival in transformed ecological and environmental conditions. The novels could be considered “post-apocalyptic” and they share genre features with other sub-genres, such as alternate history, cyberpunk, biopunk, testimonial literature, and, above all, dystopia. There is a distinction between the apocalyptic and dystopian. Benjamin Kunkel (2008) describes them as “opposed futuristic scenarios” (90). According to “Dystopia and the End of Politics,” apocalypse is usually

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about “the collapse of order,” while dystopia “envisions a sinister perfection of the order” (90). Following Atwood’s argument that every utopia contains a seed of dystopia and vice versa, thus creating “ustopia,” it could be claimed that every dystopia/utopia is linked to an apocalypse and vice versa. The sinister order of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments is justified as rebuilding humanity in the wake of a collapse of order, which the regime blames on individual sinfulness but appears to have more to do with the environmental effects of pollution and warfare. J. Brooks Bouson (2015) and other critics recognize the place of the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam) in the tradition of (eco) apocalyptic, speculative fiction, dystopia, but they also note the presence of satirical tones. Atwood’s use of (black) humour is indeed a factor that makes their texts even more open and inviting for various interpretations without being shackled to specific ideologies. The trilogy satirizes the voracious appetites of omnipresent consumerism. Parasecoli (2008) notices that “food is prominently featured in sci-fi literature, often in connection with changes and evolutions in science and technology” (65). One of the constant threats in her dystopian revelations is a power-hungry, invasive and omnipresent (corporate) hierarchy eating away at humanity’s bodies and lives. Another complicating factor in the genre classification of Atwood’s dystopian futures is the novels’ engagement with ecological and environmental challenges and apocalypses that draw in ingredients from climate fiction, petroleum fiction and biopunk. Her wide-ranging interests inspire Michelle Gadpaille to suggest that “a newer candidate for the classification of some of Atwood’s work is ‘slipstream’ fiction” (2018, 21). This term applies to all fiction that stands in opposition to mainstream fiction. Frelik claims that “slipstream is what falls through the cracks of exclusionary definitions” (2011, 27). The apocalyptic rhetorical strategies of religions and religious sects, with vivid images of the imminent end of the world, has found a new home in the green movement. Margaret Atwood, who is deeply committed to the environmental movement, is aware of the utopian and dystopian oscillation in Western civilization and comments on the specific function of apocalyptic narratives:

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In the background of every modern Utopia lurk Plato’s Republic and the Book of Revelation, and modern Dystopias have not been uninfluenced by various versions of Hell, especially those of Dante and Milton, which in their turn go right back to the Bible, that indispensable sourcebook for Western literature. (2006, 93–94)

Atwood’s comment points out how the contours of apocalyptic literature have been outlined. Atwood’s speculative fiction is intertextually deeply rooted in this historical and biblical tradition although she also makes use of elements of more recent genres (cyberpunk, petroleum fiction, biopunk, romance, horror, thriller, farce, testimony) to criticize contemporary culture’s consumerism, exploitation of dwindling sources, resource depletion, global warming, genetic mutation, abuse of biotechnology. In “Apocalypse, Utopia, and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium,” Dale Knickerbocker discusses representations of postapocalyptic utopias and/or utopias. He considers how speculative fictions invoke and alter the biblical apocalypse narrative. Although Atwood’s novels are not mentioned in this article, we can clearly see how Knickerbocker’s concepts could apply to them. Atwood also invokes “the biblical paradigm” and, ambiguously, opens it to dystopian futures in the cases of all our selected novels. Mark Bosco examines the apocalyptic visions in Oryx and Crake: “Oryx and Crake is one of Atwood’s most apocalyptic novels, placing it in a long line of oracular literary texts in Western culture” (2010, 157). The MaddAddam trilogy clearly belongs under the umbrella of postapocalyptic writing as its key event is Crake’s pandemic, the Waterless Flood, which wipes out almost all the human species. From an “ustopocalyptic” point of view, it would be worth pointing out that Crake’s pandemic is made possible by a promise of Utopia in the Blyss Plus Pill and the secret of immortality, which the Paradice project was meant to unlock. He also created the plague for his personal vision of a posthuman/post-apocalyptic utopia in which our problematic heritage is disposed of. Although it is somewhat more difficult to see The Heart Goes Last as an example of apocalyptic writing, it is possible to read it as an example of a slow apocalypse. In a slow apocalypse, as Frederick Buell describes it in From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century,

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crisis has become domesticated into daily life, crisis discourse has grown more self-reflective as well as more complexly and subtly encompassing circumstances are different […] people now live threatened by hyperabundance even more than by scarcity; they live not with the fear of imminently transgressing limits (and this incurring immediate and total punishment) but with the more or less conscious certainty that they have passed beyond the limits – that they live not with sudden apocalypse immediately ahead but in a slow apocalypse in a slow process of increasing ecological and ecosocial immiseration and rising ecological and ecosocial risk already embarked upon. (2005, 186)

In The Heart Goes Last , the construction of a totally artificially, corporate-controlled environment is a similarly slow process. It does not descend in one cataclysmic day, like a coup in Gilead, but a series of trials and errors. Consilience is one of those trials that goes comically wrong, but the technology and the idea are still out there roaming the world at the end. The eerily familiar world that appears at the beginning of the novel uses (seemingly) apocalyptic imagery: the world after the financial crash offers no safe haven, our protagonists live in their car and live off garbage, hoping not to become the victims of street gangs. Atwood undeniably uses techniques and modes of apocalyptic writing in her dystopian novels and these are also signalized by the use of food metaphors. Atwood’s writing reimagines hungry humans in worlds radically reshaped by catastrophic events. At the same time, her speculative novels operate within the what if question: (as if) we are already within a(n ecological) cataclysm. Since speculative fiction repeats that our contemporary world could have been changed quickly, genre fiction (science fiction, dystopias, utopias, alternate history, cyber punk, testimony) present realities that are at the same time familiar and disturbing. Atwood’s speculative fiction novels introduce worlds that create (un)comfortable and uncanny impressions of reality and familiarity. Through images of food, daily routines and eating, starting with a classical breakfast of toast and egg or cereals, she creates a believable future. As Parasecoli argues that “sci-fi has employed food and eating both at the forefront of the narration and as secondary subplots. By doing so, this genre helps us to achieve a better understanding of the relevance of food for the stability of political and social structures” (2008, 64). Moreover, Atwood’s fiction shows the relevance of (non)-eating for the (in)security about individual bodies and social roles.

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Crumbs of Hope in Atwood’s Post-Apocalyptic Scenarios

Atwood’s novels offer crumbs of hope through rituals of food/eating and storytelling that serve as a means for preserving the physical and metaphorical leftovers from pre-apocalyptic humanity, as well as seeds of a utopian, sustainable future. Food is an essential condition for the survival of any biological species, but in Atwood’s texts, food “is never just food,” to cite Terry Eagleton’s acute maxim about food and literary interpretation. Eagleton continues: “Like the post-structuralist text, food is endlessly interpretable, as gift, threat, poison, recompense, barter, seduction, solidarity, suffocation” (Eagleton 1997, 446). Aware of the global environmental, technological and political threats, Atwood writes about the existential crises now confronting humanity: accelerating habitat destruction and ecological calamity. Her post-apocalyptic rhetoric invokes that we are already witnessing a mass extinction event of enormous proportions. By giving body to metaphors of (corporate) cannibalism and degenerative totalitarianism, the writer expresses her concern about environmental, social, political and moral degeneration. Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction argues that the postapocalyptic and dystopian fictions of Atwood vividly illuminate the sustainability and survival of humanity through rituals of food and storytelling. Contemporary dystopian fiction is a variation of postapocalyptic literature, for it challenges and questions current social, political, economic, cultural and ecological trends, observable in the early twenty-first-century environment. Through these bleak post-apocalyptic narratives, featuring the lack of tasty food, readers are warned and reminded of the need for individual awareness and engagement in a contemporary world already manifesting many dystopian elements. A more concentrated focus on Atwood’s texts’ literary intertextuality and genre creativity illustrates her recurrent engagement with anthropocentric literary and political frameworks. Criticizing anthropocentricity (views of the world in which humans are central), Timothy Morton describes the environmental agenda as follows: [e]nvironmentalists try to preserve areas of wilderness or ‘outstanding natural beauty.’ They struggle against pollution, including the risks of nuclear technologies and weaponry. They fight for animal rights and

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vegetarianism in campaigns against hunting and scientific or commercial experimentation on animals. They oppose globalization and the patenting of life-forms. (2007, 9)

These are clearly themes of Atwood’s Gilead novels, MaddAddam trilogy and The Heart Goes Last . Critics have recognized a variety of contemporary areas of concern that are reflected in Atwood’s speculative fiction. Nathalie Cooke suggests that Atwood’s main interests are “environmental awareness, Canadian nationalism, and feminism” (2004, 3). Earl G. Ingersoll (2004) discusses Atwood’s preoccupation with the theme of survival and exploitative capitalism. Hutcheon situates the writer in “both the feminist and postmodern contexts” (153). It is, however, obvious that Atwood’s political position has become more “humanist” than feminist. As Theodore F. Sheckels argues, “she believes in the dignity of her fellow human beings and the importance of good relations among them as well as between them and the rest of creation” (2016, 1). As for Atwood’s narrative tactics, Howells locates Atwood’s genre tendencies in “our contemporary context of poststructuralism and postmodernist aesthetics” (2000, 139) and Sharon Rose Wilson emphasizes that Atwood uses “comic, parodic, and ironic techniques, multiple narrators and other literary devices including intertexts” (2013, 334). Atwood uses these strategies to explore the accelerating devastation of the natural environment, the elimination of species and the rampant proliferation of biotechnologies. Karen Stein maps out Atwood’s evolving ecofeminist concerns. In Payback, the environmental concern becomes a moral obligation spiritually and biologically linked to the survival of human kind: “in ancient societies, the debt we own to the Earth was remembered at all seasons. Each religion paid tribute to the sacredness of the Earth, and acknowledged with gratitude that everything people ate, drank, and breathed came from it through providence. Unless people treated the gifts given by the natural world with respect, and refrained from wastefulness and greed, divine displeasure would follow, signalled by drought, disease, and famine” (2008, 132). According to Shannon Hengen, Margaret Atwood’s works are infused with environmentalism: “a concern with the urgent preservation of a human place in a natural world in which the term ‘human’ does not imply ‘superior’, or ‘alone’, and in which what is fabricated is less satisfying than

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what has originally occurred” (2006, 74). Furthermore, Howells highlights Atwood’s enthusiasm for “popular cultural forms and that from the beginning she has blurred genre boundaries to fulfil her own agendas in her scrutiny of cultural myths and contemporary social trends” (2021, 2). All these issues, themes and approaches culminate in Atwood’s speculative writing and encapsulate a life-long cross-section of her literary oeuvre. In this book, Atwood’s concerns with environmentalism, feminism, survival and politics are viewed through the lens of food and eating. In the selected novels, food, eating, and cooking practices are topics pervaded with ecological themes, especially in the post-apocalyptic situation Atwood depicts in her novels. The fear of hunger as well as the fear of being consumed are regularly evoked in dystopias, speculative fiction novels as well as alternate histories: “The terror of being cannibalized and the fear of menacing and mysterious powers, whose actions cannot be fully understood and foreseen, emerge also in science fiction” (61), as Fabio Parasecoli (2008) points out. This book proposes to apply the metaphors of food, cooking and eating to Atwood’s textual strategies: the splicing of genre traditions, the use of intertextuality and hybridity imitates the themes of hunger, cannibalism and food production. By (f)using the ingredients of old recipes (dystopia, utopia, thriller, romance, fairy tale, farce), Atwood cooks up rich novels.

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Edible Atwood: Food and Atwood’s Fiction

Food has a central place in Atwood’s literary oeuvre. In The Canlit Foodbook, she argues, eating “is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality and language. We eat before we talk” (1987, 2). Typically, her protagonists suffer from various food related issues before they start talking/writing/acting about their problems. Atwood has always been interested in food in fiction: “Some novelists feed their characters, others don’t. […] Pets and menus, bathtubs and curtains, buildings and gardens, all reflect the psyches of their owners: or at least they do in books” (BQ 266). Her menus reflect the social, psychological and environmental chronotope. Even Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), deals with the politics of food. The protagonist Marian refuses to be consummated in her marriage by refusing food. Having dinner with her fiancé, she realizes her own commodification: “She looked down at her own half-eaten

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steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood-red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar” (EW 155). Marian recognizes the power politics in the food hierarchy and refuses to become the prey. In Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, Sharon Rose Wilson suggests that “[b]y baking, decorating, serving, and consuming the cake-woman image […] Marian announces […] that she is not food” (1993, 96). When Marian ends her engagement with her fiancé, she reconstructs her appetite and her own identity. As for her second novel, Surfacing (1972) Atwood uses the imagery of eating to intensify key motifs of her fiction: survival, politics of power, strategies of identity, be it gender, national or personal. The motifs of food and related issues of eating and cannibalism have been discussed by Emma Parker, Rose Sharon Wilson and J. Brooks Bouson. The novel is a further step in the development of Atwood’s consideration of vegetarianism, recognizing how the killing of animals for food is linked to abuse of power. Lady Oracle (1976) deals with women’s right to eat. Emma Parker (1995) argues that “Joan’s mother attempts to deny her daughter any sense of autonomy and tries to control her life and identity. She makes her diet and tries to assert her authority physically by reducing her daughter in size” (351). The novel deals with the trauma of obesity and invisibility. The link between being in control and eating is further developed in Life Before Man (1979), where Atwood uses images of rotten food to symbolize the decaying and dysfunctional marriage of Nate and Elizabeth. Issues of the (harmed) body and lack of power are portrayed in Bodily Harm (1981). Food is used for political control and power. Rennie’s bodily discomforts pile up in prison: the food is unpalatable, and the tea is salty: “they’re eating, lunch, cold rice and chicken backs, boiled, Rennie thinks, but not enough. Pink juice runs out. Lora gnaws with relish, licking her fingers” (BH 279). Rennie cannot eat it. She associates freedom with junk food, a link that is developed in Atwood’s later dystopian fiction as well. Like the other novels, Cat’s Eye (1989) is a novel about power politics, this time as enacted in bullying among girls. The book shows more images of non-eating than eating. Only later, when Elaine reverses the power imbalance, can she eat and threatens her tormentor with vampirism. Moreover, she develops an ability to speak up and talk back to Cordelia.

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The mouth is a centre of emotions, as we show in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Atwood’s works are saturated with images of eating, food and hunger and a related motif of metaphorical cannibalism. In The Robber Bride (1993), Atwood develops a toxic predator, Zenia, who is imagined sipping blood and eating men and raw meat. Tony, Charis and Roz, Zenia’s victims, prefer comforting foods: they share nourishing meals and stories to nurture each other. Storytelling and food become conditions of survival in Atwood’s writing. Another novel in which we can see Atwood’s strategical use of eating and food metaphors is Alias Grace (1996). The style of the novel is a pastiche of the Victorian historical novel featuring accurate depictions of the contemporary Canadian lifestyle including its foods and menus. The food and sex association is an undertone in Alias Grace. The motifs of food and hunger and their links to the (metaphorical) hunger for truth and story drive the plot of Alias Grace. Moreover, it highlights powerful connections between sexual violence and food as does The Blind Assassin (2000). Here, eating disorders, such as anorexia, are presented as a hunger strike, a political protest on behalf of bodily and personal autonomy. Atwood uses images of food and eating to comment on patriarchal hierarchies. Partly set in a prison, Hag-Seed (2016) is Atwood’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the novel, Felix deliberately imprisons himself in his simple cell, with outhouse and tin bath. He enters a government prison only when he starts teaching drama classes to improve literacy there, but similarly to the prisoners, his food choices are limited to eggs and macaroni and cheese. Like prisoners, he eats without pleasure or loving company. An interesting aspect of Atwood’s use of cannibalism and food metaphors is that characters who have been bitten, bodily harmed or (symbolically) eaten alive, can heal themselves through sharing food and stories, a theme which is very significant in all her novels. Emma Parker (1995) observes that, for Atwood, “eating is unequivocally political […] and employed as a metaphor for power” (349). In Atwood’s speculative fictions, the food serves as a metaphor for gender relations and patriarchal conventions, however, other food metaphors, including cannibalism, eating disorders, scavenging for food, starving, cooking and feeding take on even wider connotations: power struggles, class distinctions and hyper-consumerism.

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While food surfaces in all of Atwood’s texts, this book focuses on her work in a group of related genres including utopia, dystopia, science fiction, speculative fiction, and post-apocalyptic fiction. Atwood argues that food reflects whether the communities are supposed to be ideal or the opposite. Similarly, in “Utopia and the Art of Visceral Response,” Brett Cooke points out a trend in the dystopian genre towards culinary extremes: there is little particular reason for the food of a centrally planned state to be either delicious or disgusting, albeit enthusiasm of its citizenry may play a role. Nevertheless, the quality of what is served in these fictions tends to go to extremes on the gustatory scale. (1996, 188)

It appears that dystopian literature needs to frustrate one of the three tenets of food in paradise/utopia, which is plenitude, variety and palatability: “In dystopia the food is markedly less than adequate, psychologically if not physiologically, for at least one of these reasons” (1996, 193). However, as we will see in the analysis of The Heart Goes Last , Atwood subverts these notions as well, and food serves here to signal the genre shifts from dystopia to the grotesque. Food motifs enable the authors of utopias and dystopias to depict a society’s power politics: Who eats what? Who cooks and buys the food? How do eating practices illustrate the wounded bodies and psyches of the dystopian state? As this book shows, Atwood’s writing is complex and intertwined, but the food allusions help the reader to see through the disgusting food in dystopia, healthy portions of nourishing dinners in utopia as well as through the very monotonous breakfasts in the postapocalyptic future. Numerous critics have discussed Atwood’s genre hybridity and intertextuality (Nischik’s volume Margaret Atwood’s Works and Impact, 2000 includes several studies on intertextuality and genre hybridity; Howells 2006, 2017, 2020, 2021; Gadpaille 2018; Bosco 2010; Bouson 2015; Wilson 1993; Stein 2010), but less attention has been focused on the thematic issues of food in her fiction (Parker 1995; Sceats 2003; Wilson 2008; Boyd 2015; Sasame 2010). Emma Parker’s seminal study “‘You Are What You Eat’: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood” discusses Atwood’s use of food and eating as metaphors for power, describing it “as an extremely subtle means of examining the relationship between women and men”

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(1995, 349). Parker’s article focuses on Atwood’s early novels, while this book discusses Atwood’s more recent fiction. Parker explores the issues of cannibalism, anorexia, and other bodily issues. Parker argues that the images of women as food convey “a negative condition” (1995, 365). Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction examines Atwood’s late dystopias in which not only women are presented as food: the power politics of dystopian regimes is not only a gender struggle but an ongoing power play of ideologies, be it controlled by corporations (MaddAddam trilogy) or theocracy (The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments ). In Food, Consumption, and the Body, Sarah Sceats investigates the significance of food and eating in contemporary women’s fiction. Sceats discusses how food, eating and related issues of the body are central to contemporary writers, including Margaret Atwood. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats scrutinizes the metaphorical images associated with food and eating, revealing connections between food and sex, motherhood, identity and behaviour. Sceats discusses Margaret Atwood’s politics of consumption. The chapter concentrates on “cultural and political issues through eating and female bodies and these combine to expose differences and dislocations between culturally constructed roles and experienced realities” (2003, 95) in Atwood’s early writing. Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, by revealing the link between eating and storytelling, enriches the scholarship. The link is also interwoven with the theme of survival and hunger: survivors tell stories to heal themselves. The issue of cannibalism in Atwood’s works has been discussed by Sharon Rose Wilson. She explores this issue in Atwood’s The Edible Woman but also in The Robber Bride. While Wilson links the theme of cannibalism with the fairy tale genre, Karen Stein describes a politics of metaphorical cannibalism in Atwood’s dystopias, especially The Handmaid’s Tale. She argues that “Atwood has clearly been fascinated with the idea of cannibalism” (1996, 66). The issue of cannibalism is discussed in this book too, which will engage with arguments made by Stein and Maria Christou. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy considers another food-related issue, namely, genetically modified and processed food. This theme has been addressed by several critics already, including Kiyomi Sasame and Marcus Rockoff. Rockoff’s discussion of meat is closely related to vegetarianism, which has been an important leitmotif in Atwood’s works from the beginning. Carol J. Adams’s work on vegetarianism refers to The Edible

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Woman. Adams observes that meat consummation becomes a metaphor of the character’s own oppression: “Marian intuits her link to other animals, suggesting that a challenge to meat eating is linked to an attack on the sovereign individual subject. The fluid, merged subjectively of the middle part of the book finds mystical identity with things, especially animals, that are consumed” (2010, 175). Atwood’s approach to vegetarianism develops throughout her novels, from The Edible Woman to The Year of the Flood. Chloe Taylor’s work on abnormal appetites analyses the issue of food and eating and refers to Atwood’s The Edible Woman, Bodily Harm, Surfacing and Lady Oracle. She criticizes Atwood’s pathologizing of vegetarianism and veganism: “Vegetarianism and compassion for nonhuman animals are thus consistently represented by Atwood in her fiction as a self-defeating persecution-paranoia and a loss of touch with reality” (2012, 135). Taylor criticizes the conclusions of Sceats, Adams and Parker as she believes that female empowerment cannot be indifferent to “the suffering of those who are eaten” (2012, 138). However, I argue that Atwood shows a different perspective on vegetarianism and veganism in The Year of the Flood, where feelings of kinship with animals and environmental mindfulness provide rational and emotional reasons for the vegetarian diet of the God’s Gardeners. Following Chloe Taylor’s observations in “Abnormal Appetites,” Maria Christou takes up Foucault’s forgotten alimentary monster and considers the presence an alimentary “monstrosity” in contemporary fiction. In “Alimentary Monstrosities: Genetically Modified Food in Contemporary Fiction,” Christou discusses genetically modified foods in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, which are examined in this book too. Moreover, Christou’s Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature analyses “the ontologico-political significance of auto-cannibalism in Atwood’s work, along with its ambivalent implications” (2017, 121). Such auto-cannibalism is the type of selfsacrifice that the Handmaids are supposed to make for Gilead. My analysis of the imagery of eggs and the diet of dairy products and chicken meat is based on Christou’s examination of Gilead’s “o(o)ntotheology” and the relationship between eating and being. Therefore, this book adopts a heterogeneous approach combining feminism, psychoanalysis, genre theory, and notions of personal, gender and class identity, to justify the multifarious occurrences and functions of

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food and eating in Atwood’s novels. Food studies is a holistic and interdisciplinary field with roots in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as studies of cannibalism by Maggie Killgour), sociology (Belasco), history (Colin Spencer’s The Heretic’s Feast, 1995), and cultural studies (Fabio Parasecoli’s Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture, 2008). Fabio Parasecoli claims that “food is pervasive” (2008, 2). The significance of food spreads to other fields, such as art, film, media, and literature. Our analysis of food in Atwood’s speculative fiction draws on the theoretical concepts of food discussed in the works of Belasco, Lupton, and Elspeth Probyn to examine the religious, gender and sociological issues presented in Atwood’s works.

1.4

Atwood’s Dystopian Cuisine

This book is organized into chapters centred on specific food and eatingrelated themes and topics in Atwood’s five dystopian novels. Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction examines moments of culinary transformation in Atwood’s text, in which food appears as a biological and psychological necessity, as a political statement, and as an aesthetic ingredient. We deal with Atwood’s writing and reading as methods of cooking, chewing and digesting, giving the readers pleasure and satisfaction. In Food and Literature, Gitanjali G. Shahani states “[f]ood is memory, food is irony, food is drama, food is symbol, food is form” (2018, 19). This is exactly how Atwood writes her novels: a tasty goulash of nostalgia, sarcasm and tragedy. Using this method not only in her theme but also in the form of her hybrid genre novels. Atwood’s postmodern method has influenced other women writers of dystopias. Her relationship with the science fiction and/or speculative fiction genres, radical cross-pollination with popular genres, and engagement with themes of food and survival seem to have become key foci for the late twentieth and twenty-first-century writing. The claustrophobic anxiety of her dystopias has influenced the dystopias of women writers who sought fresh approaches to classical dystopia, speculative fiction, science fiction, dystopia, horror, cyberpunk, alternate worlds and alternate histories. I argue that, although these genres used to be considered “masculine” (Howells 2000, 141), they have been adopted by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sophie Mackintosh, Naomi Alderman, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler and others to satirize patriarchal tyranny and

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other monstrous ideologies, including feminism taken to extremes. Moreover, these writers use the themes of (non-) eating, hunger, cannibalism, and food to illustrate control and resistance in societies dominated by repressive ideologies. These women authors of contemporary dystopias have also engaged with issues of non-eating, hunger, cannibalism and environmental/food toxicity—in settings that are dystopian (The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh), prison-like (The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood) and/or post-apocalyptic (Angela Carter The Passion of New Eve). It is, however, Atwood’s speculative fiction novels that most explicitly link food and power. In all these novels, gender is demonstrated through food. The patriarchal power hierarchy is delineated by strict associations of women and edibles. Women are very commonly associated with milky and sweet foods or soft-textured food items as in The Handmaid’s Tale but also in The Water Cure. This tendency culminates in cannibalism in post-apocalyptic The Passion of New Eve. Dystopian strategies of a prison-like setting, isolation, and, most importantly, food shortages and rationing of food can be seen in The Natural Way of Things , The Water Cure as well as in Atwood’s Gilead novels, just to preview the analyses in respective chapters. The second chapter discusses Margaret Atwood’s most popular Gilead dystopias, The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments (2019). The Handmaid’s Tale is a reconstruction of Offred’s voice, recording her everyday life in the totalitarian state of Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, a sex slave assigned to Commander Fred, to produce a child for his family and Gilead. Due to post-nuclear pollution, there are no healthy children born in Gilead, hence the state solves the problem of decreasing birth rate by corrupting the biblical story of the handmaid Bilhah, who is impregnated by her master, Jacob, to provide a child for his wife Rachel. If the Handmaid fails to produce children, Gilead declares her an Unwoman. This is a death sentence in the novel because Unwomen—older women who cannot bear children, feminists and lesbians—are sent to do forced labour in the most toxic zones. Women have been reduced to a biological function: reproduction and they become pieces of white meat to be consumed by Gilead. Moreover, the restrictive and controlling theocratic regime seriously controls every bite eaten by the citizens of Gilead. The power hierarchy is reflected in the food pyramid: the handmaids are allowed food that is healthy for their bodies, as long as they function as instruments to increase the population of the state.

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The third chapter, “Canned Food and Canned Death: Oryx and Crake,” deals with the edibility, production and consumption of pseudofoods. It reveals that despite the proliferation of food-like substances invented by the technological wizardry of the pre-apocalyptic world, human beings remain unsatisfied and hungry. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) reflects contemporary ecological and cultural concerns, but a shared genre repertoire allows me to compare it with novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Heart Goes Last that question other aspects of contemporary societies (respectively, the role of women in society, and the future of work and intimate relationships). Oryx and Crake considers the question of the ideal (utopian) society, including designing whole new humanoid generations. Crake, a scientific genius, creates a utopian human society, the Crakers. Crake’s utopia is a world without famine and wars, and, as it turns out, without people. He lets the world melt in an apocalyptic pandemic seeded in his BlyssPlus Pill. Surviving Snowman is weighed down by his role as a designated survivor of Crake’s plague and guardian of the Crakers. The heaps of litter in a devastated landscape stand as an accusation against the pre-apocalyptic world of false plenty and a foreshadowing of a post-apocalyptic world of famine. The link between food and death is created through Atwood’s use of powerful metaphors, moreover, the link is even more strongly emphasized by society’s over-use of pharmacological products and consequent pandemic. The fourth chapter, “Corporate Cannibalism: The Year of the Flood,” deals with the companion book to Oryx and Crake and its protagonists’ efforts to live a sustainable life. In the Year of the Flood, the events are narrated by women as an alternative to Snowman’s cynical and limited point of view. Whereas Snowman and Crake belong to the elite and sheltered Corporate caste, the new female voices narrate the catastrophic events from the “pleeblands.” As members of an eco-religious cult called God’s Gardeners are preparing for an apocalyptic Waterless Flood. The sect’s founder, Adam One, has anticipated the cataclysm of Waterless flood, and teaches his followers to build a series of food storehouses— “Ararats.” As a reaction and resistance to the totalizing pre-apocalyptic world run by corporations, the God’s Gardeners use imaginative structures to renew the place of humanity within nature and thus, they oppose wasteful consumerism and commodification of natural resources, human and animal bodies. The many rules for their diet designed to reduce the

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suffering of other creatures reflects the rich theological code of the God’s Gardeners, mixing ecology, myth and religion. The fifth chapter, “Eating and Storytelling: MaddAddam” discusses the importance of food, sexual rituals and storytelling as means for the preservation and reproduction of human society. The rituals of eating as well as storytelling thus enable humanity to grow into a (hopeful) future. The third part of the MaddAddam trilogy (2013), is set in a post-apocalyptic rural landscape. It proposes answers to Atwood’s fiction and non-fiction texts she asks in “Writing Oryx and Crake”: “What if we continue on the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?” (2005, 284–286). The corpse-littered post-apocalyptic world is populated by dangerous transgenic animals like Wolvogs, and pigoons, peaceful Crakers as well as sadistic Painballers. The dangers of the post-pandemic world are most fully embodied in the Painballers, who represent a threat to women, Crakers and animals alike. The new Paradice, is no harmonious utopia, as all the creatures, human and non-human, are starving. The sixth chapter, “Junk Food and Prison Food: The Heart Goes Last ” deals with Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, which offers yet another perspective on the schemes of power hierarchy. The fragmented narrative form and sensational plot twists super-size Atwood’s genre-hybridization strategies in order “to engage readers’ interests in her satirical analyses of North American mass consumerism and her warnings against uncontrolled corporate power” (Howells 2017, 304). Again, living in Atwood’s utopian town is no picnic: free lunches and feasts are bought by characters’ freedom. Atwood (surprisingly) associates free food with dystopian loss of freedom, while living outside the Positron project means living on stale food, junk food and repetitive meals that taste like sawdust. In this slow apocalypse, Stan and Charmaine live in their car after losing everything. They decide to join the Positron Project: they literally exchange their human rights for prison food, which turns out to be unexpectedly tasty. As Atwood suggests, eating is human activity that has all kinds of symbolic connotations depending on the society and the level of society. In other words, what you eat varies from place to place, how we feel about what we eat varies from individual as well as from place to place. If you think of food as coming in various categories: sacred food, ceremonial food, everyday food, and things that are not to be eaten, forbidden food, dirty food. (Lyons 1991, 28)

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This monograph examines eating habits and food rituals in Atwood’s post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels. Sharing food or eating alone, setting the table and eating at specific times are parts of eating rituals that create a specific culture as well as a sense of community, as well as a sense of community.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. [1990] 2010. Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York and London: Continuum. Atwood, Margaret. [1969] 1980. The Edible Woman. London: Virago. Atwood, Margaret. [1981] 1996. Bodily Harm. London: Vintage. Atwood, Margaret. 1987. The Canlit Foodbook. From Pen to Palate: A Collection of Tasty Literary Fare. Harper and Collins. Atwood, Margaret. 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books. Atwood, Margaret. 2005. “Writing Oryx and Crake.” In Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005, 284–287. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Atwood, Margaret. 2006. “Writing Utopia.” In Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 85–94. London: Virago. Atwood, Margaret. 2008. Payback: The Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto, ON: Anansi Press. Atwood, Margaret. 2009. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday. Atwood, Margaret. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Doubleday. Atwood, Margaret. 2013. MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbury. Atwood, Margaret. 2019. The Testaments. London: Chatto & Windus. Bosco, Mark S. J. 2010. “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 156–172. London and New York: Continuum. Bouson, Brooks J. 2015. “A ‘Joke-filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 58 (51): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/002/9894/5573558. Boyd, Shelley. 2015. “Ustopian Breakfasts: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam.” Utopian Studies 26 (1): 160–181. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies. 26.1.0160. Buell, Frederick. 2005. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. New York: Routledge. Christou, Maria. 2017. Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in TwentiethCentury Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cooke, Brett. 1996. “Utopia and the Art of Visceral Response.” In Foods of the Gods: Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, George Edgar Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, 188–200. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Cooke, Nathalie. 2004. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1997. “Edible Ecriture.” Times Higher Education, October 24. www.timeshighereducation.com/features/edible-ecriture/104281.article. Frelik, Pawel. 2011. “Of Slipstream and Others: SF and Genre Boundary Discourses.” Science Fiction Studies 38 (1): 20–45. https://doi.org/10. 5621/sciefictstud.38.1.0020. Gadpaille, Michelle. 2018. “Sci-fi, Cli-fi or Speculative Fiction: Genre and Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon.” ELOPE 15 (1): 17–28. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.15.1.17-28. Hengen, Shannon. 2006. “Margaret Atwood and Environmentalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 72–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howells, Coral Ann. 2000. “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” In Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, edited by Reingard Nischik, 139–156. Suffolk: Camden House. Howells, Coral Ann. 2006. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”. In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 161–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howells, Coral Ann. 2017. “True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited In Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 11 (3): 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpx010. Howells, Coral Ann. 2020. “Atwood’s Reinventions: So Many Atwoods.” ELOPE 17 (1): 15–28. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1.15-28. Howells, Coral Ann. 2021. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingersoll, Earl. 2004. “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation 45 (2): 162–175. https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2004.45.2.6. Kunkel, Benjamin. 2008. “Dystopia and the End of Politics.” Dissent 55 (4): 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2008.0072. Lucas, Gerald R. 2010. “Speculative Fiction.” In Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction, edited by Brian W. Shaffer. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781444337822.wbetcfv2s013. Lyons, Bonnie. 1991 “Using Other People’s Dreadful Childhoods.” In Conversations: Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl Ingersoll, 221–233. Princeton: Ontario Review.

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Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makinen, Merja. 2001. Feminist Popular Fiction. Hampshire: Palgrave. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2008. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Parker, Emma. 1995. “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Twentieth Century Literature 41 (3): 349–368. https://doi.org/10.2307/441857. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Donna Lee Brien. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. New York: Routledge. Sasame, Kiyomi. 2010. “Food for Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Worlds.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 21: 89–109. Sceats, Sarah. 2003. Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shahani, Gitanjali G., ed. 2018. Food and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheckels, Theodore F. [2012] 2016. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent. London and New York: Routledge. Spencer, Colin. 1995. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hannover and London: University Press of New England. Stein, Karen F. 1996. “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 148: 57–72. Stein, Karen F. 2010. “Problematic Paradice: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 141–155. London & New York: Continuum. Taylor, Chloe. 2012. “Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10 (4): 130–148. Tolan, Fiona. 2007. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wilson, Sharon Rose. 1993. Fairy Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wilson, Sharon Rose. 2008. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Sharon Rose. 2013. “Postapocalyptic Vision: Flood Myths and Other Folklore in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” In Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 313–334. Ipswich: Salem Press.

CHAPTER 2

Women as White Meat: The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

Abstract The chapter deals with food images in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. The characters in these novels have the bare minimum of control over their lives and, consequently, over their diet: they cannot eat what they want or as much as they want, they cannot shop for themselves, they cannot cook it as they like. The monology of Gilead is symbolized by the rules for the citizens’ clothing and their food, which is tasteless and strictly portioned. Gilead, as Atwood shows, metaphorically consumes its own people. Images of cannibalism show the power hierarchy of Gilead: who eats whom. The chapter argues that food allusions in witness narratives enable Atwood to represent the unspeakable and indigestible trauma of Gilead. Keywords Margaret Atwood · The Handmaid’s Tale · The Testaments · Dystopia · Testimony · Eating/non-eating · Cannibalism

The smell of nail polish has made me hungry. (HT 39) Quick, eat those words. (HT 191) Food can obviously confine women to subservient roles, keeping them busy at home and ‘quiet’ in the public sphere. (Belasco, Food: The Key Concepts 44)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_2

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Atwood’s Gilead novels—The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent sequel, The Testaments —are dystopian fictions speculating on a totalitarian regime in which food, physical suffering and emotional hunger are instruments of power and social control. In “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition,” Amin Malak situates the novel within the context of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. She articulates the “salient dystopian features” in the novel and Atwood’s “rendition and redefinition of those features” (1987, 10). Food serves here as an illustration of the characters’ struggle for survival and satisfaction. Moreover, there are complex power relationships in the cooking and preparing of food, over which the state of Gilead seeks to exercise control. This gives readers a vivid example of how power and agency is taken from Gileadean women and men: nobody can buy whatever they want and cook what and when they please. This is Gilead: food is highly politicized. The Handmaid’s Tale, inspired by authentic newspaper clippings, should function as a simulation, giving the reader the feeling they could really be in the novel’s dystopia. The narrator of the novel, the eponymous handmaid Offred, describes how her country has been changed into a theocracy that controls all aspects of its citizens’ life, including food, eating, cooking, sex and childbirth. These themes are later developed in The Testaments published in 2019, thirty-four years after The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in second-generation Gilead, fifteen years after the first book, it amplifies the voices of young girls: Daisy, who was raised in freedom in Canada but becomes involved in Gilead’s resistance movement due to the secret of her birth, and Agnes, who was raised in Gileadean high society to become a Commander’s wife. The two girls become entangled in a thriller plot overseen by the novel’s third narrator—Offred’s former torturer, Aunt Lydia—who is approaching the climax of a long game of collaboration and subversion at the heart of the Gileadean regime. Her goal is to take it all down. As The Testaments consists of witness narratives—Agnes’s diary-like account, Aunt Lydia’s memoirs, and Daisy’s testimony—we hear not only about ideology and public face of Gilead, but also about the private lives of individuals, their routines, rituals and meals. Gilead is no closer to freedom and prosperity. The characters have the bare minimum of control over their lives and, consequently, over their diet: they cannot eat what they want or as much as they want, they cannot shop for themselves and they cannot cook it as they like. The monology of Gilead is symbolized by

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the rules for the citizens’ clothing and their food, which is tasteless and strictly portioned. Gilead, as Atwood shows, metaphorically consumes its own people. Images of cannibalism show the power hierarchy of Gilead: who eats whom. Food allusions in witness narratives, I argue, enable Atwood to represent the unspeakable and indigestible trauma of Gilead.1

2.1

Milk and Eggs: Women and Food

Emma Parker observes that “[one] of the main ways the system of oppression is enforced is through food” (1995, 118). In The Handmaid’s Tale, citizens’ relationship to food is determined by their prescribed function in the state. The Republic of Gilead insists that “letting people choose whether or not to bear a child caused the falling birth rate in the United States” (Sasame 2010, 92) and allots everyone to a specific role in both public and private spaces. In the home of a high government official, a Commander, we find his Wife, who is tasked with overseeing the home but not cooking, Marthas, who perform the household chores, a male servant for security and driving, and the Handmaid, whose role is to bear a child for the household. The justification for this is a misinterpreted story from the Old Testament, in which citizens are required to act out in a perverse ceremony. A regime that extends its power into the bedroom will not stay out of the kitchen. In The Consuming Body, Falk suggests, “within the one culture, there may be a number of sets of rules which define the boundaries between forbidden and permitted foodstuffs, related to stage in the life-cycle, place, gender and social class” (1994, 774). In Gilead, nobody can freely choose their food: the Commanders’ Wives eat only what the Handmaids buy for them and Marthas, in their kitchen, prepare for them. Gilead sets every citizen’s permitted food, portions and time to eat according to their status within the society. By virtue of her function, a handmaid must be guaranteed a nutritious and healthy diet. However, in Gilead, in keeping with its puritan inspiration, only simple foodstuffs are served: eggs, chicken, vegetables, canned pears and fruit juice. Christou suggests that the foodstuffs the Handmaids are made to consume are “identified with their consumer” (2017, 131). The Handmaids are associated with eggs, chickens that lay eggs 1 For detailed discussion of the testimonial literature genre in The Testaments , see Labudova, Katarina. “Testimonies in The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Images of Food in Gilead.”

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and canned pears. Offred refers to her womb as her centre that has a pear shape. As Christou observes, “the regime […] in serving [the Handmaids] this womb-shaped dessert, puts them in a position in which they are figuratively eating themselves” (2017, 132). By reducing the Handmaids to edible objects, not only does the regime metaphorically consume its own citizens, but it also forces the Handmaids to cannibalize themselves. Furthermore, the Handmaid is treated like a child, whose eating is carefully monitored, and she is expected to eat up whatever is put on her plate. Sarah Sceats describes this as “infantilising force-feeding” which is “an admonitory reminder of disempowered status, echoed in the restriction of Handmaids’ cutlery to spoon and fork” (2003, 112). It is not only knives that are taken from them to make them powerless, thus associating them with babies. The Handmaids are not allowed to control their food nor their appetite. Offred feels that she is obliged to “repay the team, justify [her] food and keep, like a queen ant with eggs” (HT 145) by having a child for the Commander’s household. It is not only Serena Joy who needs Offred to have a child, the Marthas, especially Cora, want the child too: Cora hopes for “a Birth Day, here, with guests and food and presents, she wants a little child to spoil in the kitchen, to iron clothes for, to slip cookies into when no one’s watching. I am to provide these joys for her” (HT 145). If the Handmaid fails, she will be declared Unwoman and sentenced to a cruel death in the Colonies. The Handmaid turned into a mere object—“torso only” (HT 70)— is forced to participate in the Ceremony, a sex ritual after a communal Bible reading, under the supervision of the Commander’s Wife: “My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers” (HT 104). Atwood presents a reversed image of this Ceremony in the ceremony of childbirth. All the Wives and the Handmaids gather, then “[The Wife] scrambles onto the Birthing Stool, sits on the seat behind and above Janine, so that Janine is framed by her: her skinny legs come down on either side” (HT 135). Concentrated on “multiply[ing], and replenish[ing] the earth” (HT 99), the two rituals degrade female subjects into fragmented objects: the individuals are seen only as their fragmentary body parts. Both the Ceremony and the Birth Day, despite the fact that they deal with very private and intimate events, are turned into public acts subject to the full control of the state. Dunja Mohr observes that these rituals, “associated with bonding, intimacy, and connectedness, turn into the illusion and/or abhorrence of bonding and eventually into acts of

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isolation” (2005, 248). I add that although Gilead’s rituals impose singularity, uniformity, and monological discourse on its citizens, instead of creating a sense of family and community, they exacerbate isolation. The novel underlines this with scenes of characters eating alone (Offred in her room) or in unconvivial institutional settings (the canteens of the Red Centre and Ardua Hall). The unpleasantness of the Aunts’ communal dining is reflected in the references to being served their “mouldy dishwater” and “fish eyes in glue” (T 323). These rituals are echoed by the food served on these occasions. At the birth party, the Handmaids are offered sandwiches, milk and grape juice, little more than baby food, associating them with pregnancy, children and powerlessness, while the Commanders’ wives get ham, cheese, oranges and fresh bread, but also cakes, coffee and wine, adult food. Sometimes, the Handmaids are allowed the Gileadean dessert, the previously mentioned canned pears. As Christou points out, “[t]he very existence of desserts in Gilead seems odd, for […] Gilead promotes strict functionalism: desserts, by contrast, are traditionally sweet and insubstantial, lacking useful nutritional value” (2017, 138). However, Gilead believes that pear compote is full of vitamins and thus, good for the (almost) pregnant women. While the Handmaids are treated to canned pears, the Wives are allowed alcohol to celebrate the birth of a child, to ease the pain of not having the child themselves. The Birth Day is intended to enable women, Wives, Aunts, including Handmaids, to release their feelings of pain and frustration. In Food, the Body and the Self , Deborah Lupton points out that the consumption of alcohol “signals escape from the civilized body into self-indulgence and physical and emotional release” (1996, 32). The Wives are privileged to drink alcohol only on rare occasions, but they are allowed some coffee. In The Testaments , Aunt Lydia can have a teaspoon of rum in her coffee when meeting with Commander Judd: “we lifted our mugs, clinked them together” (T 282). The ritual reminds her of her past, before coffee became a “a valuable commodity that is increasingly difficult to obtain” (T 173). Even Aunts Lydia, Vidala, Elizabeth and Helena, the designers of habits, names and hymns, can only drink coffee at their business meetings with Commander Judd. This reminds us of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which only the top-ranked Alphas could drink real coffee (laced with the notorious “soma”). Thus, in The Testaments, drinking coffee with rum triggers nostalgia, and thoughts of how they have betrayed their former jobs, their former values and beliefs. Drinking coffee with Commander Judd symbolizes and enacts this duplicity. Aunt Lydia is no true believer

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in Gilead. In fact, she is scheming to bring it down, even as she sips her coffee and rum. The novel also presents coffee as an epitome of life outside of Gilead, although the coffee Daisy drinks in Canada is usually terrible. When running away from Gilead, Daisy and Agnes buy two cups of coffee: “The coffee must have been sitting around all day because it was the worst I’d ever tasted” (T 363). However, even bad coffee tastes of freedom. As Waren Belasco points out, “no one called coffee a functional food” (2008, 251) and in Gilead, coffee is definitely a luxury. While the Handmaids’ diet of eggs and white meat illustrates their precarious status as privileged slaves, their bodies are metaphorically fragmented to the reproductive and consumable parts. Aunt Lydia herself admits to passing cruel sentences leading to mutilating women: “Wives, daughters, Handmaids. Some have missing fingers, some have one foot, some have one eye” (T 170). In The Testaments , when Aunt Lydia recollects the first days after she was arrested, she remembers eating egg salad sandwiches. Egg salad, as it is prepared from eggs that are chopped, is another powerful metaphor associating these educated women with not being fertile anymore. They must make a choice about serving Gilead: they cannot bear children like the Handmaids, but they are offered a position to control other women and indoctrinate them. The Commanders’ diet of red meat is associated with high power and masculinity. But just like anybody else the Commanders get their meat very rarely. Everybody’s portions are rationed and restricted. Every food item then can signify the power position. For example, Aunt Lydia likes having a cup of warm milk in Schlafly Café, however, Aunt Vidala, due to her allergies, can only drink mint tea. Aunt Lydia, pretending to forget about Aunt Vidala’s condition, always suggests a cup of milk to provoke Aunt Vidala, using it as a power play. Mutilated, sick and fragmented bodies underline the fact that Gilead is a failed utopia for everyone. The Commander is composed of fragments of “silver hair,” “his moustache, silver also,” and “after that his chin” (HT 97). The Handmaid’s Tale is preoccupied with representations of pain and fragmented bodies. The protagonist starts seeing herself in bodily scraps arranged around her uterus as well: “I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping” (HT 84). Offred’s fragmented perspective of herself and the reality around her thus balances Gilead’s “monolithic depiction of reality” (Mohr 2005, 233). Offred is

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often presented as “viable ovaries” (HT 153). Her function of reproduction is also symbolized by the food she is allowed to eat. Constant references to eggs suggest a parallel with producing a life as well as the female body: “[…]an eggcup on it, that kind that looks like a woman’s torso, in a skirt. Under the skirt is the second egg, being kept warm” (HT 110). Her body is cut down and fragmented to her reproductive and consumable parts. Such a fragmentation is underlined by the fragility of an egg as several critics have noted. In “Food for Survival,” Sasame points out that “the fragility of an egg suggests the delicate situation of the Handmaid herself” (2010, 94). Seeing Offred as pieces of edible parts is highlighted by cannibalism. Similarly, Karen Stein sees it as “dehumanizing and cannibalizing the victims” (1996, 67). Offred is a consumed object, she feels like “cotton candy: sugar and air.Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red” (HT 148). Offred is cut and squeezed to be consumed by Gilead. The state forces the Handmaid into an edible object which underlines her loss of humanity, she is an edible commodity. The disturbing images of cannibalism and mutilated bodies culminate in the moment of “Particicution,” a ceremony where the handmaids tear into pieces the body of a man suspected of committing rape. The totalitarian regime of Gilead controls its citizens with a threat of physical pain and destruction and, what is most distressing, the regime makes them participate and be co-responsible. Mohr observes that Handmaids “participate in Gilead’s atrocities, and they execute the very men and women who might have become their potential liberators” (2005, 247). By tearing the (falsely) accused rapists apart, they collaborate in Gilead’s dehumanization, which oppressively turns everybody into distorted objects. The outbursts of aggression at the Particicutions as well as the failed attempts at empathy during the Birth Day are parodies of community gatherings. Instead of a share in the joy of a new life, the Birth Day reminds the other Handmaids of their “own failure” (HT 137). Offred realizes she is also an accomplice of the regime. When Offred catches sight of Aunt Lydia at the execution ceremony, she thinks: “Hatred fills my mouth like spit” (HT 286). Parker observes that the “significance of the politics of eating in Atwood’s fiction is endorsed by images of orality” (1995, 358). The hateful tearing and mutilating of someone else’s body make her both disgusted (she feels like spitting out) and hungry. Hatred, thus, is presented as centred in the mouth, which, according to Parker,

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is “the site of ingestion of both food and feelings” (1995, 359). Offred cannot take it anymore, she literally cannot stomach it, she needs to spit it out, which, in a way, she does when she tells her tale, thus linking eating and storytelling. The Aunts promote a concept of sisterhood, albeit for ends few feminists would recognize: “Women united for a common end! Helping one another in their daily chores as they walk the path of life together, each performing her appointed task. At this point, Offred, in her mind, confronts her radical feminist mother: ‘You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one’” (HT 137). The values of sisterhood are perverted by the Aunts into an imposed, prescriptive and obligatory community based not on shared values and empathy, but on envy, anxiety and the threat of physical torture. This is underlined by another food and eating association here: Aunt Helena used to be a Weight Watcher in the pre-Gileadean times, giving her experience of torturing and shaping female bodies into acceptable norms and forms.

2.2

Cooking Women and Cooking the Women

The Republic of Gilead forces its citizens back to Puritan values and ways of life. That is why its propaganda, especially the content of Serena Joy’s speeches, emphasizes the ideal of housewives staying at home: “She wasn’t singing anymore by then, she was making speeches. […] Her speeches were about sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home” (HT 55). This ideology not only prevents them from being active in the public sphere, but what is more, this so-called traditionalist concept imprisons them in their homes. As Belasco suggests in Food: The Key Concepts, “food can obviously confine women to subservient roles, keeping them busy at home and ‘quiet’ in the public sphere” (2008, 44). Nevertheless, the kitchen loses its significance as a private space. Gilead uses the sanctity and privacy of the kitchen space against women, including the Commanders’ Wives: their households and their kitchens are invaded by other women. Not only must they share their husbands with the Handmaids, they even share the kitchen with Marthas, who might be spying on them, thus, the kitchen is not a place of trust and solidarity but a battlefield. Marthas sometimes exert the little power they have over the Handmaids and make them eat burnt or undercooked meals. The privacy of the kitchen, the power to prepare food for their own family, is taken from women of Gilead. The kitchen seems to be a

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significant space for Offred. She associates it clearly with her family and motherhood: “The kitchen smells of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers, although my own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother” (HT 57). Offred’s mother, a radical feminist, was mainly oriented towards the public sphere, but Offred nevertheless acquired an appreciation of family and domesticity. However, Offred is explicit that the association with motherhood, kitchen and home is not based on her own memories, but rather, her own decision to create a conventional family life to rebel against her own mother. The totalitarian regime of Gilead can intensify its power by destroying families and other strong emotional human bonds such as friendship, love and the sense of sympathy and sisterhood among women; individuals are much more easily controlled when they are cut off from their homes and social relations. Offred, whose family has been broken, dreams about family life: “lying in bed, with Luke, his hand on my rounded belly” (HT 113). According to Tomc, The Handmaid’s Tale advocates traditional family as well as traditional femininity. She argues that the novel delivers a “conservative interpretation of women’s exemplary social actions, advocating what looks more like traditional femininity than an insurgent feminism” (1993, 74). But Atwood writes beyond the paradigm of romance (as well as beyond the genre of dystopia) for the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale is open. Whether the ambiguous Nick is Offred’s saviour, or not, is revealed only in The Testaments. Atwood’s Gilead novels show extreme practices of radical ideologies, including ideas of Offred’s mother, whose antipornography campaigns, book-burning and contempt for parenthood have echoes in Gilead’s ideology. The double-think of Gilead claiming to have freed women from pornographic objectification while turning Handmaids into single-purpose objects is prefigured when young Offred visualizes an anti-pornography campaign as frying real female bodies when taken to burning of books and magazines: “I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flashes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, sill on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air, before my eyes” (HT 48). Parts of women’s body, objectified and prepared to being consumed is repeated by Gilead. Gilead cuts the women into usable parts, it also cuts all the bonds: not only family ties, but also values of sisterhood. The kitchen as a private sphere of women is invaded and women no longer can feel safe here.

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Offred nostalgically thinks of kitchen space as a place of female bonding: “I would sit at Rita’s kitchen table, which is not Rita’s any more than my table is mine, and we would talk about aches and pains, illnesses, our feet, our backs, all the different kinds of mischief that our bodies, like unruly children, can get up to” (HT 20). However, Offred learns that she cannot trust anyone. Gilead strictly sets the boundaries between the male and the female; the fertile and the sterile; the powerful and the powerless, leaving them all isolated and hungry. Gilead’s project that “the women will live in harmony together, all in one family; you will be like daughters to them, and when the population level is up to scratch again we’ll no longer have to transfer you from one house to another because there will be enough to go round” (HT 143), concurs with the feminist utopian projects. Atwood’s novel turns this utopia into dystopia. The women, forced to live together in the Commander’s household, openly manifest hostile feelings towards each other: the Marthas’ “faces were the way women’s faces are when they’ve been talking about you behind your back and they think you’ve heard” (HT 20). The Wife’s and Offred’s occasional feelings of empathy are far from harmonious. Instead of “exchang[ing] remedies,” women of Gilead mistrust each other. Solidarity among women becomes stronger fifteen years later in The Testaments which explores the association between food and healing. Traditionally, people have drunk herbal teas and eaten specific roots and leaves to treat their illnesses. Medicinal products, drops and pills used to be based on plants and natural ingredients. This is why they tend an herbal garden at the aunts’ headquarters, Ardua Hall. Aunt Clover suggests drinking mint tea for digestion. Women are given chamomile tea to calm down. Young girls are also taught how to use food and herbs to care for the sick, which proves to be a lifesaving skill for Daisy during their escape. Daisy suffers from fever and Agnes tries to keep her hydrated: “There were some lemons on board, and I was able to mix some of their juice with tea and salt and a little sugar” (T 380). Of course, these natural remedies are Gilead’s propaganda as the state (probably) does not invest in medical and pharmaceutical research.

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Hunger Pangs: Food and Freedom

Gilead infects its citizens with distrust and prejudice. According to Catherine Rainwater, Atwood’s female characters “exhibit an array of physical and body-related psychological ills: eating disorders, disturbed body image, rational and irrational fears of infestation, mutilation and amputation” (1987, 14). The worries of the characters, such as feelings of amputation and dismemberment are related to their anxiety about losing the self. The threat of losing the self is symbolically presented as hunger. As it has been shown, it is not only the Handmaids who are trapped and abused by the state. It is all the citizens, including the Commanders and their Wives that are imprisoned, symbolically as well as literally. Serena Joy, a famous religious TV preacher, is forced to stay at home: “How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word” (HT 56). Speaking, like eating, is an oral activity, situated in mouth, Serena Joy rebels against this forced silence by smoking. As cigarettes are not allowed in the Republic of Gilead, There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged. She then was a woman who might bend the rules. But what did I have, to trade? I looked at the cigarette with longing. For me, like liquor and coffee, they are forbidden. (HT 10)

Cigarettes are not food, of course, but people eat not only to be satisfied nutritionally but for the taste. Falk understands modern societies as having an oral character due to increasing individualization and a sense of separateness from others. He argues that the modern self seeks the stimulation of food to fill the absences: the “oral urge” (1994, 28). Falk argues that it is not hunger in a physiological sense because the appetite is for sensual stimulation just as much as it is related to physiological needs (1994, 31). He suggests that it is associated with a rise in snacking and other modes of oral-ingestive activity, such as smoking (1994, 29). Serena Joy is denied her speeches, her voice, and her audience, which makes her a victim of the Republic of Gilead in a better-decorated cage than Offred. Both are robbed of their privilege to cook their own food for their own family. Lupton observes that “[c]ooking for women is […] an intensely social undertaking, performed for others” (1996, 40). Here, the Gilead separates women from a cooking activity that is social, creative and expressive, thus, forcing them into silence, passivity and isolation.

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Offred is hungry for touch as well as for any creative activity like writing and/or cooking: “I would help Rita to make the bread, sinking my hands into that soft resistant warmth which is so much like flesh. I hunger to touch something, other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch” (HT 21). Offred has lost her own kitchen, she is deprived of preparing her own food, but Serena Joy does not get to cook her own meals either. Gilead delegates this function to Marthas, which makes the Wives, like Serena, dependent on them. Cooking can be viewed as an act of power, as a potentially dangerous activity. In Eat My Words, Marion Halligan notes that the terms used in cooking are typically violent and cruel, associated with rage: “Look at this list of verbs associated with the preparation of food: pound, beat, strip, whip, boil, sear, grind, tear, crack, mince, mash, crush, stuff, chop. Images of torture occur: sauter is to make jump in the pan while applying heat, there is skinning and peeling […]” (1990, 118) Marthas are “shelling peas” (20), “thumping the pots” (30), “peeling and slicing carrots” (57). Cooking Marthas are clearly associated with some greater degree of power than Offred. Marthas can use food to express their feelings: over-cooking or under-cooking the meals can be regarded as their way of expressing disapproval. They treat Offred in a similar way to how they tend to a chicken: “she prods the chicken, flexes a wing, pokes a finger into the cavity, fishes out the giblets” (HT 58). Offred overhears them discussing who would help her with the bath: “They are talking about me as though I can’t hear. To them I’m a household chore, one among many” (HT 58). Both Gilead and its citizens, including Marthas, see Offred as an object. In The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments , citizens of Gilead, especially women and girls, are portrayed as food in ways that suggest they are being consumed by their husbands and/or commanders. In The Testaments, Agnes describes herself as a pastry: “I had a dough face, like the cookies […] with raisin eyes and pumpkin-seed teeth” (T 11). Atwood uses metaphors of cooking and eating to underline the low position of women in the hierarchy. The regime manipulates individuals into cooperation and controls them. To make Aunt Lydia collaborate, they isolate her, leave her hungry, beat her and then feed her with luxury food like fruit and salmon: “it was like a recipe for tough steak: hammer it with a mallet, then marinate and tenderize” (T 170). To feel control, even a young girl like Agnes turns to metaphors of baking: “I would make a man out of dough, and they would bake it in the oven […] I always made

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dough men, I never made dough women, because after they were baked I would eat them, and that made me feel I had a secret power over men” (T 20). It is not only young girls depicted as food items, even people with some more power, including Aunts, are presented as edibles: “She smiled. It was like an old turnip smiling: the dried-up kind our Marthas used to put in soup stock” (T 247). Images of fragmented bodies and faces underline the fact that Gilead is a failed utopia for everyone. Instead of cooking, women of Gilead are cooked. Gilead makes Offred see herself as a piece of food: “Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast” (HT 108). In fact, not only Offred but other women associate women’s bodies with edible objects like a pear or “a huge fruit” (HT 37). Aunt Lydia’s indoctrination process specifically turns women into food: “oiling themselves like roast meat” or “wrinkle you up like a dried apple” (HT 65). The images of women as edibles are recurrent in the novel. Offred feels “washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig” (HT 79). However, the associations of women with edibles have a long tradition: the feminist campaign of Offred’s mother presents “a line drawing of a woman’s body, lying on a table, blood dripping out of it” (HT 130) under the sign “DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN’S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE?” (HT 130). The poster seems to be a “pro-abortion” and/or safe abortion message. The woman’s mutilated torso on the table like a slaughtered animal evokes the imagery of sacrifice: Gilead scapegoats the Handmaids for children. Thus, a woman’s pregnant body is strongly associated with food. A pregnant Handmaid feeds the embryo and, later, produces milk for a baby. In The Testaments , Ofkyle dies for the Commander’s baby. She bleeds to death because her body and life have no priority in Gilead: “I uncovered her face. It was flat white: she must have no blood left in her” (T 103). The image of the Handmaid’s cut-open dead body is contrasted with the Birth Day party food: “sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cake, real coffee” (T 103) Agnes, disgusted by Ofkyle’s death cannot eat: “They offered me some treats, but I said I wasn’t hungry” (T 103). Agnes loses her appetite because she recognizes the policy of Gilead: they cut the Handmaid’s body open to save the child and let her bleed out. The tyrannical theocracy breaks the bodies of the Handmaids into “sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” (HT 146), to give life to the dying out state. However, it oppresses and consumes the other citizens as well. Offred remembers watching a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. She watched it as a child so she cannot remember it very well, but

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she thinks about being terrified of the ovens in which the Jews’ bodies were disposed of. She contemplates these images: “[o]vens mean cooking, and cooking comes before eating. I thought these people had been eaten. Which in a way I suppose they had been” (HT 155). The regime of Gilead cooks and consumes everybody. The pressure is getting too high and the pot of Gilead is about to explode: there is a resistance movement, symbolized by food, eating/non-eating, and hunger. Just as it is a phase of the psycho-sexual development of a child and, later, teenager, to rebel against their parents’ food choices and eating manners, “a symbolic gesture of rebellion, rejecting their parents’ habits and norms” (Lupton 1996, 127), so the oppressed citizens of Gilead find ways to resist the regime through non-eating. In The Testaments , there are several examples of women who stop eating (or eat inedible things) because they cannot and do not want to live in Gilead anymore. Agnes, for example, is contemplating suicide to avoid her wedding, she considers swallowing drain cleaner (T 229) as one of the Handmaids. Her emotional state is reflected by her eating as she “could scarcely eat” (T 230). However, the regime is prepared to force young women into marriage by giving them sedatives and brainwashing them into being obedient: “Shunamite used to say that they put happy pills into the warm milk of girls who were about to get married” (T 232). Gilead controls the emotional state of the citizens by giving them sedatives into their milk or spiking their grape juice with wine, not even that prevents suicides.

2.4

Butter and Sugar: Food and Rebellion

Apart from representing oppression and the power hierarchy, Atwood’s ambiguous portrayals of food, cooking and (force) feeding in The Handmaid’s Tale also serve to ironize and ultimately subvert the twisted ideology of the dystopian state. Additionally, food is shown to function as a means of communicating empathy and care. Calling to mind Gilead’s stipulation that Marthas do not befriend (sororitize with) the Handmaids, the reader still witnesses how, while working in the kitchen, Rita offers Offred an ice cube, after seeing her in a warm red habit on a hot day. An act of sympathy, on the one hand, the cold ice cube, on the other, is a gesture of rebellion against (not only) the strict dress code. The kitchen, for a moment, becomes a confidential space of old-fashioned alliance. There is a similar moment when Cora does Offred a favor. She saves

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Offred from a difficult situation by concealing the truth about dropping a breakfast tray with orange juice and eggs after seeing Offred lying on the floor: “[…] it would be better if we could both pretend I’d eaten my breakfast after all. If she said she’d found me lying on the floor, there would be too many questions” (HT 160). Offred sees Cora’s willingness to lie for her as a bond. This is more satisfying for Offred than eating her actual breakfast as she is hungry for human touch and human relationships. There is one more time when Offred must give up her breakfast— the morning she is summoned to a district Salvaging: the brutal hanging of rebellious women, two Handmaids and a Wife. Offred reveals her extreme hunger to show the inhumanity and sterility of Gilead. Atwood uses images of food and cannibalism to describe the ceremony: a dandelion is the colour of “egg yolk,” which makes Offred “feel hungry” (HT 286); the three tortured bodies hang there “like chickens strung up by the necks in a meatshop window” (HT 289). The degradation of human beings to edible objects reveals the obscenity of a country that voraciously consumes its own citizens. At the end of the ceremony, the Handmaids take part in the previously mentioned Particicution of a man accused of rape. His description also involves food imagery: his face looks “like an unknown vegetable, a mangled bulb or tuber” (HT 290). In Particicution, the Handmaids are allowed to do anything, even to tear the body of the man: “there is a bloodlust, I want to tear, gouge, rend” (HT 291). This horrible cannibalistic ritual leaves the Handmaid Janine with “a smear of blood across her cheek” and “a clump of blond hair” in her hand (HT 292). Offred feels very hungry: “Death makes me hungry. Maybe it’s because I’ve been emptied; or maybe it’s the body’s way of seeing to it that I remain alive […] I could eat a horse” (HT 293). Sasame points out that Offred’s literal as well as symbolic hunger “reminds us of the simple fact that we eat in order to stay alive” (2010, 100). Most of the time, Offred is not hungry for food, but she hungers fiercely for words, reading and communication. Since reading and writing are forbidden for Handmaids, the merest glimpse of words and letters can make Offred hungry, as in the famous Scrabble scene, the focus of much critical attention.2 In the Commander’s 2 For further discussion of the symbolism of Scrabble game, see Coral Ann Howells’s Margaret Atwood; Emma Parker’s “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood;” Kiyomi Sasame’s “Food for Survival in Margaret Atwood’s

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study, Offred indulges herself in reading illegal magazines and playing a word game: “I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it were eating it would be gluttony of the famished, if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere” (HT 194). The oppressed Offred is hungry for communication and human touch, but the Commander seems to be starving for human company too. As Sherrill Grace argues: “Scrabble becomes a vivid image of what is necessary to human beings and what is repressed, withheld (it cannot be absolutely destroyed) in Gilead” (1994, 197). Even the Commander rebels against the strict rules of Gilead and feeds Offred with Scrabble letters, the words and sentences in his old magazines as well as human communication. When Offred plays Scrabble with the Commander, the forbidden fruit of reading, language, and letters is translated into seeing the Scrabble counters as “candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. […] I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious” (HT 149). Howells sees Offred’s hunger for the Scrabble letters as subversive: “[Offred’s] image of the Scrabble counters as candies, which she would like to put into her mouth, makes beautifully literal equivalent for Cixous’s metaphor for women’s seizing language to make it hers, continent it, taking it into her mouth” (Howells 1996, 104). Talking like eating is an oral activity, but it is satisfying only when it is based on mutual trust, which is why there is almost no real, satiating communication in Gilead. Offred’s and the Commander’s hunger for communication as well as for human touch is grotesquely described by the Handmaid’s exaggeration of their encounters: “Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words” (HT 191). To eat the words is a metaphor for secret communication, secret language of desire that is controlled and repressed by the state. The phrase “eating your words” also means taking back something that you proclaimed and that was not right. Here, it can have several possible meanings: Offred’s fantasy of making the Commander take back the oppressive laws and ideology of Gilead. Offred is hungry to talk, to gossip with Cora and Rita, or with her shopping partner Ofglen. She has the opportunity/duty to walk and shop with her every day, but their communication is very shallow and Dystopian Worlds”; Sarah Sceats’s Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction.

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full of state-approved phrases and clichés: “‘Blessed be the fruit,’ she says to me, the accepted greeting among us. ‘May the Lord open,’ I answer, the accepted response” (HT 29). Only after months, when they start discussing the secret Mayday resistance movement, do they find that they can trust each other. Food and non-eating can be seen as a symbol of resistance. One of the Wives complains about her Handmaid refusing to eat, to take a bath or to participate at the Ceremony: “she doesn’t eat her dinner properly; and as for the other thing, not a nibble, and we’ve been so regular” (HT 125). There are signs of (weak) resistance on Offred’s part: the Handmaids, for example, do not eat butter but they hide it and use it as face cream: “The butter is a trick I learned at the Rachel and Leah Centre. The Red Centre, we called it, because there was so much red. My predecessor in this room, my friend with the freckles and the good laugh, must have done this too, this buttering. We all do it” (HT 107). Using butter to stand in for the cosmetics that are denied to the Handmaids is a way to take their bodies and femininity back. Through using butter as cosmetics, they articulate their desire for freedom, privacy and touch: “as long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will someday get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones” (HT 107). By this, Handmaids can relate to each other, bond together, although any kind of relation is dangerous. What is brought to the fore in The Testaments is the variety of ways women look out for and protect each other, forming strong alliances. Taking Aunt Lydia as an example, in the second Gilead novel, it becomes evident that she is, in fact, a double agent. An irreproachable regime supporter on the surface, she smuggles out the evidence of Gilead’s perversion and human rights abuse, which is a powerful act of protest against the regime and proves Aunt Lydia’s firm solidarity with women. Furthermore, she protects girls from the paedophilic and murderous Bluebeardian figure of Commander Judd, who would marry and then poison his brides, one after another. To prevent the same terrible fate from befalling his child wife at the time, Aunt Lydia arranges a retreat to the Calm and Balm Clinic for her. Admittedly, medical treatment for women in Gilead is heavily controlled and available only with their husbands’ permission. In The Testaments , women find at least some crumbs of comfort in sugar and each other’s company. Zilla consoles Agnes with a sweet biscuit when she learns about her Handmaid mother. “Emotions and tastes are

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connected. A sweet taste helps Agnes to stomach her bitter feelings of disgust” (Labudova 2020, 107). Discussing dissident women bonding, Kiyomi Sasame enlists sugar as a subversive food item: “Ordinary food like sugar has become not only a symbol as resistance but also a means of communication” (2010, 96). When Offred’s rebellious friend Moira is tortured severely after trying to escape from the Handmaid’s so-called training centre, the other inmates steal packets of sugar for her to comfort her and show empathy: “[p]robably she didn’t need the sugar but it was the only thing we could find to steal. To give” (HT 102). In Gilead, Handmaids are not allowed to eat too much sugar, hence, the packets of sugar can be seen as something rare and precious. Moreover, historically, sugar was believed to be “a soothing substance, with the properties of soothing hoarseness, chest pains and stomach disorders” (Lupton 1996, 30). Even if the Handmaids do not think that sugar would heal Moira’s tortured body, they send it to her to comfort her. And although the Handmaids are cut off from sugar, fried food, junk food, and alcohol, they still remember the pleasure and freedom of being able to choose what they want to eat, buy and cook. In Gilead, the state controls shopping by the distribution of tokens and the division of responsibility between multiple women. Private firms appear to have been replaced by pictogram-identified brands with religious associations: Milk and Honey, All Flesh, Loaves and Fishes, the biblical phrases enforce the theological ideology via food and memory (as the Handmaids are not allowed to read). The regime controls not only the Handmaid’s space by restricting her to her room (where she eats alone), to the kitchen (where she gets the tokens to go shopping) and grocery shops, but it tries to control her memories and emotions as well. However, all these restrictions only intensify Offred’s nostalgia. The sign language of the Loaves and Fishes shop, in which they put a picture in the window when they (rarely) have something, evokes Offred’s memories of the variety of fish available in the past: “Sole, I remember, and haddock, swordfish, scallops, tuna, lobsters, stuffed and baked salmon, pink and fat, grilled in steaks” (HT 173). The variety of the fish Offred remembers seems to stand, as Sceats observes, “for the diversity of ideas, beliefs and discussion, now suppressed” (2003, 111). In contrast with her present life as a Handmaid, Offred reminiscences about her past freedom to choose her own food, including junk food. She could indulge herself and her daughter with ice cream of various colours, which gives her memories of family and love life a pastel filter. Like Offred, Daisy also associates freedom with

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junk food in The Testaments: “We ate in fast-food places […] I used to think it was slightly glamorous, probably because Melanie disapproved of it” (T 264). It is symptomatic that Daisy (and Offred) long for anything that Gilead disapproves of or cannot provide. Offred never stops feeling pangs for her former life as a free woman. She remembers the smell of nail polish and it “has made [her] hungry” (HT 39). This is the first time Offred tells her readers that she is hungry. Offred’s hunger for nail polish stands in for her hunger for her identity, her femininity, her family and love, as Gilead despises the sort of romantic love she describes to the Commander in the following terms: “What kind of love? Falling in love” (HT 232). Gilead controls the most intimate parts of human life; it dictates when sexual intercourse will take place and arranges marriages; it even forces nuns to “renounce their celibacy, sacrifice it to the common good” (HT 232). While food generally appears in images of power, satisfaction and freedom, Offred also surprises the reader with images of food gone bad to highlight her disgust at arranged marriages and Gilead-controlled marital sex: So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish. (HT 234)

Significantly, food images clearly evoke Gilead’s perversion and repulsiveness. Offred yearns for genuine human touch and sex. Her hunger for freedom, touch and communication is embodied in her sexual relationship with Nick. Even before the Commander’s Wife enables her sexual intercourse with Nick to conceive a child for her household, Offred finds Nick erotically attractive and associates him with food: “I want to reach up, taste his skin, he makes me hungry […] It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy” (HT 109). Offred forgets about the resistance movement, she believes she is pregnant with Nick’s baby. Satisfaction of her hunger for love makes her passive. The ending of the novel is ambiguous: Offred might be saved by Nick or betrayed by him and/or Serena Joy: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (HT 307). Since the readers learn about Offred’s witness story from the Epilogue, in which Professor Pieixoto explains the history of Gilead based on the reconstructions of Offred’s recorded voice, we assume that she was indeed saved and had a chance

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to record her Gilead experience. The hunger of readers for a story is thus satisfied. However, as Professor Pieixoto controls and manipulates the Handmaid’s narrative in a similar way to Gilead, it still leaves a bad taste in our mouth. We learn more about Gilead, Offred and her baby in The Testaments where Offred is united with her daughters. The Gilead novels adopt images of cooking and eating to illustrate the fundamental loss of human rights and agency in dystopia that reduces women only to their reproductive function. Images of disgusting food and cooking parallel the bleak and monotonous existence in a totalitarian state. The omnipresent hunger is translated into isolation of Gileadeans who cannot stomach their life in Gilead: “I chew and swallow, chew and swallow, feeling the sweat come out. In my stomach, the food balls itself together, a handful of damp cardboard, squeezed” (HT 76). Disgusting food and uneasiness, food rationing, delivery problems and food shortages, this is Gilead. Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, in its unapologetic dystopia, refers to The Handmaid’s Tale in several ways. As in Atwood’s novel, there are women imprisoned because of their sexual scandals with powerful men. The lack of food, the repetitive menus consisting of pasta, cereals, tinned food and powdered milk parallels prison-like menus in dystopias. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, women cannot even trust other women, deformed by sexist ideology, some are infantilized and some too obedient, all of them hungry: “she had found only enough dried stuff to last for around nine weeks. And the cans were all gone. She rummaged through the packets and boxes: powdered milk, muesli bars, potato powder, freeze-dried peas. Powdered macaroni cheese” (2015, 146). In The Testaments and other dystopias, needed deliveries of food fail to arrive on schedule and what remains, however nauseating and malnourishing, must be strictly rationed. Images of nauseating and dissatisfying food predominate in The Handmaid’s Tale and in The Testaments. They embody, both literally and metaphorically, the Gileadeans’ craving for freedom and their deep disgust with the repressive state. Atwood purposefully links certain foods with women (eggs, chicken, white meat, cookies) to demonstrate the corrupted power and gender hierarchy, as well as the objectifying sexual politics, of the state. Her dystopian testimonies do not, however, merely reproduce witness narratives to show totalitarian state in a more convincing way; the polyvocality, genre-hybridity and multi-perspectivity of the novel aim to accentuate the manner of Atwood’s writing. The form

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of testimonies is heterogenous, hence, does not allow one to simply view the text as a mimetic soliloquy representing the (fictional) reality of totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, it subverts everything authoritative and imposed, whether it be the Gileadean religious ideology and gender role rigidity or the prescriptive and restrictive diet. The voices in testimonies speak beyond the boundaries of dystopia.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 1987. The Canlit Foodbook. From Pen to Palate: A Collection of Tasty Literary Fare. Toronto: Totem Books. Atwood, Margaret. 2015. The Heart Goes Last. New York: Penguin Random House. Belasco, Warren. 2008. Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford, New York: Berg. Christou, Maria. 2017. Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in TwentiethCentury Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Grace, Sherill. 1994. “Gender as Genre: Atwood’s Autobiographical ‘I’.” In Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, edited by Colin Nicholson, 189–203. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Halligan, Marion. 1990. Eat My Words. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Howells, Coral Ann. 1996. Margaret Atwood. Houndsmills: Macmillan Press. Labudova, Katarina. 2020. “Testimonies in The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Images of Food in Gilead.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 17 (1): 97–110. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.17.1.97-110. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self . London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Mohr, Dunja. 2005. Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Jefferson: McFarland. Parker, Emma. 1995. “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Twentieth Century Literature 41 (3): 349–368. https://doi.org/10.2307/441857. Rainwater, Catherine. 1987. “The Sense of the Flesh in Four Novels by Margaret Atwood.” In Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality, edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle, 14–27. Edinburg: Pan American University. Sasame, Kiyomi. 2010. “Food for Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Worlds.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 21: 89–109. Sceats, Sarah. 2003. Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stein, Karen. 1996. “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 148: 57–72. Tomc, Sandra. 1993. “‘The Missionary Position.’ Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 73–87.

CHAPTER 3

Canned Food and Canned Death: Oryx and Crake

Abstract Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake hyperbolizes contemporary problems with food. The chapter discusses how food plays a relevant part in speculative fiction, a genre imagining alternatives to our present realities. Food is a fruitful target for the genre’s technique of criticizing the status quo by extrapolating from current trends. In Oryx and Crake, artificial food becomes very closely associated with lack of life, decay and death. Atwood uses the metaphor of food not only to illustrate the pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic struggles to survive, but in its all-ambiguous connotations she associates food with memory, sexual appetite, pleasure, pain and death. Keywords Margaret Atwood · Oryx and Crake · Pseudo-food · Ersatz food · Cyborg · Post-apocalyptic novel

‘My unit’s called Paradice,’ said Crake, over the soy-banana flambé. ‘What we’re working on is immortality.’ (OC 292) Every day they were eating them up. They were killing them and killing them, and eating them and eating them. They ate them even when they weren’t hungry. (OC 103)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_3

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Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood’s dystopian nightmare of a consumerist world run by corporations culminates in a cataclysmic event (a lethal bioengineered viral pandemic) that exterminates all but a few of the human species. The novel’s protagonist, Snowman, finds himself in an alien world, defending the tiny community of a genetically engineered post-human species, the Crakers. While Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic life is awash with pseudo-food products1 (notably laboratory-grown meat, soybased substitutes and human protein), in the post-apocalyptic world he is starving because of his dependency on the technologies and infrastructure of industrial food production. Oryx and Crake envisages the costs of the unlimited expansion of multinational corporations. In The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future, Patricia Stapleton suggests we should “look at multinational corporations in the agriculture and food production industry” and we find that “about ten major companies control the global food supply” (2016, 28). Atwood’s novel hyperbolizes these contemporary problems with food. Food plays a relevant part in speculative fiction, a genre imagining alternatives to our present realities. Food is a fruitful target for the genre’s technique of criticizing the status quo by extrapolating from current trends. In “What Do Cyborgs Eat? Oral Logic in an Information Society,” Margaret Morse discusses the failing food system: “one of the fundaments of human intelligence, not to mention social justice, is having enough food to eat of sufficient quantity and quality” (1994, 99). Although the citizens of the Compounds and the Pleeblands can fill their stomachs with an abundance of technologically produced food, they are, whether they know it or not, starving for fresh and genuine food. The lack of food in Oryx and Crake is most keenly experienced by Snowman, the last man on Earth, who suffers frequent pangs for both food and human company.

1 Margaret Morse refers to such pseudo-food as “frankenfood” (100). In “What Do Cyborgs Eat?”, she suggests that “technological advances have produced ‘fresh’ food that virtually can’t decay, via irradiation and genetic engineering” (1994, 100). Similarly, the system in Oryx and Crake deals with the lack of food by producing genetically and technologically manipulated pseudo-food.

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3.1 Frankenfood, Ersatz Food, Pseudo-Food: Food and Technology Snowman thinks he is the sole survivor of a global plague seeded by his childhood friend, Crake. Snowman spends his days searching for food and taking care of the peaceful and vegetarian Crakers, a “nearly human, transgenic species” (Rockoff 2015, 234) named after their designer, Crake. When Crake designs cyborgs to be the perfect humanoid species, he clearly transgresses the limits of (our understanding of) conventional humanity: the Children of Crake or Crakers are “customize[d]” (OC 305) from modified human embryos spliced with the genes of a variety of other living beings with the aim of creating “some kind of perfectly beautiful human gene splice that could live forever” (YF 395). Paradoxically, the new bioengineered creature’s humanoid look is preserved by using animal elements and food associations which guarantee a more innocent and primitive look, while the genomes of peculiar creatures such as jellyfish and citrus fruit provide for the artificially added, superhuman extras including UV-resistant skin, a delicate citrus fragrance, and “a built-in insect repellent” (OC 304). To avoid racism, Crakers’ skin colours are versatile (and delicious): “chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey” (OC 8). By giving their skin colours edible names, Crake seems to relish his (almost cannibalistic) power over them. They are programmed to “drop dead at age thirty” (OC 303) as a blunt way to avoid problems with overpopulation. The Craker’s scientifically enhanced (super)humanoid bodies match Haraway’s description of the cyborg body, in so far as it “is not innocent; it was not born in a garden” [of Paradise, although Crake’s laboratory is called Paradice] it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonist dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted” (1991, 180). Humankind’s technological reinvention by Crake serves idealistic goals: his perfectly crafted, genetically modified creatures are playful and peaceful herbivores, whose ancient primate brain has been removed to eliminate the aggressive-destructive features characteristic of humans. In “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake,” Ingersoll sums up that “because farming and even hunting can lead to complications and destructive potential of civilization, the Crakers graze on grass, leaves, and the shoots of plants” (2004, 167). However, Atwood’s use of sarcasm throughout the description of this idealistic vision made flesh suggests that the utopia is foredoomed to become

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a dystopia. To deal with the potential scarcity of food, Crakers recycle their own faeces several times a week, which produces both disgust and laughter in the same way as Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque body is “not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished outgrows itself, always transgresses its own limits” (1984, 26). The stress is on copulation, eating, drinking or defecation. Thus, the Crakers diet of leaves and their own excrements is certainly a practical but humorous element and signals a shift from dystopia to farce. Atwood uses humour to portray the Crakers’ bodies waving their blue penises “that not one is likely to ponder the engineering-in of cooperation in the courting ritual, thus, ensuring the elimination of paternity, since none of the three males can know who actually impregnated the female” (Ingersoll 2004, 168). In Oryx and Crake, humankind has metaphorically devoured and cannibalized the whole existing world. Snowman teaches the Crakers that people were killing other people all the time. And they were eating up all the Children of Oryx, against the wishes of Oryx and Crake. Every day they were eating them up. […] They ate them even when they weren’t hungry. (OC 119)

The highly institutionalized corporate world is consumed by its own greed. Oryx and Crake has been read as a ‘Last Man narrative’,2 through which we witness the extinction of humanity (Howells 2006, 162) and the hopeless survival of the narrator dying not only from the lack of food but also the lack of human company: the two people closest to him, Oryx and Crake, named after extinct animals, are dead and so, as it seems, is the rest of the human race. Snowman gives himself the nickname of a legendary creature for which only equivocal evidence exists to reflect his precarious position on the brink of extinction. Snowman is hungry and dying: his foot is injured and badly infected and his search for food and antibiotics is failing. The post-apocalyptic landscape is a devastated

2 Atwood incorporates the Last Man narratives, the discourses of the apocalypse and “places them in the what-if scenario of the moment” (Cooke 2006, 122). Other critics read the novel as “a cautionary tale about the dangers of quantitative science and technology superseding” (Dunning 2005, 89).

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wasteland, littered with the empty cans, containers and bottles of the preapocalyptic society that has now disappeared. Snowman is rummaging through the waste looking for whatever is edible. In his search for food, he searches also for his past and the story of his childhood. Growing up in the pre-apocalyptic Compounds (the highly controlled, walled and gated communities of the techno-elite and scientists), he gets used to eating pseudo-food products based on soy and artificial additives: soy-sausage dogs, SoyOBoyburgers, SoYummie Ice Cream, ChickieNobs Nubbins, joltbars, soyfries, soytoast and SoyOBoy sardines. According to Kiyomi Sasame, the society of Oryx and Crake needs “to produce artificial foods in order to survive” (2010, 102). Despite the endless stream of pseudo-food and pseudo-entertainment, many inhabitants of the Compounds remain unhappy and dissatisfied. Snowman desperately needs human company to enjoy the little food he has, moreover, the food he finds gives him very little pleasure or satisfaction. As Deborah Lupton (1996) suggests [t]he recognition of food and eating practices as symbolic commodities is also integral to understanding individuals’ search for diversity. Because humans eat not simply to satisfy hunger but for a range of cultural reasons, including the sensual pleasures and the status-oriented and emotional meanings of food, they seek new sensations and experiences when eating. (126)

Since the sensual quality of technological food and eating is very dubious, Snowman frequently criticizes food, not only in terms of the distinction between the real and artificial, but also its taste and pleasurability. Snowman treasures a childhood memory of eating “a genuine cake” given to him by a housekeeper, whom he misses a lot: “He clutches on to the reality of those cakes; he closes his eyes, conjures them up, hovering all in a row, their candles alight, giving off their sweet, comforting scent of vanilla, like Dolores herself” (OC 50). Not only is Dolores the only character who can cook, she is also the one who remembers his birthdays. Snowman’s preference for real food versus artificial foods shows his dissatisfaction and hunger that cannot be satisfied with artificial and fake products. To this, however, Crake answers “It’s food” (OC 201). This echoes the moment when Snowman’s mother complains that experimenting on pigs’ brains is immoral and “sacrilegious” (OC 57), to which Snowman’s dad responds like Crake, “It’s just proteins, you know

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that!” (OC 57). The Utilitarian calculus of Snowman’s society takes account of only the most basic needs, dismissing spiritual or moral and emotional needs such as fairness or integrity or pleasure. After civilization collapses, Snowman still relies on remains of “technological infrastructure and institutionalized food production” (Zwart 2015, 269). He cannot provide for himself as he cannot hunt or grow his own vegetables. So far is he from the image of man the hunter that he risks becoming the prey of genetically modified animals such as pigoons and wolvogs. As Dunja Mohr observes, “In the post-apocalyptic world, the roles of human hunter and animal prey become interchangeable, as liobams, bobkittens, and the pigoons are serious predators” (2017, 56). Snowman is too weak to hunt and unable to identify edible plants so he is forced to rely on eating Pseudo-food remains: Snowman finds himself humming as he goes through the kitchen cupboards. Chocolate in squares, real chocolate. A jar of instant coffee, ditto coffee whitener, ditto sugar. Shrimp paste for spreading on crackers, ersatz but edible. Cheese food in a tube, ditto mayo. Noodle soup with vegetables, chicken flavour. Crackers in a plastic snap-top. A stash of Joltbars. What a bonanza. (OC 272)

Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic past is not so very different from our contemporary fascination with food additives and substitutes.3 In Food, the Body and the Self , Lupton observes that “[d]evelopments in technology that produce fresh food that does not easily decay, such as irradiation and genetic engineering, have blurred the boundaries between authenticity and artificiality, between fast or convenience food and natural food” (1996, 99). In Oryx and Crake, real food is presented as a luxury. The tiny elite at the prestigious college Crake attends eat much better food than Snowman at his third-rate academy: “The food in Crake’s faculty dining hall was fantastic – real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha Graham […] the desserts were heavy on the chocolate, real chocolate” (OC 208). Obviously, the power hierarchy is reflected in the quality of food. Generally speaking, attitudes to food reflect attitudes to life and sustainability. Nutrition is vital to the survival of the human race, 3 Very recently, the references to lab-grown meat and cultured meat: see G. Owen Schaefer’s “Lab-grown Meat: Beef for Dinner without Killing Animals or the Environment.” Scientific American, 14 September 2018. https://www.scientificamerican.com/art icle/lab-grown-meat/.

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but in Oryx and Crake, the real, fresh, satisfying, nutritious and delicious food becomes increasingly rare and images of food are replaced by empty bottles, empty cans and containers which indicates a move towards the post-apocalyptic genre. The gradual replacement of nutritious natural food by lab-grown animal proteins, flavours and chemical innovations prefigures the death and extinction of the human race. He hopes he’ll find some canned food there, soy stew or beans and faked wieners, anything with protein in it – even some vegetables would be nice, ersatz or not, he’ll take anything – there’s a handful of dry cereal, so he eats that; it’s unadulterated junk-gene cardboard and he has to chew it. (OC 272)

Another perspective on sustainability is that Crake builds recycling directly into his utopian Crakers by enabling them to consume their own waste. In Eating Otherwise, Christou suggests that “they do not use up the earth’s resources and are thus able to live in a way that prolongs life on earth” (2017, 137). The Crakers are designed to be able to do it, however, people of Atwood’s dystopia were literally eating waste (research by-products) before the pandemic. The depletion of nutritional value in food mirrors the decay of human relationships, family dynamics, parenting and sexuality of pre-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake that becomes marginalized and increasingly artificial. In The Consuming Body, Pasi Falk comments on these developments in modern society: First, the modern condition does not only imply a collapse of an eatingcommunity as a structuring principle of social life but it also manifests a tendency towards a marginalization of the meal, even when conceived of as a less collective social event. Second, the decline of the meal is accompanied by the rise of different forms of non-ritual eating (snacks) and other modes of concrete oral-ingestive activity which concerns substances that are not considered to be food. (1994, 29)

In Oryx and Crake, the disruption of family and community is represented by artificial food products that are not shared by families but snacked on in solitude and mindlessly.

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Information science, biotechnology and genetic engineering obsessively permeate all aspects of life, both in the Compounds and the Pleeblands: Snowman and Crake watch live “snuff porn,” fake hills surround houses which are imitations of Georgian or Renaissance style, sex is reduced to sex scandals and virtual experiences and children are genetically designed: “[…] if the kids from those [agencies] didn’t measure up they’d recycle them for the parts, until at last they got something that fit all their specs – perfect in every way, not only a math whiz but beautiful as the dawn” (OC 250). Although some inhabitants, including Snowman’s mother, find these developments fake, sacrilegious and artificial, many accept them. Even human behaviour becomes increasingly fake: Snowman thinks that his father behaves as if auditioning for the role of Dad (OC 52) and although Snowman himself is “faking himself” (OC 52), he realizes only later that his childhood friend, Glenn/Crake “was never any real Glenn, Glenn was only a disguise” (OC 70–1). The images of artificial and empty food stand out as metaphors for a natural world that has been destroyed and lives that have been hollowed out. This suggestion is supported by many associations of food and death. Snowman’s earliest memory, from the age of only five or six, is of a bonfire, a pile of infected livestock “[…] and a smell of charred flesh […] like the barbecue in the backyard […] but a lot stronger and mixed in with it was a gas-station smell” (OC 15– 16). It is only the beginning of the disappearance of traditional meat due to bioterrorism and rampant consumerism. The memory of a barbecue smell is not only a memory involving nostalgia for real meat but also a reminder of a vanishing world and life. There is a strong association between the emotional aspect of food and memory. As food belongs to the material reality, it can organize our relationship with the world and others. Food can trigger memories of previous food, shared meals and experiences around eating rituals. In Food, the Body and the Self , Lupton argues that “the power of the food/memory/emotion link is such that fragrances have been especially created to encapsulate our emotional response to food tastes and smells” (1996, 33). Thus, Snowman’s memories of food stir up even stronger emotions attached to things already past, dead and gone. His nostalgia for real food, which has become very rare, is reflected in his clinging to certain words: “He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them” (OC 195). It is not only that words are vanishing,

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it is the end of the human world and human activities that had a decisive impact on the landscape, climate and the environment. Snowman’s language is the language of a world that does not exist anymore. When he is trying to explain the world to the Children of Crake, he constantly fights with words that refer to things (usually food items) that are gone: Toast is when you take a piece of bread – What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour – What is flour? We’ll skip that part, it’s too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it […] While the slice is in the toaster, you get out a butter – butter is a yellow grease, made from the mammary glands of – skip the butter. (OC 98)

The words no longer have any referent or anchor in reality. They are only in Snowman’s memory and his stories. As Grayson Cooke points out, “Snowman’s language, […], is a storehouse, a mnemo-technic and archive, but what it preserves no longer exists” (2006, 79). Without Snowman’s memory and his language, the world as we know, cannot last any longer, it dies with him.

3.2

Eating Death: Food and Disgust

The link between vanishing food and vanishing life and death is emphasized when Glenn/Crake’s Uncle Pete dies of a virus, which was, according to Glenn/Crake “like watching pink sorbet on a barbecue – instant meltdown” (OC 253). Similarly, microbes in Snowman’s infected wound turn “his flesh to porridge” (OC 358), hot sun would turn his brain into “melted cheese” (OC 283). In Oryx and Crake, the food becomes very closely associated with lack of life, decay and death. When Snowman, as a university student, visits Glen/Crake’s Institute, they go to look at lab-produced chicken meat: “[t]he thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber. […] they’d removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth” (OC 202–3). This “thing” is a chicken, alive but reduced to its edible parts. The removal of eyes, beak, and brain functions reduces the living chicken to a protein tuber which can be seen as a hyperbolization of contemporary market strategies: all the features of the living animal are minimized to protect the separation of humans and their (once-alive) food sources.

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Sanitizing the meat of blood, skin and feathers, packing it antiseptically in more and more plastic containers and foil codifies food as sterile waste and death. Thus, the brainless, sightless and helpless ChickieNob can stand for a human being who is as good as dead, separated from the natural environment and dependent on artificial nutrients. Another example of a link between food and waste is when Snowman has a revulsion towards eating at the bistro in the OrganInc Farms Compound because of the jokes about research waste used as food: “‘Pigoon pancakes, pigoon popocorn. Come on Snowman, eat up!’” (OC 24) Snowman associates failed research, waste and death with food and he is faced with a dilemma: to eat it or not to eat it? The biotechnological production of food, especially meat, claims to provide cheap food for the growing population. Although Snowman is disgusted by the idea of eating lab-grown ChickieNobs, he satirically thinks that it might be similar to “the tit implants – the good ones – maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference” (OC 203). Here again, the impossibility to distinguish between authentic live tissue and fake replacement underlines a link between food and dead matter distancing food and life. In Food: The Key Concepts, Belasco suggests that [f]ollowing spices, sugar, and flour, animals may have been among the earliest components of the modern diet to be ‘distanced’ from consumers, as their tending, slaughter, and processing were rendered invisible by railroads and steamships, acute division of labor, refrigeration, power saws, nitrates, and cellophane. (2008, 96)

Indeed, the technological processing of food in Atwood’s book is more advanced, however, it is only a development of the trend that has been here for a long time: the modern technologies oversee death, sanitize it and make it invisible. Such closing of the gap between life and death in food is one of the primary concerns in Oryx and Crake. Atwood caricatures the growth of lab-produced cultured meat and uncontrollable growth of human population and consumerism. This constant demand for growth is, however, unsustainable and tends towards complete destruction. In the novel, substitutes for real meat and food prevent mass starvation but are understood as less prestigious: eating real meat, especially the meat of endangered animals becomes a badge of (privileged) identity. This urge is “embedded in an anthropocentric framework, in which meat consumption is an important indicator of prosperity,

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human dominance and being on top of the food chain” (Rockoff 2015, 227). In Oryx and Crake, eating endangered species is a sign of status and power. Like ChickieNobs, Happicuppa, the novel’s ubiquitous brand of coffee, embodies the consumerist imperative. Happicuppa coffee has been genetically modified to increase production (and profit). The novel suggests that before this technological manipulation, the individual coffee beans “ripened at different times and had needed to be handpicked and processed and shipped in small quantities” (OC 179), however, the Happicuppa brand has modified the coffee plant so that: “all of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines” (OC 179). In Food: The Key Concepts, Belasco discusses these processes and observes that such mechanization and automation of the jobs of farmers results in downscaling “lives, disrupted families, destroyed communities, and dangerous political unrest” (2008, 113). In Oryx and Crake, it is obvious that the intense race to keep food cheap leaves a trail of environmental destruction. Technological and mechanical manipulation has a huge impact on the environment as the corporations chop down forests to plant Happicuppa. In “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained,” Danette DiMarco points out that “in modernity productivity becomes more than the mere output of objects or tools derived from natural resources to ease the toil involved in life. The instrumentalism once integral to producing good citizens and committed to the ideals of technological innovation evolved into a form of production that eschewed outward-looking objectives (like community building through government, for example)” (2011, 174). Clearly, in Oryx and Crake, technology is used for making profit regardless of the high cost to the environment, community and solidarity. The small growers are thrown out of business and end up starving. Typically for Oryx and Crake, this coffee is again linked with destruction and death: “Don’t Drink Death!” (OC 180) say the posters of the Happicuppa resistance movement.

3.3

Pharmakon: Food and Poison

Another unexpected area where Oryx and Crake links food and death is when it is supposed to provide healing. Since the earliest times, people have drunk herbal teas and eaten specific roots and leaves to treat their illnesses. Medicinal products, drops and pills used to be based on

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plants and natural ingredients. As in other aspects of Atwood’s dystopian world, the link between natural pharmacy and healing is much weaker. The pharmaceutical industry reduces healing components to chemical constituents, of which a major part is mere placebo, or, even worse, a harmful substance causing diseases so the inhabitants of Pleeblands would be forced to buy more and more of the pharmaceutical products. Grayson Cooke comments on this: “The Compounds need the Pleeblands, and science needs the market” (2006, 112). If the research conducted in the Compounds found a product to cure most of the diseases, they would lose the market as all the citizens would be healthy, which would not be profitable. Atwood mentions the games of the pharmaceutical system several times in her trilogy: “they were seeding folks with illnesses via those souped-up supplement pills of theirs – using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses. Nifty scam, charging top dollar for stuff they caused themselves” (YF 244). The culmination of this metaphor is Crake’s BlyssPlus Pill, advertised as protecting humans from all sexually transmitted diseases, providing unlimited libido, prolonging youth and solving the problem of contraception. However, The Pill seeds a deadly virus that kills almost all humans except Snowman. Paradoxically, Snowman, Crake’s best friend and is invited to promote The BlyssPluss Pill: The BlyssPluss Pill would sell itself, it didn’t need help from him. But the official launch was looming closer, so he had his staff turn out some visuals, a few catchy slogans: Throw Away Your Condoms! BlyssPluss, for the Total Body Experience! Don’t Live a Little, Live a Lot!” (OC 312)

Snowman’s slogans sell the lethal pill. The BlyssPluss Pill, taken orally like food, brings death, not life. Grayson Cooke discusses the concept of Pharmakon in Oryx and Crake (2006, 112). Crake and his seminal BlyssPluss Pill encapsulate the duality of the pharmakon. The pharmakon, Plato’s term frequently used in Phaedrus, and which is discussed in Derrida’s Dissemination, might imply medicine, drug, remedy, recipe, and, most significantly, both poison and cure: “There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial […] It partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable” (Derrida 2000, 99). Pharmakon, ambiguously, means either/or and both. As Grayson Cooke suggests, “we could characterize the pharmakon as something like a ‘necessary evil’” (2006,

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112). The BlyssPluss Pill is the poison that kills almost everybody on the Earth but, paradoxically, it simultaneously cures the planet of famine, wars, racism and greed. The pre-apocalyptic world of Atwood’s trilogy is ill: “more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries” (OC 254). When Snowman later feeds the Crakers his mythologized version of this pre-apocalyptic world, he uses the metaphors of food, eating, and greed to characterize this chaotic world: The people in the chaos were full of chaos themselves, and the chaos made them do bad things. They were killing other people all the time. And they were eating up all the Children of Oryx [animals], against the wishes of Oryx and Crake. (OC 103)

Atwood criticizes the gluttonous appetites of the pre-apocalyptic world by linking consumption of meat and sexual objectification. In line with her previous writing, she connects sexual violence and the predatory behaviour of meat eating.4 Atwood “instructs readers about the baneful social and economic effect of global climate change on the poor of the world” (Bouson 2004, 147). Using the association of food and sex, she emphasizes the effects of boundless consumerism.

3.4

Enter Oryx: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism

Atwood sees Western greed as cannibalism, both literal (eating SecretBurgers in The Year of the Flood) and metaphorical (Oryx as an edible woman). Oryx’s mother sells her to improve her family’s financial situation and she ends up in porn movies. Oryx notices that the white cameraman of a child pornography ring smelled of meat: “He had hair like frayed rope and smelled too strong, because he was a meat-eater. He 4 In The Robber Bride, the characters linked with malignant and abusive sexual violence eat a lot of meat: Zenia who enjoys rare steaks. Uncle Vern who raped Charis as a child “smells of stale sweat and rancid meat” (RB 258). Charis associates Uncle Vern with meat. Zenia cunningly notices that the meat associations make Charis uneasy and plays on it by depicting her dying mother as a pile of rotting meat. More on cannibalism in The Robber Bride, see Labudova (2017) “Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65 (4): 413–427.

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ate so much meat!” (OC 140). She enters the life of Snowman and Crake through the internet channel where they used to consume “delicious midgets” (OC 90) in porn shows. Atwood’s use of a food association is no accident. She draws a line joining the (sexual) exploitation of children and women, the exploitation of nature and the typically Western “gluttonous carnal appetite” (Parry 2009, 254). Oryx first appears as a little girl, licking whipped cream from a giant male body with her “kittenish tongue” (OC 271). Later, Crake employs her to teach the Crakers what to eat and what not to eat. Oryx is persistently associated with food and sex: “licking her hands” (OC 126) and smelling of citrus. Although she never protests Snowman’s meat preferences, she prefers mushrooms and the artichoke hearts (OC 117, 118). She even takes her codename Oryx from an extinct herbivore. Oryx remains an ambiguous figure as we never find out who she really is, if she is the little girl from the internet. In Oryx and Crake, desires for food, whether in the pre-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic time, can never be fully satisfied. Sexual desire/abuse is presented as a form of uncontrollable consumerism and metaphorical cannibalism. Not only Oryx but women and children, in general, are treated as commodities for instant consumption and incorporation. Cannibalism is a complicated symptom of a profound crisis, occurring typically at the point of starvation. The pre-apocalyptic society of Oryx and Crake is metaphorically and literally starving. It has exhausted not only the natural food sources but also human relationships and human solidarity. In Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference, Deborah Root argues that “[…] the cannibal is able to live and grow where there is a void – which is to say, an absence of a particular element (or cluster of elements) that is necessary to the cohesion and balance of the whole” (2018, 16). In Oryx and Crake, the use of cannibalism is ambiguous: it is a metaphor representing not only the power struggles between classes and genders but also an economic solution to solve a biological need for survival. In From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, Maggie Kilgour points out, the notion of incorporation central to the idea of cannibalism “depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside,” yet, at the same time, the act “dissolv[es] the structure it appears to produce” (1990, 4). Thus, cannibalism points to the fear of being consumed; but also to the ambiguous desire/dread of becoming one ourselves. This is what Snowman is

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fighting against when he is disgusted by eating pigoons that contain human tissues. Food and sexual reproduction are conditions for sustaining life. If the ChickieNob is produced to provide food nourishment, pigoons are designed to keep the human race alive and (possibly) healthy. The pigoons host “an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs” for transplantation purposes (OC 22). The pigoons open the concept of cannibalism. Snowman sees pigoons as “creatures much like himself” and recognizes that “no one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their own” (OC 24). However, it is obvious that a plethora of pork meat on the menu of Compound employees’ cafeteria coincides with the problematic consumption of human/pigoon meat. Later, when Snowman is starving to death, he fantasizes about a “pigoon feast” (OC 150–1). Maggie Kilgour suggests that the concept of cannibalism is crucial to “definitions of identity, either individual, textual, sexual, national, or social” (1990, 256). The discourse of cannibalism posits a threat to the fragile boundaries between human and non-human, as the cannibal transgresses all the boundaries of the body and community. Since the pigoons are ambiguously human and non-human, they are already a threat to human autonomy. Atwood uses the metaphor of food not only to illustrate the preapocalyptic and post-apocalyptic struggles to survive, but in its all ambiguous connotations she associates food with sexual appetite, pleasure, pain, and death. The symbol of food even enters into the novel’s formal structure: the titles of chapters, like Mango, Toast, Fish, Bottle, SoYummie and Takeout, are associated with meals and eating. More importantly, the novel starts with Snowman counting his food: “some mangos there, knotted in a plastic bag, and a can of Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, and a precious half-bottle of Scotch – no, more like a third – and a chocolate-flavoured energy bar scrounged from a tailer park, limp and sticky inside its foil” (OC 4). The book opens with Snowman’s lonely breakfast and ends with him smelling roast meat. Meals, as presented in Atwood’s writing, are very important rituals that create bonds within a human community. This is suggested at the very end of Oryx and Crake when Snowman observes a group of survivors. He watches them “roasting something – meat of some kind” (OC 373). However, this scene is portrayed as ambiguous and potentially dangerous, as is very typical of Atwood’s novels. Snowman meditates over roast meat, he “hasn’t smelled for so long” (OC 373) as “the poor creature” (OC

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373), and, in parallel. The ending of the novel is open, but the following novel shows not only the dangers of the human community but also Snowman’s hunger for human company and human communication. Snowman is a storyteller who survives to tell his story and by telling his story. He chants words to himself, remembering their forms and meanings. Karen F. Stein sees him as as a kind of human lexicon, the last repository of a language that will vanish when he dies. Just as, when he was young Snowman, he turned his unhappy family life into material for the stories he told friends, he now turns his pre- and post-catastrophe experiences into stories for himself, for the Crakers, and now for the three other humans he is about to encounter. (2010, 154)

He is almost paralyzed with hesitancy as well as hope to tell his stories and hear theirs. In this way, Margaret Atwood shows her belief in the power of words: “It’s comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language” (OC 99). Snowman keeps living because he is still able to narrate his story, which Atwood seems to find essential for survival. Snowman eats his own words, he feeds himself with stories from the past. Words and stories are “a way to remind him that he is still human and alive” (Rao 111) although he is starving and almost dying in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Belasco, Warren. 2008. Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford, New York: Berg. Bouson, Brooks J. 2004. “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39 (3): 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/002 1989404047051. Christou, Maria. 2017. Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in TwentiethCentury Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooke, Grayson. 2006. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en literature 31 (2): 105–125.

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Derrida, Jacques. [1981] 2000. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London and New York: Continuum. DiMarco, Danette. 2011. “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.” College Literature 38 (4): 134–155. https://doi.org/10.1353/ lit.2011.0038. Dunning, Stephen. 2005. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186: 86–101. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Howells, Coral Ann. 2006. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”. In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 161–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingersoll, Earl. 2004. “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation 45 (2): 162–175. https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2004.45.2.6. Kilgour, Maggie. 1990. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Labudova, Katarina. 2017. “Cooking and Eating Your Own stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Zeitschift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65 (4): 413–427. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Mohr, Dunja. 2017. “‘When Species Meet’: Beyond Posthuman Boundaries and Interspeciesism—Social Justice and Canadian Speculative Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 37: 40–64. Morse, Margaret. 1994. “What Do Cyborgs Eat? Oral Logic in an Information Society.” Discourse 16 (3): 86–123. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389336. Parry, Jovian. 2009. “Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat.” Society and Animals 17: 241–256. Rockoff, Marcus. 2015. “Don’t be such a meat-breath!: Food and Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” In Ethics of Sustainability Research, edited by Simon Meisch, Johannes Lundershausen, Leonie Bossert, Marcus Rockoff, 219–247. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Root, Deborah. [1996] 2018. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. New York: Routledge. Sasame, Kiyomi. 2010. “Food for Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Worlds.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 21: 89–109. Stapleton, Patricia. 2016. “‘The People in the Chaos Cannot Learn’: Dystopian Visions in Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” In The Age of Dystopia: One Genre,

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Our Fears and Our Future, edited by Louisa MacKay Demerjian, 19–34. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stein, Karen F. 2010. “Problematic Paradice: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 141–155. London & New York: Continuum. Zwart, Hub. 2015. “Tainted Food and the Icarus Complex: Psychoanalysing Consumer Discontent from Oyster Middens to Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28: 255–275. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10806-015-9530.

CHAPTER 4

Corporate Cannibalism: The Year of the Flood

Abstract Throughout the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood critiques insubstantial environmentalism and meditates on radical ecological movements to warn us about the future that our greedy consumerism and aggressive destruction of nature is leading us towards. In the second volume, The Year of the Flood (2009), Atwood uses themes of food and eating, especially the theme of hunger, to reinforce her critique of rampant consumerism. The chapter explores how food and its production become a marker of a social, gender and religious group as well as means of political resistance. Keywords Margaret Atwood · The Year of the Flood · Gender · Religion · Vegetarianism · Healing

The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law. (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 285) Its sun-grown, pesticide-sprayed, rainforest-habitat-destroying coffee products were the biggest threat to God’s feathered Creatures in our times. (YF 372)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_4

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Throughout the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood critiques insubstantial environmentalism and meditates on radical ecological movements to warn us about the future that our greedy consumerism and aggressive destruction of nature is leading us towards. In the second volume, The Year of the Flood (2009), she uses themes of food and eating, especially the theme of hunger, to reinforce her argument that the “rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law” (Atwood 2005, 285). Whereas Atwood’s critique of rampant consumerism in Oryx and Crake showcased a world lacking in humanity and hope, The Year of the Flood allows readers a scrap of hope, which is preserved in the counter-narrative of several (female) protagonists and the eco-beliefs of the God’s Gardeners sect, which they live out in an ecological lifestyle. It illustrates how Snowman’s perspective was blinkered by his reductive notions of women and his dependence on techno-culture. The counter-narrative character of The Year of the Flood is underlined by a rebellious approach to food. Whereas the characters in Oryx and Crake accept artificial, ersatz food or exotic, “authentic” treats from the corporations, the protagonists of The Year of the Flood seek to get back to simple, natural food. The Year of the Flood was published as a sibling book, “chapters of the same book” (Atwood 2011, 93) or “simultaneouel” to Oryx and Crake. Apart from a mix of dystopian, utopian, post-apocalyptic genre elements, The Year of the Flood includes “legends, fairy-tale allusions, animal folklore, folk remedies, sermons, stories about the saints and songs as folk allusions or intertexts” (Wilson 2013, 346). The world of Oryx and Crake is viewed from the perspective of three Pleebland women, followers of the God’s Gardeners teaching. This is an eco-religious sect in Pleeblands, where the dominant environmental factor seems to be omnipresent consumerism. There are the patches of utopian rooftop garden in the hellish dystopian Pleeblands. The God’s Gardeners tend to their garden and reject technology. The CorpSeCorps view them as “twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude towards shopping” (YF 35). Nevertheless, they are able to turn a rooftop space into a garden that is a real miniature utopia: The Garden wasn’t at all what Toby had expected from hearsay. It wasn’t a baked mudflat strewn with rotting vegetable waste – quite the reverse. She gazed around it in wonder: it was so beautiful, with plants and flowers

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of many kinds she’d never seen before. […] It was as if a large, benevolent hand had reached down and picked her up, and was holding her safe. (YF 43)

This is the result of the God’s Gardeners’ efforts to restore the purity of their food and retreat from urban living to an “idealized pastoral dream of the ‘good life,” as Deborah Lupton calls the attempts at healthy life without processed food. (1996, 89) Indeed, the lifestyle represented by the rooftop garden and their wholesome food seems like a sanctuary. In their expectation of the civilization-ending Waterless Flood, the God’s Gardeners learn and remember everything about plants, animals, organic food and survival skills. It is important to remember that the garden is not isolated from the outside world. The Gardeners are to some extent dependent on external products, a relationship that they justify based on the duty to recycle materials and prevent waste. They recycle wine to make vinegar and gather meat leftovers to feed maggots that are used to heal wounds. It clearly shows that the Gardeners’ lifestyle and “theology [are] scrambled” (YF 46). Their aim as an apocalyptic sect is not to reveal a new heaven but new ways of living for a fractured and antagonistic world: the Compounds and the Pleeblands, human–non-human, animals– humans, artificial–real, natural–artificial. Having prepared for the apocalypse, many members of the sect, including Toby, Ren, Zeb, Adam One and Amanda, survive the pandemic in isolation. The Gardeners had foreseen the Waterless flood and come through it thanks to their God’s Gardenes’ training and the food Ararats that they are instructed to build “with canned and dried goods” (YF 59). The most important factor, however, is the way they take loving care of each other. In my reading, Ararats are not only storehouses packed with food, they are also archives of memories, since Gardeners are encouraged to use their memory to store important, essential information for survival and reconstruction: A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to overpopulation and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. (YF 47)

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Thus the process of remembering, restoring memories and stories, is as fundamental for the survival of the human race as food. Atwood establishes, again, a link between eating and storytelling. The God’s Gardeners stand out as a utopian island amidst the dystopian Pleeblands. There is plenty that is comically imperfect about the God’s Gardeners garden in the pre-or post-apocalyptic time—but they nourish their sense of community and this is what empowers them to survive the apocalypse and remain human. Food is a recurring motif in The Year of the Flood: not only the character’s struggle for food while trying to survive the Waterless Flood, but as a political sign as well. The political aspect of food is not new; the class system has always been represented by the types of food consumed as well as rituals surrounding food. According to Sidney Mintz and Christine Du Bois, “[f]ood serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart” and it “functions in social allocation, in terms of ethnicity, race, nationality, class, and (less precisely) individuality and gender” (2002, 109). Here, in The Year of the Flood, food and its production become a marker of a social, gender and religious group as well as means of political resistance.

4.1

Saved by Bees and Plants: Food and Medicine

Toby is saved from her exploitation and starvation as a server in a burger franchise when the God’s Gardeners picket it to protest against “selling the mutilated flesh of God’s beloved Creatures” (YF 41). To the God’s Gardeners, eating meat means eating death. In rescuing Toby, they not only save her from Blanco’s violence but also from hunger and starvation: “The first evening, there was a modest celebration in honour of Toby’s advent. A great fuss was made over the opening of a jar of preserved purple items—those were her first elderberries—and a pot of honey was produced as if it was the Holy Grail” (YF 43). After Toby is saved by God’s Gardeners, she studies the healing effects of plants, mushrooms, and honey. In dystopias, the characters often turn to natural remedies because they distrust their society’s toxic pharmaceutical products. Similarly, in The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, three sisters are isolated on an “island” in fear of lethal men and diseases they might contaminate them with. This fairy tale dystopia depicts a “toxin-filled world,” and many rituals that should immunize the girls, including the titular water cure.

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The family uses natural products to treat illnesses: “I noticed a slight cough, mixed up a honey tincture for you the day before you died. Boiled nettles from the end of the garden” (2019, 9). However, as in The Year of the Flood, danger is hidden not only in pills and contaminated food, but, most importantly, in dangerous and toxic ideologies. In The Year of the Flood, Toby learns about the pharmaceutical industry producing poisonous vitamin pills, like those that killed her mother, to increase their sales. Pilar teaches Toby about the pills: “those Corporation pills are the food of the dead” (YF 105). The Corporations abuse the trust that consumers place in medicine and food, they blur the line between food and drug. This actually enables Crake to sell his lethal Pill and bring the Waterless Flood. In Food, the Body and the Self , Lupton suggests that [i]n contemporary times, vitamin tablets may be regarded as inhabiting a liminal position between medicine and food: they are nutritious in that they supply essential substances, but are produced and sold as pharmaceutical products and are taken as adjuncts to meals, and are not normally described as food. (1996, 30)

After Toby meets the Gardeners, she turns to nature for sustenance and for medicine. Toby survives Crake’s pill-transmitted plague thanks to the Gardeners’ knowledge and the way she applies it to create an Ararat in the spa, AnooYoo. Toby embodies not only the new values of God’s Gardeners, but in a broader sense, the traditional moral values of friendship, caring and solidarity. When Toby and Ren rescue Amanda from two Painballers, Toby insists on sharing food with the Painballers because of the Gardeners’ teaching: “Let us be grateful for this food that has been given to us. Amanda. Ren. Snowman. You, too, if you can manage it” (YF 431). Toby is prepared to share her food with brutal criminals and she does not refuse to give water (with poisonous poppy) to her former enslaver Blanco, to save him from dying thirsty. Toby aims to develop harmony and peace, though not yet in the utopia, by living the utopian values of caring. Having survived an apocalypse, she is Atwood’s alternative to the greed and consumerism of the pre-apocalyptic world. Ren’s story has a similar beginning to Toby’s: going down in the world through a series of economic, social and familial dislocations. After a short period with the God’s Gardeners, she returns to the Compounds where she falls in love with Snowman and follows him to the Martha Graham

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Academy, where she studies dance. Her dysfunctional mother cuts her financial support and Ren ends up as a sex dancer/trapeze artist at an upscale Scales and Tails, a strip club. She survives the Waterless Flood because she happens to be quarantined in an isolated area of the brothel known as the “Sticky Zones” for fear of sexually transmitted infection. As a dancer, she performs in a Biofilm Bodysuit. This is a living second skin that must be fed: the Biofilms needed to be sprayed with water and lubricant skinfood – they were dried out – but once we’d done that they slid on as usual, and you could feel the pleasant suction as their layers of living cells bonded with your skin, and then the warm, tickly feeling as they started to breathe. (YF 330)

These Bodysuits are overlaid with elaborate bird or fish costumes that transform women into “cyberanimals” (Lapointe 2014, 145). The constant presence of artificial animal costumes, fake foods (the Sticky Zones are stocked with frozen ChickieNobs, faux fish, the Joltbars, soybits), fake furniture (“[a]ll that faux marble, and the reproduction antique furniture, […] none of it seemed real” [YF 208]), as well as fake news (“the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed” [YF 293]) shows how alienated she is from the natural world and natural eating. Only when her Bodysuit is torn, she immediately becomes human again and becomes a dangerous “hot bioform” that must be isolated in the Sticky Zone (which, paradoxically, saves her life). Ren is constantly hungry. Having caught the vegetarian ways of the God’s Gardeners, she cannot eat meat even after she leaves them: “Amanda would’ve eaten the bacon to show she hadn’t been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn’t go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal” (YF 216). Moreover, she develops a habit of eating very little to keep her childlike appearance for sex work in the Scales and Tails, and later, for survival: “[i]f I ate only a third of every meal instead of half, and saved the rest, […] I’d have enough for at least six weeks” (YF 283). For her, non-eating becomes a slogan. Instead of traditional Gardeners’ saying, [w]e are what we eat, she prefers We are what we wish (YF 400). This shows how much she has been transformed by the consumerism of Scales and Tails. Unable to face reality, she starts believing in the Scales and Tails ideology: “‘You can be whoever you want,” […] ‘[a]ct it out’!” (YF 295) In the Scales

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and Tails, she does not become whoever she wants, she even loses her own face and identity as she is reduced into a non-human Scalie in a Bodysuit that disguises her face. As a Scalie fish-woman (or a bird-woman), she is associated with prey and food. Toby first notices Ren as “a huge bird on a leash […] a bird with blue-green iridescent plumes like a peagret. But this bird has the head of a woman (YF 350). Ren has been kidnapped by Blanco, Toby’s rapist, as sexual prey. Toby saves Ren, or, “the large bird or whatever it is” (YF 351), because she still believes in the Gardeners’ teaching and she considers it wrong and evil to kill and butcher “large Creatures […] at the top of the food chain” (YF 351). Blanco and the other Painballer are seen as (sexual) predators, hunters and “real evil” (YF 351). After being saved by Toby, Ren gets a chance to develop a healthier life by drinking and eating the authentic and natural food and drink that Toby prepares and shares. Although Toby considers killing Ren because her food stock is limited, her Gardener values are stronger. Instead of a safe but lonely survival, Toby chooses to open herself to human company. The motif of sharing food thus opens new aspects, the motif of domesticity and healing. Just to have a second person on the premises – even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time – just this makes the Spa seem like a cosy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house. (YF 360)

Toby thus becomes a protecting and nurturing mother, providing shelter and nutrition for helpless Ren. Toby cures and comforts her with food and drink, cleans her wounds, she “puts some honey on it. Antibiotics in it” (YF 356). She also uses herbs, such as willow and chamomile and poppy for their sedative and anti-inflammatory effects. Preparing food and elixirs, Toby chooses the immune-system boosters: “reishi, maitake, shitake, birch polypore, zhu ling, lion’s mane, corycepts, ice man” (YF 357). Toby has learned the healing power of natural products from the God’s Gardeners. Not only food but also effective medicines. She remembers healing Zeb’s infected wound using maggots that eat decaying flesh and thus help in preventing gangrene. Zeb jokes about maggots that in case they start eating his healthy tissue, he would eat them: “Great source of lipids” (YF 108). Toby has to start to cook her daily portion of maggots when her food stash is almost gone and she is on the verge of starvation: “Toby scrapes

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the crispy land shrimp off the tip of her tin can onto her plate—to waste food is to waste Life” (YF 350). Food heals wounds, cures diseases and saves life but only if it is not technologically processed but almost in its natural state.

4.2

Eating Fear and Violence: Food and Emotions

In Food, the Body and the Self , Lupton observes that “the histories of the management of the emotions and the regulation of food practices and development of table manners in western societies developed in parallel in relation to understandings of the civilized body” (1996, 31). The Year of the Flood draws a clear line between civilized and controlled practices of eating and uncivilized, barbaric practices. Here, the calm and controlled emotions of the God’s Gardeners contrast with the rage and aggression of the Compounds and Pleeblands. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood portrays the God Gardeners’ peaceful religious sect in opposition to the cannibalistic violence and predator–prey brutality of the rest of her fictional human world. The sect saves Toby from the hands of Blanco, a violent sexual predator who later ends up in the Painball Arena—a forest under digital surveillance allowing their hunting and slaughtering to be watched onscreen. Atwood portrays their actions using images of cannibalism, cooking and eating. The Painballers are vicious and bloodthirsty. They hang their prey on trees and mutilate them to spread horror and fear: “Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys […] Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were” (YF 98–99). Towards the end of The Year of the Flood, Amanda and Ren become victims of their sadism and human degeneration. This violence is contrasted with Toby’s response to compulsive nightmares and violent thoughts of Blanco. She does a Vigil, a common religious practice of God’s Gardeners that includes fasting, prayer and the use of special Vigil mushrooms for visions. In general, food is an essential part of religions. God’s Gardeners see eating as holy, but they also practice fasting as a part of their religious rituals. Atwood juxtaposes the sadistic practices of Painballers’ cannibalistic rituals with Toby’s peaceful vigil and fasting: “The vines, the flowers, the leaves, the pods. So green and soothing” (YF 99).

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Atwood also uses metaphors of food and eating to convey her characters’ emotional states. As the novel is centred around a society rife with greed and over-consumption, the food metaphors highlight emotions such as envy and jealousy that, as Atwood’s novel suggests, might be the foundations of the wild materialistic appetites of the Compounds and Pleeblands as well: “Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It’s part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we’re stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others” (YF 303). In a different passage, a cooking metaphor is used to describe the emotional state of jealousy: “I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground” (YF 304). Atwood uses powerful cooking metaphors to envisage the turmoil of a person’s emotions. God’s Gardeners, in emphasizing their life of simplicity and restraint also stress the need for self-control, which the greedy and materialistic people lack: Our appetites, our desires, our more uncontrollable emotions — all are Primate! Our Fall from the original Garden was a Fall from the innocent acting-out of such patterns and impulses to a conscious and shamed awareness of them; and from thence comes our sadness, our anxiety, our doubt, our rage against God. (YF 52)

But not only rage and violence are associated with appetite in The Year of the Flood, the feeling of love also triggers certain memory and taste associations. Toby associates Zeb with a salty taste “Toby had an image — no, a taste. She could taste the skin of Zeb’s arm, the salt on it” (YF 110) In another passage, Toby recalls Zeb as “peppery” (YF 117). These associations are erotic, as Belasco suggests “as love warms into lust […] flavours shift toward salt – the taste of human secretions – and the ‘hotter’ spices, especially pepper, ginger, garlic, and mustard” (2008, 37). Toby can taste desire even before she can consciously experience it. Lupton argues that “[f]ood and eating […] are intensely emotional experiences that are intertwined with embodied sensations and strong feelings ranging the spectrum from disgust, hate, fear and anger to pleasure, satisfaction and desire” (1996, 36). The God’s Gardeners’ preference is to avoid violence, strong feelings and passions and to seek

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harmony, peace and balance through self-control in both material and emotional life. They teach it to children using metaphors that include metaphors of food and eating: The Gardeners were expected to avoid any broadcasting of their personal problems: foisting your mental junk on others was frowned on. For drinking Life there are two cups, Nuala taught the small children. What’s in each of them might be exactly the same, but my, oh my, the taste is so different! The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy — Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy? (YF 113)

Our dietary habits seem to symbolize control over our bodies and emotions. Food then, may represent a number of value-added categories: good/bad, tasteful/distasteful, healthy/unhealthy, raw/cooked, hence, these oppositions shape not only our food preferences but contribute to the construction of our beliefs, identities and communities. We not only construct ourselves to become ourselves, but we shape ourselves against others, which shows how subversive and oppositional our food strategies might be.

4.3 Vegetarian Revolution: Food as a Subversive Act The plot of The Year of the Flood is built around themes of food, lack of food, food production, consumerism, corporate-controlled world and extreme social injustice. Atwood’s trilogy includes multiple passages suggesting the severe effect that climate change has had on an already ruined landscape (that might become non-fictional reality very soon). Her novels highlight the view that “humanity’s food and especially meat consumption and production is causing climate change and environmental pollution. Moreover, climate change will have a negative impact on agricultural productivity that food security is high at stake” (Rockoff 2015, 360). In The Year of the Flood, the God’s Gardeners try to minimize their ecological impact. Their aim is self-sufficiency as they live in intentional communities and impose on themselves a rigid code of conduct voluntarily constraining their personal choices. The God’s Gardeners engage in peaceful green practices, such as respect for animal rights,

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gardening, rooftop beekeeping and the preservation of traditional food production methods. According to Rockoff, the life of the God’s Gardeners represents an attempt at sustainability: “[t]heir ideology is presented as a mixture of Deep Ecology and Christian dogmatism […] they share similar convictions to Crake regarding the origin of humanity’s unsustainable behaviour but add to this a religious dimension” (Rockoff 2015, 363). Thus, their practices, especially gardening, reestablish a connection between natural food production and food consumption. However, their (religious) belief in the value of simplicity and asceticism is crucial in subverting the discourse of rampant appetites and consumerism that dominates Atwood’s fictional world. As Lupton notes, “[t]here is a strong historical link between religion, spirituality, asceticism and dietary regimens. In western societies, Judeo-Christian ethics underlie the practices of eating and fasting” (1996, 131). The Gardeners are ascetic in their modest dark clothes, green lifestyle and diet that can be described as vegan1 with the addition of honey. Although it seems that the God’s Gardeners are not a unified social movement but rather a syncretic religious sect, their vegetarian lifestyle places them in opposition to mainstream society. According to Laura Wright “veganism constitutes a subject position that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the west, as oppositional to and disruptive of a capitalist system that is largely dependent upon big agriculture” (2017, 1). God’s Gardeners did not oppose only the consumerism of the Corporations, but also their ethics. The God’s Gardeners’ vegetarianism is itself an act of rebellion against Corporations that run the vast food production networks and push excessively processed, genetically and chemically modified food on consumers depriving them of their power and control. According to Lupton, “[v]egetarianism represents the extreme response to this need to take control in a world in which there appears to be far too much choice

1 The Vegan Society was founded in Leicester in 1944. Spencer comments on the name

of the society: “[o]ne of the founders, Donald Watson, a CO, has said that the word was chosen as the first three and the last two letters of ‘vegetarian’. To many then and now veganism seems the logical outcome of vegetarianism, for in refusing all animal products, including eggs and dairy products (milk, cheese, butter), they are making a stand against modern farming and all animal exploitation” (Spencer 1995, 317).

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and far too many moral and existential dilemmas around eating practices” (1996, 89). The God’s Gardeners prefer simplicity and modesty in their food and their ethics. Moreover, their vegetarianism can be seen as a pro-ecological strategy. The treatment of vegetarianism has undergone significant developments over the course of Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre. From identifying sexual oppression with meat eating as in Edible Woman, through empathizing with nature and animals in Surfacing , to Cat’s Eye where, as Carol J. Adams observes, “the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and a baby” (2010, 236). In the same vein, women characters in Lady Oracle are associated with eating eggs and men with steaks. (Raw) steaks are also associated with predatory and bloodthirsty Zenia, while her victims prefer chocolates (Roz), tuna (Tony) or vegetables (Charis). In Oryx and Crake, humorous references to vegans and veganism reflect various existing attitudes to veganism. Nevertheless, in The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, the vegan lifestyle is no longer ridiculed. Although Atwood clearly associates the peaceful God’s Gardeners and women with veg(etari)anism and male predators with eating meat in The Year of the Flood, vegetarianism, obviously, has more ethical and ecological resonances. Toby acquires both practical skills, such as recycling, foraging, trading recycled materials and eco-friendly and humanitarian values while living with the Gods’ Gardeners. These skills and values help Toby, Ren and many other God’s Gardeners to survive and they represent a skein of hope for human survival in the post-human world. The God’s Gardeners’ subversive behaviour aspires to an ethic that is in, as Stein observes, “marked contrast to the acquisitive, consumption-driven, status-seeking societies of the wealthy Compounds” (2013, 325). The Gardeners teach values of harmony, communality and equality and nurturing that include all living beings (rats, ants, and unfaithful and cowardly Compound women). In Food, Belasco argues that “[t]hinking deliberately, carefully, responsibly about the consequences of current actions, the conscientious consumer will want to select products that are green for the environment, fair for workers and producers, and humane for animals” (2008, 120). The Gardeners’ philosophy synchronizes with these goals. They are aiming for a sustainable lifestyle: instead of gated and disinfected Compounds, they live in abandoned buildings, using as little electricity as possible (no dryers and no daily showers). The Gardeners wear puritaninspired clothes while even the poorest Pleebland children (pleebrats) scavenge for trinkets and living jellyfish bracelets that need to be fed.

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The cannibalistic desires well represent the rampant appetites of the hyper-consumer society. The Gardeners, in contrast, grow their own food and beg for forgiveness when they step on a beetle: “[b]y covering such barren rooftops with greenery we are doing our small part in the redemption of God’s Creation from the decay and sterility that lies all around us, and feeding ourselves with unpolluted food into the bargain” (YF 11). While the HealthWyze scientists develop expensive pills that make people sick so that they can sell them more expensive medicine; the Gardeners rely on honey and mushrooms, grow medicinal herbs and learn healing rituals, such as touch and meditation. While the Compounds kidnap scientists to win their technological battles, the Gardeners practice an underground economy, recycle materials and produce soap and vinegar to sell or trade at the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange. All the members of the sect share in the routine daily tasks; men, women and children have an indispensable place and activities in their community: “There was no such thing as garbage, trash or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use. And, most importantly, everyone, including children, must contribute to the life of the community” (YF 326). Again, this subverts the values and practices of the Compounds, where only the number people, and/or the best scientists are seen as valuable, useful and important. The God’s Gardeners’ vegetarianism responds to both ethical and environmental demands. Furthermore, Lupton sees vegetarianism as “a political act of self-empowerment that resists dominant norms” (1996, 124). And this resistance is crucial for the ethics of the God’s Gardeners. A contrasting path of political radicalism is shown in the story of Bernice, another former Gardener. Despite living in the Compounds and attending the Martha Graham artistic school with Snowman and Ren, she protests against the consumerism of the Compounds together with “other kids with the same T-shirt, but different signs: BREW OF EVIL, DON’T DRINK DEATH. I could see from the outfits and facial expressions that they were extreme fanatic ultra-greens, and they were picketing the place” (YF 287). Bernice refuses bottled water as evil. Her position shifts from a passive consumer to an environmental activist and protester. However, in the end it is the less strict and pious Ren who survives the Waterless Flood while Bernice meets her end “spraygunned in a raid on a Gardeners safe house” (YF 290). In the novel, Bernice’s positions are linked to disharmonious social relations. Ren notes that Bernice tried to excel at piety as a girl as a “substitute for not having any real friends” (YF 141). In my reading, Bernice’s protests against non-ecological food and

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non-ecological practices are not in harmony with the other Gardeners’ pacifist values of peace, friendship, caring and love. As conditions in society deteriorate, the Gardeners’ insistence on a peaceful stance cracks and gives way to violent activism when Zeb’s MaddAddam group commits acts of bioterrorism: “peace goes only so far. There’s at least a hundred new extinct species since this time last month. They got fucking eaten! We can’t just sit here” (YF 252). Ironically, their sabotage of greedy and cannibalistic corporate society by using “bioform resistance […] to destroy the infrastructure” (YF 333) involves a form of consumption. For example, they develop microbes that eat asphalt (YF 333). In this way, eating becomes a form of subversion, a bio-terrorist attack.

4.4

Sex Toy You Can Eat: Food and Sex

For the Gardeners, food extends far beyond fuel, vitamins and nutrients, it encompasses what Roland Barthes calls “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour” (1979, 167). The God’s Gardeners share a meal on the feast night devoted to Saint Julian and All Souls. Their feasts include environmental activists and scientists with democratic and environmental values. Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century mystic who saw God as a nurturing mother and a powerful father. One of the ways that these traditional gender roles are distinguished is through food, food choices as well as eating habits. Food is a gendered phenomenon associated with the body, sex, power as well as patriarchy. The gender aspect of food was already noted by Claude LéviStrauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1983, 202). Lupton discusses the body and gender’s influence on food. According to her research, different foods are considered appropriate for different genders. Feminine foods are supposed to be: “light, sweet, milky, soft-textured, refined and delicate” (Lupton 1996, 106) while foods associated with masculinity are “[h]eavy […] chewy, rich or filling” (Lupton 1996, 107). In the dystopian The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, this strict stereotype is taken to extremes: the isolated women eat so much sugary food that their teeth are ruined. “Peach slices, prunes, fruit cocktail, condensed milk that we spoon directly into our mouths” (2019, 203). This restricted diet that makes the girls vitamin-deficient and weak is imposed on the sisters by their father, King. The orthodox association

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of women with milk and sugar is underlined by linking men with meat: “Like my father, he is made of meat” (2019, 96). In The Year of the Flood, aggressive, masculine types like Blanco are associated with eating meat, while women, children and the pacifist God’s Gardeners eat vegetarian food. The distinction is even more striking when Toby associates herself with fruit, specifically, with soft (fruit) purée after Blanco’s sexual assaults: “she was lucky she hadn’t ended up fucked into a purée and battered to a pulp and poured out onto a vacant lot” (YF 103). After taking her VegieVows, Toby never eats meat again and she also does not have sex either. In Food: The Key Concepts, Warren Belasco suggests that meat connotes sex (2008, 37). Blanco is a sexual predator who does not give up eating meat and raping women even after the Waterless Flood, which he survives as a Painballer. It is not only the food preference that is gender-specific: preparation of food and serving food is traditionally associated with women. According to Alan Beardsworth and his colleagues’ research of contemporary Britain, “a married woman’s obligation to produce elaborately prepared traditional meals for her husband provides an expression of her domesticity and subordination” (2002, 473). Atwood provides us with a nostalgic picture of Toby’s parents and traditional family in Toby’s memory: “They’d eaten deer stew, and her mother had made soup with bones” (YF 24). And although this gender division is still visible in The Year of the Flood, where Rebecca is responsible for cooking and serving their vegetarian dinners, these are no longer the classical family meal cooked by a mother and eaten by her husband and children but a communal meal. Atwood subverts food and other dangerous stereotypes, including gender roles. As Parasecoli suggests “the articulations between female flesh, sex, and food are complex. A large body is often identified with a woman who expresses her affection for her family by cooking large, if unhealthy, meals” (2008, 111). In The Year of the Flood, Rebecca, although plump, prepares frugal but healthy vegetarian dinners for her family of Gardeners. The novel shows many communal meals and festivities but there are very few, if any, representations of a simple family meal. One example comes when Lucerne is trying to keep Zeb as her lover and she prepares a nice family breakfast: mashed-up fried black beans and soft-boiled pigeon eggs. Lucerne acts out the role of a good wife and mother, feeding her family. Lupton argues that “[o]ne major emotion that is constantly linked with food is that of love, particularly maternal love, romantic love and wifely concern for the well-being of one’s husband” (1996, 37). Lucerne

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herself, in this passage, is presented as sweet food: her smile is “syrupy” and she has “cookie eyes” (YF 134). Artificially sweet, Lucerne is not authentic but only acting out a fake role to keep her partner, Zeb, at home with her. In the case of Bernice, the dysfunctionality of her family is indicated by the absence of family meals. Her mother, Veena appears to be in what the Gardeners call a Fallow state—a state of low activity in which a Gardener gathers spiritual energy before a new burst of life— but later it is revealed that she was being drugged by her husband, who was also a paedophile growing illegal marihuana: “Veena didn’t cook: she ate what Bernice’s father gave her; or else she didn’t eat it. But she never tidied up” (YF 80). Families in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are fragmented and dysfunctional, a theme that is taken to even greater extremes in MaddAddam. The concept of the traditional family becomes obsolete and its role is taken over by a community. The God’s Gardeners serve special food on special occasions and numerous feast days: these are usually highly ritualized, accompanied by artistic productions and/or special games. These dinners “serve to reproduce and constitute ideals of the happy, united family” (Lupton 1996, 63). The Year of the Flood is formally structured by these festivals and special festival meals, every chapter starts with a sermon by Adam One, preaching the Gardeners’ ideology as well as describing the meals served on each occasion. In Stone Age Economics, Marshal Sahlins (2017) suggests that: “[f]ood dealings are a delicate barometer, a ritual statement as it were, of social relations, and food is thus employed instrumentally as a starting a sustaining, or a destroying mechanism of sociability” (215). While Oryx and Crake catalogues Snowman’s lonely and unsatisfying junk-food dinners, relieved only occasionally by sharing pizza and snacks with Oryx, symptomatically, The Year of the Flood presents the closer community of Gardeners sharing meals frequently. Thus, Atwood shows not only practical but emotional ties between the members of this vegetarian and religious community: “This evening we will share a special Festival meal— Rebecca’s delicious lentil soup, representing the First Flood, with Noah’s Ark dumplings stuffed with vegetable Animal forms […] teaching us not to gobble our food in a heedless manner” (YF 90). Strong social and emotional bonds are restored in a reunion of Gardeners after the Waterless Flood: Amanda comes to free Ren from the Sticky Zone and they celebrate it by drinking champagne, when they are joined by Shackie, Croze

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and Oates, they eat and drink party treats such as mimosa, Scotch, coffee, and some salted soynuts: “All five of us moved towards each another like a slow-motion football huddle on TV, and then we were hugging each other. Just hugging and hugging, and holding on” (YF 332). It is, however, very important to note that the Gardeners’ dinners are highly inclusive because sharing meals is one of the most important part of their teaching. In Consuming Body, Pasi Falk argues that “[s]haring and incorporating food in a ritual meal implies incorporation of the partaker into the community simultaneously defining his/her particular ‘place’ within it” (1994, 20). Thus, the individual eats their way into the community. At the beginning of The Year of the Flood, the community invites Toby to their table, later, Toby invites Ren and Amanda to share her food. She also invites her enemies, the Painballers and the stranger, Snowman: “‘Let us be grateful for this food that has been given to us. Amanda. Ren. Snowman. You, too, if you can manage it.’ This is to the two Painballers. One of them mutters something like Fuck off , but he doesn’t say it very loudly, He wants some of the soup” (YF 432). The teaching of the God’s Gardeners is so strongly associated with food, dinners and sharing food that Toby cannot disobey it. Although Atwood frequently uses stereotypical masculine (meat) or feminine food (sugar) preferences in her portrayals, she also employs food imagery to subvert traditional stereotypes. Amanda, for example, is presented as an active survivor and adventurist. She always refuses the role of a weak victim. Unlike Ren, who is disgusted by the idea of eating animals, Amanda seems to be comfortable with hunting, killing and skinning an animal in their Predator–Prey class preparing the God’s Gardeners children to survive the Waterless Flood: “‘But we ourselves are among the larger hunting animals, aren’t we? Why would we hunt?’ said Zeb. ‘To eat,’ said Amanda. ‘There is no other good reason’” (YF 140). Thus, Atwood breaks another stereotypical food association. While a vegetarian diet is typically linked with women, God’s Gardeners of both sexes are shown to prefer meatless, cruelty-free food, and it is of special importance to their leader, Adam One. Lupton suggests that “the vegetarian philosophy is based on two major objections to animal-based food that it is unhealthy and unnecessary for the human body, and that it is morally repugnant” (1996, 123). Adam One’s preaching of a strict vegetarian diet is based on the moral and spiritual argument that the human species should not be privileged over all other species: “Spare your fellow Creatures! Do not eat anything with a face!”

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(YF 40). The Gardeners are against an anthropocentricity that sees nonhuman creatures as subordinated to humans. Adam One refers to his own green conversion: “I too, was a materialistic, atheistic meat-eater. Like you, I thought Man was the measure of all things” (YF 40). As he takes care of Toby and other people as if they were his children, he subverts the stereotype of a dominant male leader by embodying a nurturing and protecting mother as well. In her earlier fiction, Atwood describes women becoming vegetarians. As Chloe Taylor argues, “these women are ultimately not presented as ethical in any admirable sense, but as neurotic and self-deceived. They are not really concerned for other animals” (2012, 134). Later, as is evident in The Year of the Flood, Atwood’s concept of vegetarianism evolves and culminates in MaddAddam, where people, humanoids, animals and animal splices live in peace and harmony. Veganism becomes “the way to survive in the times of crisis and one of the most important means through which to build a new world” (Prorokova-Konrad 2021, 84). Central to biological reproduction, food and sex are both vital for the survival of the (human) species. Freud sees an analogy between the hunger for food and the libido as a hunger for sexual satisfaction (Freud 1962, 1). Food, eating and cooking are often charged with erotic tensions. In The Year of the Flood, the survival of human race is linked with the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which, eating the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden was followed by the loss sexual innocence: Some say that the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a fig, others prefer a date, yet others a pomegrate. […]The Fruit remains a deeply meaningful symbol for us, embodying the notions of healthful harvest, of rich culmination, and of new beginning for within every Fruit is a seed – a potential new life. (YF 276)

The overlap between the languages of sex and food makes food metaphors and metaphors of eating/cooking practices very powerful. In Carnal Appetites : FoodSexIdentities, Elspeth Probyn observes that “[p]ractices of preparing and eating food are […] highly sensual and sometimes sexual” (2000, 60). In Atwood’s fiction, sexualized associations between food and sex intensify the sensual pleasure or, more importantly, distaste and bad experience. It is significant that sex and food both seem to have gone bad. Just as eating is, pleasurable sexuality is very

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rare. In Atwood’s dystopia, food is seen as dangerous and it is associated with death, similarly, sex is not satisfying, but associated with sexual violence and rape. Blanco who used to rape Toby frequently, yells at her that she is “meat” (YF 255). Toby, one of the main protagonists, experiences hunger, sexual exploitation and degradation from a human being to a sexual fetish, and later, sexual meat. She works as a “furzooter,” an animal-mascot promoter. She is frequently sexually assaulted by fetishists attracted by her animal suit. During her time in this job, she lives above a suspicious place that sells “Halloween costumes over the counter to fool the animal-right extremists and cured the skins [of endangered species] in the backrooms” (YF 31). The rest of the animals’ carcasses are served in decadent restaurants called Rarity. They pretend the name is about rare-cooked steaks, but it is actually an allusion to the endangered species that can be ordered. Toby is similarly associated with animal skin, fur (she sells her hair), eggs, and meat. She exists to be exploited. The boundary between her human status and animal blurs when she sells her eggs, which leads to the loss of her fertility. By this, “the categories of woman and animal [bird] overlap: Toby must first cease to be able to ‘lay’ eggs before she can become meat” (Lapointe 2014, 142). Toby becomes (sexual) meat rather rapidly: Blanco, the manager of SecretBurgers, where she starts working as a food server, exploits Toby as his sexual slave. He deprives her of food, so she gradually starves, he eats away at her. Written more than twenty years before The Year of the Flood, Angela Carter’s speculative fiction novel The Passion of New Eve reveals the cannibalistic relationship between gender, food, and power. Zero is a sexual cannibal who leaves “angry marks of love-bites” (PNE 88) on his wives’ necks. Zero is one of the villains who exemplifies the cannibalistic character of male appetite. Carter suggests that cannibalism is an act of exploitation, “turning the other directly into a comestible” (2006, 140). In Atwood’s 2009 novel, Blanco is clearly a leftover from the past patriarchal order. His metaphorical cannibalism is supported by the cannibalistic associations of the chain called SecretBurgers. The secret of SecretBurgers was not only that you “might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail” (YF 35), but also that the local pleebmobs run “corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders” (YF 35). The fast-food chain grinds all remaining meat sources into commodities. As

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Jennifer Brown suggests in Cannibalism in Literature and Film, “[f]ood and eating are more than biological necessities, rather they are imbued with a symbolic and, at times, mythical force” (2013, 3). Hence, our food, dietary preferences and eating practices symbolically include and/or exclude us. As I show, characters are associated with certain food choices, and some of them represent a taboo. Thus, Blanco’s taste for human flesh as well as the ruthless commodification of human flesh by the SecretBurgers can be seen as part of a broader violation of cultural norms and taboos through transgressive consumption. In cannibalism, such ignorance of the boundary between the permitted and prohibited presents a loss of humanity. Towards the end of the novel, Amanda, who is barely surviving the Waterless Flood, becomes a sexual slave to two Painballers. They treat her like “a sex toy you can eat” (YF 417). At another point, people are cynically reduced to carrot-suckers and meat-holes on legs (YF 86) which shows both sex and food in a vulgar and disgusting light. In similar imagery, Crake, who is often referred to as an asexual, is compared to a cold kitchen object: “Not that I wanted sex with Glenn, it would be like shagging a salad server” (YF 227). After he starts coming to the Scales, he is compared to a “cold fish” (YF 306). As he cannot taste any difference between real food and artificial food, he similarly does not understand sexual pleasure. It comes as no surprise that he designs “his” Crakers to eat grass and recycle their excrements and plans their sexual life to be focused only on reproduction, without emotions like desire, love and passion. Sexual intercourse is also seen in (cynical) food metaphors. At Scales and Tails, Scalies refer to unbuttoning as to “peeling the shrimp” (YF 308). In The Year of the Flood, the link between distasteful food and sex is obvious. Snowman is obsessed with meaningless sex and he is very promiscuous: “I couldn’t stand it that he would just include me in a big basket of girls, as if we were peaches or turnips” (YF 227). Although he is fixated on Oryx, he sleeps with many women. In Carnal Appetites : FoodSexIdentities, Probyn suggests that junk food has so desensitized and desexualized us that “[s]exuality currently risks becoming theoretically stale, past its use-by date” (2000, 60). In Atwood’s trilogy, promiscuity and fast food are tied together: “LyndaLee […] was rumoured to be going through all the boys at school one by one but fast, like eating soynuts” (YF 226). On the other hand, Ren, who is still in love with Snowman, refers to him as sweet and calls him honey, a very precious and rare ingredient she remembers from her life as a God’s Gardener.

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Although pretentious Lucerne is obsessed with Zeb, their love is depicted in mocking and inedible food terms: “That kiss had gone right into her like a knife, and she’d crumpled into his arms like – like a dead fish – no like a petticoat – no – like a damp tissue paper!” (YF 118). Their affair is manipulative and calculated and hence it is seen only as “appetizer-sized helpings of each other” (YF 118). They objectify each other: Zeb because he is undercover and revealing his identity would be dangerous. As for Lucerne, she is a very superficial woman, bored and selfish and seeks opportunities to be admired and indulged. However, her tastes do not bring her lasting happiness. In History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the more actions, thoughts, emotions around sexual expression have been prohibited in western societies, the more they have been discussed. Sexuality is thus produced through strategies that seem to be explicitly repressive: “On the subject of sex, silence became the rule” (1990, 3). In Atwood’s trilogy, we are shown a world that has gone to the opposite extreme. No sexual practice is prohibited and, in parallel, there are no restrictions in diet, which includes endangered animal species as well as drugs. However, the fact that every appetite can be satiated does not provide lasting levels of satisfaction. Most of the practices of sexual intercourse are depicted as unfulfilling and the food is inedible. As the next chapter of this book shows, it is not only the diet of human survivors that has to change. They also need radical changes in their sex life, concepts of motherhood as well as fatherhood, family life and other rituals. Because our language and culture define what we eat, food is often a part of religion, rituals and community meetings. After the apocalyptic Waterless Flood, the extinction of human kind brings new concerns as the environment is losing its capacity to support human life. According to J. Brooks Bouson, Atwood critiques shallow environmentalism and considers “deep ecology and radical environmentalism as she communicates in the MaddAddam trilogy her alarm about the environmental costs of our heedless destruction of nature, even as we are now living through a mass extinction event cause by humans” (2015, 2). If the passing time and the dawn of human civilization is marked by religious festivals and dinners of the God’s Gardeners, the following MaddAddam is framed by the optimistic mornings and breakfasts of human survivors. In the last book of the trilogy, Atwood proposes new rituals of eating, cooking and living to bring hope for survival.

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Works Cited Adams, Carol J. [1990] 2010. Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-vegetarian Critical Theory. New York and London: Continuum. Atwood, Margaret. 2005. “Writing Oryx and Crake.” In Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005, 284–287. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Atwood, Margaret. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Doubleday. Atwood, Margaret. 2009. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday. Barthes, Roland. 1979. “Toward a Psychosociology of Food Consumption.” In Food and Drink in History, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, 166– 173. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Beardsworth, A., A. Bryman, T. Keil, J. Goode, C. Haslam, and E. Lancashire. 2002. “Women, Men and Food: The Significance of Gender for Nutritional Attitudes and Choices.” British Food Journal 104 (7): 470–491. https://doi. org/10.1108/00070700210418767. Belasco, Warren. 2008. Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford, New York: Berg. Bouson, Brooks J. 2015. “A ‘Joke-filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 58 (51): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/002/9894/5573558. Brown, Jennifer. 2013. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carter, Angela. [1979] 2006. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. Falk, Pasi. 1994. The Consuming Body. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Foucault Foucault, Michel. [1976] 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Lapointe, Annette. 2014. “Woman Gave Names to All Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction.” In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, Tara Lee, 131–149. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. The Raw and the Cooked: Mytologiques, Vol. 1. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Mackintosh, Sophie. 2019. The Water Cure. London: Penguin.

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Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois. 2002. “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2008. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Probyn, Elspeth. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London and New York: Routledge. Prorokova-Konrad, Tatiana. 2021. “Veganism, Ecoethics, and Climate Change in Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ Trilogy.” In The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, edited by Laura Wright, 76–89. London and New York: Routledge. Rockoff, Marcus. 2015. “Don’t be such a meat-breath!: Food and Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” In Ethics of Sustainability Research, edited by Simon Meisch, Johannes Lundershausen, Leonie Bossert, Marcus Rockoff, 219–247. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Sahlins, Marshal. 2017. Stone Age Economics. London: Routledge. Spencer, Colin. 1995. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hannover and London: University Press of New England. Stein, Karen. 2013. “Surviving the Waterless Flood: Feminism and Ecofeminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and the Year of the Flood.” In Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 294–313. Ipswich: Salem Press. Taylor, Chloe. 2012. “Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10(4): 130-148. Wilson, Sharon Rose. 2013. “Postapocalyptic Vision: Flood Myths and Other Folklore in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” In Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 313–334. Ipswich: Salem Press. Wright, Laura. 2017. “Introducing the Vegan Studies.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24 (4): 727–736. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/isle/isx070.

CHAPTER 5

Eating and Storytelling: MaddAddam

Abstract The chapter focuses on hunger and cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. In the novel, hunger is not only a metaphorical, socio-cultural and emotional phenomenon; it is a very urgent, real and biological need. On the other hand, the refusal to eat can be a sign, not just of a wish for spiritual strength or holiness, but also of a loss of the will to live. The chapter examines rituals of storytelling and meal sharing that are crucial in the formation of human embodiment, community and identity, not only in the sense of biological survival. Keywords Margaret Atwood · MaddAddam · Hunger · Cannibalism · Storytelling · Ritual

The other egg she laid was full of words. But that egg hatched first, before the one with the animals in it, and you ate up many of the words, because you were hungry. (MA 290) ...dead farrow are eaten by pregnant mothers to provide more protein for growing infants, but adults, and especially adults of note, are contributed to the general ecosystem. (MA 373)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_5

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The closing novel of Atwood’s eponymous trilogy, MaddAddam, published in 2013, completes the narratives begun in the previous novels and shows the possibilities for human life in the post-apocalyptic age. As the Waterless Flood has swept away most of the human population, the situation of the survivors can be summarized as a “return to hunter-gathering (and scavenging) and limited cultivation, with limited technology, sharing the world with other animals (including genetically engineered species)” (Northover 2016, 91). This situation has arisen because human domination is over, and people are no longer alone at the top of the hierarchy. To survive and eat, the surviving humans have to find a new niche in which they can sustain themselves. The community of humans (and non-humans) tend to protect, feed, cure and provide companionship to each other. They also seek to nourish the others and to receive nourishment themselves, which can mean not just preparing food but also sharing meals, rituals and stories. The narrative of MaddAddam begins at “zero hour,” which marks also the beginning and the end of Snowman’s narrative in Oryx and Crake. It is the moment when Snowman approaches a group of humans: he looks at his broken watch, but the time is no more the time of humans. Snowman introduced us to this world as the narrator in Oryx and Crake. Toby, Ren and Amanda added to the narrative and revealed new perspectives in The Year of the Flood. In MaddAddam, Zeb’s voice joins them to recount how he and his brother Adam One came to be among the survivors of the Waterless Flood. They escape their sadistic father, preacher of the Church of PetrOleum and steal his money. Reverend turns out not to be Zeb’s biological father. But Zeb never tells Adam that they are not brothers. The brothers split to avoid their father’s revenge but remain in touch via the Internet. Zeb slips through identities as easily as changing coats: starting with an NGO that brings food leftovers to bears, he goes on to work for HealthWyzer, where he meets Glenn/Crake and Pilar, the future Gardener and Eve, and he even works for a while at Ren’s upscale brothel, Scales and Tails, where he kills his father using deadly HealthWyzer pills supplied by Pilar: “It has to be a new microbe. Looks like a flesh eater, only so speeded up!” (MA 307). Zeb complements Toby’s, Ren’s and Snowman’s narrative in a voice that is cynical and often comical, which prevents the novel from becoming monotonous. Oryx and Crake was the monologue of Snowman and the two female narrative voices in The Year of the Flood were interpolated with Gardeners’ hymns and Adam One’s sermons. Now they are joined not only by Zeb but also

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by the young Craker, Blackbeard: the dystopian tones and the utopian melodies of the Gardeners play polyphony in MaddAddam. Atwood fuses utopia and dystopia, individual voices and corporate mainstream to express her environmental anxieties and critique “our contemporary corporation-controlled and technologically driven world” (Stein 2013, 320). However, she also expresses hope that we can still modify and radically reconsider our greedy consumerism to restore, a more sustainable version of Paradice. In line with Moylan’s definition of “critical utopia,” Atwood’s MaddAddam novels “focus on the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives” (1986, 10–11). Atwood’s imperfect post-apocalyptic world reacts to the destructive tendencies of our contemporary situation. Her imagined future counts on the multiplicity of perspectives without imposing a monological and rigid utopian perfection.1 MaddAddam depicts shepherds and gardeners, pastoral imagery conventionally associated with utopias: heavenly utopias “[f]ed on visions of paradise and accounts of journey there. […] many of the paradises are reminiscent of garden cities” (Cuddon 2013, 957). Many dystopias, in contrast, are situated within “the nightmarish society” (Moylan 2000, 148). Atwood’s “ustopia” is a synthesis of the mostly urban techno-spaces of Oryx and Crake and the patches of green rooftop gardens in The Year of the Flood, which come together in the hybrid Paradice of MaddAddam. Atwood has written “ustopia,” her version of critical utopia in line with Russell Jacoby’s words: “[i]f the future defied representation, however, it did not defy hope. The iconoclastic utopians were utopians against the current. […] They kept their ears open for distant sounds of peace and joy, for a time when, as the prophet Isaiah said, ‘the lion shall eat straw like the ox’” (2005, xviii). In Atwood’s Paradice, liobams, pigoons and the Crakers eat grass and kudzu leaves together, albeit mainly because there is (almost) nothing to eat.

1 For further discussion of Atwood’s ustopia, see Labudova 2013. “Paradice Redesigned: Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Urban and Rural Spaces in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy.” Eger Journal of English Studies XIII: 27–36.

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5.1

Crisis in Paradice: Food and Hunger

Hunger is a constant threat in MaddAddam. After killing his would-be assassin, Chuck, (and eating his flesh), Zeb hikes miles and miles on an empty stomach. The lack of food makes him less alert and more susceptible to dreaming about food: “He’d stop worrying about bears […] he was longing to meet one, a big fat one he could sink his teeth. […] The brain was 100 per cent cholesterol, so he needed the boost, he hungered for it” (MA 80). Zeb’s story of eating bear is illustrated by vivid descriptions of food deprivation: dissolving protein, thinning of the heart, weakness. While telling the story of cutting off Chuck’s fattest part to eat it, Zeb keeps stroking Toby’s “bum” (MA 70). Such juxtaposition of hunger for food and hunger for sex is very typical in Atwood’s book. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, being able to do without food when necessity arises is the sign of an inner strength. We need food to stay alive, but the excessive craving for it needs to be held in control, which in turn affects lust for sex as well, since physical pleasure in involved. These two pleasures of sex and food are related. (Smith 2004, 322–323)

Both sex and food mean life and survival: as Atwood points out in the part where Zeb’s father dies, “death made some people hungry” (MA 311). The ominous shadow of hunger hangs over everything after the Waterless Flood. When Snowman loses his appetite because he is wounded and sick, Ren is reminded of how the body and health could benefit from her sect’s fasting practices: “You can go a long time without food, […] they did fasts at the Gardeners? You can go for days. Weeks” (MA 101). The God’s Gardeners’ fasting resembles a religious ritual, analogous to early Christian practices. Through the concept of the Fallow state, the Gardeners envisaged a form of fasting and meditation as self-treatment for trauma. Toby hopes this can help Amanda heal: “the theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe” (MA 30). As the pangs of hunger are frequent and forceful, to refuse food deliberately is seen as a test of self-discipline. “Early Christians who wanted to attain true holiness and piety ate very sparingly in their efforts to transcend the flesh and purify the soul” (Spencer 1995, 118).

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In MaddAddam, however, hunger is not only a metaphorical, sociocultural and emotional phenomenon; above all, it is a very urgent, real and biological need. The refusal to eat can be a sign, not just of a wish for spiritual strength or holiness, but also of a loss of the will to live. This happens to Amanda, who suffered at the hands of the Painballers and then discovers that one of her rapists may have made her pregnant. Her body refuses food, and she wishes to “drink some kind of poison” (MA 216). Her loss of appetite is caused by her emotional state following her traumatic rape. Lupton claims that even in such a mental state, “hunger may still be experienced as a gnawing feeling, an awareness of an empty stomach, but the desire to eat is stifled; food may even appear nauseating” (1996, 33). Amanda throws up her food, she refuses to eat breakfast and wishes to die, or at least, kill her unborn child. As Toby sums up her emotional reaction, Amanda’s stomach is “death in life” (MA 216). Amanda’s trauma (and pregnancy) triggers an eating disorder. To understand this point of view, I apply Kristeva’s theory of abjection which might be understood as intuitive disgust at the body’s processes and insecurity about boundaries. Amanda is pregnant after being raped which emphasizes the non-existent distinction between the uncontaminated body and the abject, she wishes to throw up (and throw away). In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines abjection as “violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond that scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (1982, 1). Amanda’s body has been sadistically abused thus making the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body insecure. Amanda is not even sure if she is pregnant with one of the sadistic Painballers or the humanoid Crakers. Such an ambiguity is in line with Kristeva’s concept of ambiguity: “It is […] not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 4). MaddAddam offers many other moments of abjection. According to Kristeva, abjection encompasses bodily functions and fluids—such as certain foods, vomit, excrement, urine, pus, semen, blood and mucus—which cause disgust. Abjection is felt through the bodily sensations: repulsion, vomiting, disgust, shame, crying and sweating. Drawing on Kristeva’s writings, Kelly Oliver argues that food itself can be abject:

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It is food, what is taken into the body, along with excrement, what is expelled from the body, which calls into question the borders of the body. […] How can we imagine ourselves as separate bodies when we eat that which is not-us, which in turn becomes us? How can we imagine ourselves as separate bodies when we expel part of us, which in turn becomes notus?(1992, 71)

Amanda’s pregnant and traumatized body cannot claim its boundaries and her starvation is a reaction to the rape. Towards the ending, it appears that Amanda reclaims her body and improves her mood. She returns from the abject through the care of her friends and Crakers. Her HybridCraker baby’s name is Pilaren. Atwood frequently juxtaposes images of food and the abject. To highlight the power of the abject, Atwood mixes the processes of eating and digesting. For example, Zeb often finds sandwiches remains in washrooms: “I did find sandwich remains in those boxes: the odd bacon rind, the odd cheesefood fragment” (MA 321). However, the most climatic association of food and the abject is presented in the scene with Reverend’s dead body. The disgusting death of Reverend, Adam’s and Zeb’s father is depicted in terms of hostile food metaphors: “raspberry mousse” (MA 306), “raspberry soda,” (MA 333), “our dad in the form of soup stock” (MA 315), however, it is also juxtaposed with eating and food: […] while she and March the python broke the lamentable news to the three OilCorps execs, having first ordered frozen daiquiris on the house […] and a platter of mini-fish-fingers, PeaPod Good-as-Real Scallops […] some Gourmet’s Holiday Poutine, and a plate of deep-fried NeverNetted Shrimps, a new lab-grown splice. (MA 310)

Rev’s violent and repulsive death, in which his body has dissolved completely, is Zeb’s revenge for Rev’s sadism and abuse. Rev used to force Zeb “drink piss” (MA 113) and “eat the contents of said potty” (MA 77) or to eat his own vomit (MA 77). Rev’s fascination with sadistic porn sites in which women are forced to eat their excrements and are decapitated is an extreme manifestation of abjection. Paradoxically, in Rev’s household there are very strict eating/dining rituals: “Sit up straight, don’t squirm, eat properly, your hand is not a fork, don’t wipe your face on your shirt, do what your father says, say yes sir and no sir, and so on” (MA 114). However, these rituals are established only to enforce Rev’s aggressive control over his sons. In general, cultural rituals enable the policing of

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ambiguous boundaries by clearly defining clean/dirty, orderly/disorderly, pure/polluting. The MaddAddam trilogy often subverts and breaks these boundaries, natural/artificial included. Zeb is comfortable transgressing all kinds of boundaries, which is underlined by a series of identity and bodily changes he undergoes. After Rev’s cruel tutelage, he can dissociate and accept not only a new name but also disgusting food of various origin, including human flesh. On the other hand, Adam One, Zeb’s brother, marks very rigid boundaries between clean/dirty. Adam One establishes what diet and lifestyle is ecological (not polluting) and what food is pure (ethically and ecologically). When Adam and Zeb secretly meet in a café to discuss Zeb’s change of identity, Zeb recognizes that Adam considers Happimocha impure: “Happimocha and Adam didn’t go together: Zeb was curious to see if he’d actually drink any of the stuff—something so impure” (MA 190), and drinks the beverage instead of Adam so as not to draw attention in a dangerous pleeb. Zeb crosses the boundaries between clean and unclean as well as civilized and savage when he is forced to eat human meat. According to Jennifer Brown, “[c]annibalism creates ambiguity because it both reduces the body to mere meat and elevates it to a highly desirable, symbolic entity; it is both disgusting, and the most rarefied of gastronomic tastes” (2013, 3). As the categories of prey and predators are uncertain in MaddAddam, the ambiguity of cannibalism is intensified as the cannibal also becomes the object of appetite. Zeb is being hunted like a prey by his father, and as a result, he becomes a cannibal to survive. He faces a dilemma: to eat or to be eaten. In The Taste for Ethics, Christian Coff sees as “the tragedy of eating. Eating always implies sacrificing something, eating must always have a victim, and there is always something or someone who has to die when others eat. Hunger leads to the ‘dilemma of eating’: when we eat we kill—but if we do not eat, we will die” (2006, 12). Zeb’s hunger can only lead to death: his or somebody else’s. Zeb’s cannibalism can be classified as “accidental or survival cannibalism (also known as ‘obligatory’ or ‘emergency ration’)” (2004, 300). Zeb consumes Chuck’s flesh only to avoid starvation. However, MaddAddam also presents another form of cannibalism as practised by the Painballers. I suggest that Painballers are exocannibalists: “humans who eat human beings who are outside of their own group. Exocannibalism is also known as ‘warfare cannibalism’, ‘aggressive cannibalism’, or ‘juridicial cannibalism’. Exocannibals consume their enemies in an

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attempt to acquire their strength” (2004, 299). Obviously, there is also some hint of contempt as people generally select food that is “below us on the food chain” (Smith 2004, 300). The Painballers sadistically kill Oates and ritualistically eat his inner organs: “They ate my little brother’s fucking kidneys! They butchered him like a Mo’Hair!” (MA 368) To Painballers, eating the dead body of their enemy is a way to further humiliate him and reinforce their power position. As Kristen Guest claims “[…] the cannibal, long a figure associated with absolute alterity and used to enforce boundaries between a civilized ‘us’ and savage ‘them,’ may […] be more productively read as a symbol of the permeability, or instability, of such boundaries” (2001, 2). Nevertheless, the discourse of anthropophagy has tended to criticize and subvert the traditional dogmas.

5.2 Coffee, Stories and Funerals: Food and Rituals When Adam One becomes leader of the veg(etari)an cult, the God’s Gardeners, they establish rituals around the feasts of a number of ecological and religious saints, these rituals are always associated with specific food items, eating or non-eating. These rules are in line with human cultural and religious practices: all religions and cultures distinguish proper manners for food and dining. The cultural process thus raises the threshold of disgust, producing procedures of bodily control, food preparation, serving and eating. As Norbert Elias argues these regimes should be considered in terms of ritualized or institutionalized feelings of displeasure, distaste, disgust, fear, or shame, feelings which have been socially nurtured under quite specific conditions and which are constantly reproduced, not solely but mainly because they have become institutionally embedded in a particular ritual, in particular forms of conduct. (1978, 12)

The God’s Gardeners obsessive ritualism that binds specific food and specific religious holidays becomes helpful to Toby, who uses it as a calendar to strengthen her memory of the passing of time and events. MaddAddam also features more secular rituals linked to food. Many key moments revolve around breakfast, the so-called most important meal of the day. Snowman’s last meal is breakfast, which harks back to the beginning of Oryx and Crake, where we first meet him having a lonely

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post-apocalyptic breakfast: “he sits down on the ground and begins to eat the mango” (OC 5). Snowman quotes some old colonialism book about keeping routines, morale and sanity and in MaddAddam, the residents of the cobb house (former Gardeners and MaddAddamites) have breakfast together every morning, which resembles an old-fashioned family gathering minus several routines: no shower, no wardrobe hesitations, no make-up and cosmetics. An important part of the breakfast ritual is the drinking of coffee—even though the cobb-house residents have no coffee. Rebecca offers hot coffee, although only “what they’ve all agreed to call coffee” (MA 34). Even if it has no caffeine, no taste and you cannot have it with cream, they obsessively request Rebecca’s “burnt twigs and roots and crap” (MA 34). All the human survivors nostalgically cling to the morning coffee ritual, which seems to be unbreakable: “You really, really, really need some coffee. Any kind of coffee. Dandelion root. Happicuppa. Black mud, if that’s all there is” (MA 31). Although this blend of roasted roots has an “undertaste of ashes” (MA 205), the cobb-house residents prefer to discuss their plans over a cup of coffee in the same way as families and co-workers used to in the pre-apocalyptic past. Traditionally, as Lupton argues, “coffee […] was represented as a stimulant, preparing individuals for the day ahead” (1996, 35–6). In MaddAddam, Rebecca’s caffeine-free coffee is believed to deliver stimulation via a ritual. The coffee break is also an opportunity for the cobb-house residents to stimulate themselves in refreshing discussions over their steaming cups and breakfast table. Norbert Elias points out that table manners used to function as a crucial element of social distinction, but in the post-apocalyptic world, eating habits do not point to a distinction of classes but, rather, species: the Crakers eat kudzu leaves, grass and they recycle their excrement, pigoons are omnivores with occasional, very specific, cannibalism. Pigoons have very complex rules of cannibalism: “dead farrows are eaten by pregnant mothers to provide more protein for growing infants, but adults, and especially adults of note, are contributed to the general ecosystem” (MA 373). And the humans belonging to the cobb-house community eat cooked meals prepared by Rebecca. In contrast to humans’ problematic eating practices (eating pigoon ham is a potential cannibalism), the Crakers are better adaptable to the post-apocalyptic world. Kudzu vine is their popular plant of choice: the green plant “gets everywhere. It’s tireless, it can grow a foot in twelve

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hours, it surges up and over anything in its way like a green tsunami” (MA 209). They also do not have breakfast rituals, they “graze like herbivores” and “eat […] droppings” (MA 92). For Blackbeard, Toby wants to explain what breakfast is: “‘Is it a fish?’ says the boy. ‘This breakfast?’ ‘Sometimes,’ says Toby. ‘But for breakfast today, I will eat part of an animal. An animal with fur. Perhaps I will eat its leg. There will be a smelly bone inside. You wouldn’t want to see such a smelly bone, would you?’ she says. That will surely get rid of him” (MA 93). After the humans give up pigoon meat, they move towards Craker-style diet which includes not only kudzu pancakes, but also kudzu fritters, kudzu salads, even (possibly) kudzu wine. The distinctions between these groups can be seen in line with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of food practices. In The Raw and the Cooked, LéviStrauss elaborates on a central claim that cooking is a process in which raw food is transformed into a cooked product: “we thus begin to understand the truly essential place occupied by cooking in native thought: not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes” (1983, 164). Lévi-Strauss offers a culinary triangle, in which certain foodstuffs can be located (sometimes in all the forms of cooked, raw and rotten). He suggests that “the cooked is a cultural transformation of the raw” and claims that “the rotted is a natural transformation” (1983, 142). Drawing on this, then, the post-apocalyptic society includes the following categories and oppositions: the Crakers represent nature, they consume raw food, but are becoming more and more associated with culture not only because of Blackbeard’s writing but also, symbolically, by ritualistically cooking Snowman’s fish. The group of Maddammites who co-operated with Crake and helped him to design the Crakers, refer to Crakers using nature/plant metaphors, e.g. “walking potatoes” (MA 19) or “vegetables” (MA 19). When discussing their irritating singing, Manatee defends his work on their voice box: “The singing was not my idea […] we couldn’t erase it without turning them into zucchinis” (MA 43). These references underline the association of the Crakers with nature. The cobb-house survivors consume carefully cooked meals that are clearly associated with culture. The Painballers are defined through their practice of roasting (rakunk and pigoon) meat, which is striking since Lévi-Strauss associates roasting with men and boiling with women. Moreover, the Painballers consume dead/rotten (human and animal)

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meat, which places them closer to the realm of nature. Thus, while the Painballers’s human state shifts towards nature, the Crakers move towards culture. Crake tried to prevent this and warned Snowman: Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. (OC 361)

Clearly, the signals of culture, civilization and symbolic thinking can be traced back to more fundamental practices: to cooking and eating.

5.3

Kiss Your Morning Toast Goodbye: Food and Manners Must Evolve

As mentioned in the previous section, food, eating and cooking practices hold a peculiar power in defining the boundaries between in-group and out-group. Crossing or shifting these boundaries would then signify a change in the status of an individual and/or group. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of cooking explains the opposition between culture and nature, between the raw and the cooked, the cooked and the roasted, which enables us to see the slight shifts in the status of the Crakers and their introduction to rituals. The Crakers’ shift towards ritual and mythological thinking is already underway in Oryx and Crake, thanks to Snowman establishing a ritual of weekly fish. “‘This is the one fish chosen for you tonight,’ […] ‘This is the fish Oryx gives you’” (OC 59). In exchange for the food gift, Snowman tell them stories of their origin, of the Paradice, Crake and Oryx. Although the Crakers find Snowman’s appetite for fish beastly, they always prepare the fish according to his instructions and preferences because they are hungry for his stories. Snowman/Snowman later regrets not establishing a more frequent fish ritual. While Snowman/Snowman values the ritual of storytelling as a way to ensure his bodily survival, it also provides nourishment on a more intellectual level because telling stories keep him tethered to his humanity. In MaddAddam, Toby inherits the role of myth-teller/myth-maker for the Crakers from Snowman after she puts on his Red Sox baseball cap and receives the ritual fish from them. As Mohr points out: “Trading stories

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for something in return is an ancient coin” (2015, 296). In my reading, it is not only a shift towards abstract and symbolic thinking that Crake tried hard to prevent, it is also a shift from their peaceful, herbivore living to learning how to kill (fish) and cook, and later how to tell a story, read and write. When Blackbeard inherits the storyteller cap from Snowman and Toby, he insists on keeping the ritual of eating fish, but in a symbolic form: “I am putting on the red hat of Snowman-the-Snowman. See? It is on my head. And I have to put the fish into my mouth, and take it out again” (MA 388). In the previous section, we saw how important the breakfast ritual was for the cobb-house community. It is also a lens through which to show the challenges humans face in the post-apocalyptic world and their gradual adaptation to less anthropocentric conditions. It was mentioned that the breakfast ritual harks back to the family life of earlier times. This nostalgic tone is intensified by expensive antique plates, real crystal glasses and linen table napkins. However, the nostalgic re-enactment of traditional breakfast meals and beautiful antique china can provide only temporary comfort because of the other material and circumstantial limitations. As Rebecca comments “I can see the day coming when we’re not gonna be bothered with dishes anymore, we’ll just eat with our hands” (MA 34). In Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture, Parasecoli argues that, [t]he correct behavior at the table during meals, the control of bodily functions, even the gestures related to eating, would all be the result of three converging factors: biological constraints and needs, psychological elements such as personal idiosyncrasies and styles, and the social environment, which exerts its influence through training, education, status, prestige, fashion. (2008, 73)

With dwindling material sources, limited psychological motivation and, more importantly, the absence of social and cultural regulative prescriptions, table manners could change very quickly. Breakfast and dinner table rituals, as the MaddAddam survivors remember them, are ready to be broken. In Zeb’s words: “Then you can kiss your morning toast goodbye” (MA 32). Rebecca already wonders how she would bake bread without baking soda. The limited breakfast menu emphasizes the humans’ material as well as technological limitations: Mo’Hair milk, kudzu pancakes, leftovers from dinners, gleaned and scavenged supermarket items, boxes of cereals and cans and Rebecca’s ingenious food

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substitutes as well as pigoon and dog meat: ham, bacon and chops. Toby comments on the sudden break in the vegetarian diet: “it hadn’t taken them long to backslide on the Gardener Vegivows” (MA 34). Although emergency meat eating is something the God’s Gardeners were trained for by Zeb in Urban Bloodshed Limitation class, the pigoon dishes “create a problematic illusion of past abundance on a number of levels,” as Shelley Boyd observes (2015, 167). Not only is it a violation of the Vegivows, but it is also a transgression of the taboo against cannibalism because pigoons are genetically engineered pigs that carry human DNA. Thus, by eating pigoon ham, the survivors nostalgically mimic not only the breakfast ritual but also “western culture’s unhealthy and systemic commitment to over-consumption” (DiMarco 2011, 135). Fortunately, they choose to re-negotiate these eating habits that would only “lead to entropy and decline” (Boyd 2015, 167) and they give up their position as a sole apex predator in exchange for a pact with the pigoons at the end of MaddAddam. The alliance of humans, pigoons and Crakers (who are represented by Blackbeard the interpreter) fights the Painballers, who see themselves as hunters entitled to the meat of humans as well as pigoons and other animals. This alliance introduces a new food taboo: the pigoons will no longer dig up the cobb-house garden and the humans will not kill and eat pigoons. The meat taboo is taken seriously as no bacon is served during a war breakfast, only “soybits that have been soaked in Mo’Hair milk and sweetened with sugar” (MA 341). Lupton suggests that “food consumption habits are not simply tied to biological needs but serve to mark boundaries between social classes, geographic regions, nations, cultures, genders, life- cycle stages, religions and occupations, to distinguish rituals, traditions, festivals, seasons and times of day” (1996, 1). Clearly, food rituals and shared meals are crucial in the formation of human embodiment, community and identity, not only in the sense of biological survival. MaddAddam depicts several rituals that help to establish the community of human survivors of the Waterless flood. Toby and Zeb discuss a wedding ritual, called a Partnership ceremony that the God’s Gardeners practised: “[w]here you jumped over a bonfire together and then traded green branches while everyone stood in a circle, and then they had some kind of pious banquet” (MA 332). Toby and Zeb eventually have a wedding ceremony like this, but since it is retold by the Craker Blackbeard, no banquet is mentioned (unless the people eat meat, Crakers do not notice the eating habits of people). Besides the

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wedding, there are several other rites mentioned, the most significant of which are funerals. After a God’s Gardener dies, they are buried and a tree or a bush is planted over them. For Adam One, Zeb chooses a native crabapple tree for its symbolic and also practical value as “its apples would have the added virtue of making a good jelly” (MA 374). For Snowman they pick a Kentucky coffeetree which produces berries, suitable as a coffee substitute. Thus, Snowman would be always a part of their coffee ritual: “many in our group would be pleased by that, as the roasted-root coffee is beginning to pall” (MA 374). A good example of building a multispecies community by sharing food sources is the oak tree planted on top of Oates: “The Pigoons were delighted by that, as later on there would be acorns” (MA 374). The Pigoons have their own rites. They heap the dead Pigoon with flowers and branches and stand silently together. The funerals of Adam One and Snowman after the Battle with the Painballers are also a new ritual that the people, the Pigoons and the Crakers share: “The Pigoons wished to carry Adam and Snowman to the site for us, as a sign of friendship and interspecies cooperation. They collected more flowers and ferns, which they piled on top of the bodies. Then we walked to the site in procession. The Crakers sang all the way” (MA 373). Since the roles of human hunter and animal prey become quite interchangeable (humans hunt humans, but wolvogs, pigoons and liobams can also be deadly predators), the status of the human species has to be re-negotiated. As Dunja Mohr suggests, “[b]uilding a multispecies society necessitates […] a pact between human and non-human animals” (2017, 56). The pact between the pigoons and people is negotiated thanks to the translation skills of a Craker called Blackbeard: “they would keep the pact they made with Toby, and with Zeb, and they would also not dig up their garden any more. Or eat the honey of the bees” (MA 370). In return, the cobb-house residents have to give up pigoon meat. Chloe Taylor suggests that “in The Year of the Flood (2009), male and female members of the religious cult, God’s Gardeners, start out as idealistic vegetarians, but by the end of the novel are killing and eating animals to survive, and are more joyful as hunters than in their pacifist cult days” (2012, 140). However, they learn to empathize and communicate with non-human species in MaddAddam and give up meat-eating practices to ensure peaceful coexistence with pigoons. Another pact is negotiated between the Crakers and humans to prevent sexual violence and misunderstanding. The Crakers are taught to “be

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respectful, and always ask first, to see if a woman is really blue or is just smelling blue, where there is a question about blue things” (MA 386). Everyone must change their old species-boundaries, taboos and hierarchies to survive. Mohr suggests that a possible utopian future needs “an adaptation to a cooperative interspecies approach away from anthropocentrism, just as the Craker/human collective fathering of offspring” (2015, 295). In the trilogy, the family life of the human characters tends to be fragmented and dysfunctional and the role of the family is taken over by the community: the community shares meals and educates children. The Crakers’ have a multiple parentage or “biological multiple ‘fourfatherhood’” (Mohr 2017, 57). It is significant that such biological entanglement is reflected in the formal interwoven narrative: Snowman is a single narrator in Oryx and Crake, he ritualistically tells a story, exchanging it for food. Ren’s and Toby’s voices sing with Adam One’s voice and the choir of Gardeners in The Year of the Flood. Moreover, Toby shifts the “monologic aspects of Oryx and Crake, masculine, pessimistic and tragic,” (2016, 93) as Northover observes, and adds her voice to (the sometimes comic) polyphony of the Gardeners. The Gardeners share their religious stories over their vegetarian dinners. In MaddAddam, Toby, together with Snowman’s red baseball cap inherits the role of storyteller and myth-maker, which is later passed on to the Craker Blackbeard, who learns how to read and symbolically eat the ritual fish. In “‘When Species Meet’,” Mohr argues that “the narrative shifts from an anthropocentric view to a post-humanimal perspective” (2017, 57). And although the nonhumanoid animals, including the pigoons, do not have a voice, the Crakers provide a communication link between them and humans. Sharing the earth and its food requires communication and cohabitation, and thus a “cacophony of voices” (MA 12) must negotiate ways to cooperate. As Mohr observes: “Initially ferocious attackers and competitors for food, the pigoons offer to cooperate in the Painballer chase, if the humans stop killing and eating them, whereas the Crakers reject any involvement in violence” (2017, 58). Respecting the Crakers’ boundaries (since they are wired like that by Crake) is also a step towards creating a multi-species community based on tolerance and mutual understanding.

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5.4

Eating the Words: Food and Mouth

MaddAddam is bracketed by tellings of the Crakers’ origin myth, the Story of the Egg. Eggs have been a common motif in Atwood’s speculative writing but they do not feature much in this post-apocalyptic world. They crop up only in Toby’s nostalgic dreams: “From the kitchen comes the sound of her mother’s voice, calling; her father, answering; the smell of eggs frying” (MA 25). The post-apocalypse humans never consume eggs and decide they are potentially dangerous and disgusting: “for the sake of a few gull eggs, which are likely green and taste like fish guts anyway” (MA 206). The fact that they never eat eggs and that eggs are referred to only as “eggshells” (MA 359) and as an (empty) object where the Crakers were created, suggests a dystopic quality in their lives. Once a powerful symbol of life and hope, in MaddAddam’s post-apocalyptic times, the egg is now empty, broken and (probably) green because of the wild growing trees and plants in the Paradice. Nevertheless, the Story of the Egg is retold and evolves. It is first told by Snowman in Oryx and Crake. At the beginning of MaddAddam, Toby attempts her first version of it, and at the end the Craker storyteller Blackbeard gives a revised telling. In the original story as told by Snowman, the greedy Children of Crake eat up all the words and since they leave nothing for the animals, “that is why the animals can’t talk” (OC 96) In MaddAddam, Toby modifies the myth: “Some of the words fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds and the fish did see them, and ate them up […] so it was sometimes hard for people to understand them.” (MA 290) Thus, Toby emphasizes the importance of interspecies communication as well as the shift away from anthropocentricity to a multi-species community. And the Crakers present a valuable connection between the animals and the people, and as there are some leftovers in the egg, the stories can be reconstructed in new ways. The evolution of the Story of the Egg provides the audience with Sheherazadean hope in life and survival. Boyd suggests that “the power of leftovers similarly applies, but in a different way, to the remaining human survivors of MaddAddam, who will likely fade away but not without being incorporated into the new world” (2015, 176). Snowman, Adam One, Zeb, Toby pass away, however, their stories are retold by Blackbeard, and, hopefully, by other storytellers.

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It is not only food that empowers us, transforms us, and heals us; words also have a power to change us and our lives. Eating words is a process of hoping for (some) future of the cobb-house residents: the only way for them to survive is to cooperate with the other species. Only by breaking old habits of consumption can they find a sustainable life. With the BlyssPlus Pill, Crake originally envisioned a break in the chain of human life that would annihilate the species: “All it takes […] is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. […]. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever” (OC 223). This break is in line with Lawrence Buell’s argument that “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (1996, 285). However, Crake did not envisage the end of all intelligent life. He just wanted to stop the human habits of consumption as we know them. In place of rampant carnivores and predators, he imagines vegan Crakers. Atwood’s apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives offer hope in a slightly different way—there is definitely a break but humanity can still construct a bridge across it. As Canavan suggests, “Atwood […] attempts to somehow bridge this fundamental critical disjuncture: to imagine a future that is frightening (as ecological science tells us it must be) without at the same time being final (as it so often seems it will be)—a doomsday” (2012, 155). The MaddAddam world is a radical break from endless feasting on a devastated and enslaved nature, but also a hopeful peek into a less greedy and more balanced future. As a last thought, consider Greg Garrard’s observation, “only when we imagine the planet has a future are we likely to take responsibility for it” (2004, 107). Atwood can imagine a world that could succeed our present civilization, but it is up to us to take responsibility for it.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 2005. “Writing Oryx and Crake.” In Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005, 284–287. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Boyd, Shelley. 2015. “Ustopian Breakfasts: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. Utopian Studies 26 (1): 160–181. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies. 26.1.0160. Brown, Jennifer. 2013. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Buell, Lawrence. 1996. The Environmental Imagination. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Boston: Harvard UP. Canavan, Gerry. 2012. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2): 138–159. https://doi. org/10.1080/10436928.2012.676914. Coff, Christian. 2006. The Taste for Ethics: An Ethic of Food Consumption. Tanslated by Edward Broadbridge. Springer. Cuddon, J. A., ed. 2013. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DiMarco, Danette. 2011. “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.” College Literature 38 (4): 134–155. https://doi.org/10.1353/ lit.2011.0038. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization. Basil: Blackwell. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. Guest, Kristen, ed. 2001. Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity. New York: State University of New York Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press. Labudova, Katarina. 2013. “Paradice Redesigned: Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Urban and Rural Spaces in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Eger Journal of English Studies XIII: 27–36. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. The Raw and the Cooked. Mytologiques, vol. 1. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Mohr, Dunja, M. 2015. “Eco-Dystopia and Biotechnology: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013).” In Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classic-New Tendencies-Model Interpretations, edited by Echard Voights and Alessandra Boller, 283–302. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Mohr, Dunja. 2017. “‘When Species Meet’: Beyond Posthuman Boundaries and Interspeciesism—Social Justice and Canadian Speculative Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 37: 40–64. Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demands the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, Westview Press.

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Northover, R. A. 2016. “Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Studia Neophilologica 88 (1): 81–95. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00393274.2015.1096044. Oliver, Kelly. 1992. “Nourishing the Speaking Subject: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Abominable Food and Women.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, edited by Deane W. Curting and Lisa M. Heldke, 68–85. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Parasecoli, Fabio. 2008. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Smith, Andrew. 2004. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. Oxford University Press. Spencer, Colin. 1995. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hannover and London: University Press of New England. Stein, Karen. 2013. “Surviving the Waterless Flood: Feminism and Ecofeminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and the Year of the Flood.” In Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, 294–313. Ipswich: Salem Press. Taylor, Chloe. 2012. “Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10 (4): 130–148.

CHAPTER 6

Junk Food and Prison Food: The Heart Goes Last

Abstract In The Heart Goes Last, food imagery and food metaphors are used to illustrate the genre switches: dystopian reality is illustrated by hunger, scarcity of satisfying food, dry and stale leftovers of junk food, while one of the novel’s master strokes of grotesquery is to have its centre of evil, Positron prison, serve haute cuisine. The chapter discusses the food imagery in Consilience/Positron prison as it points to several functions of food in the text: it helps to measure time through the very controlled rituals of breakfast, lunches, dinners and special occasions (like a funeral or a date night), and its quality illustrates the atmosphere as well as the relationships between characters. Keywords Margaret Atwood · The Heart Goes Last · Junk food · Prison food · Alcohol · Farce · Dystopia

Dangerous chemicals in the chickens, and everyone was eating them? Surely not, those chickens were organic. (HGL 227) In the evening, after four hours of towel-folding and the communal dinner – shepherd’s pie, spinach salad, raspberry mousse – Charmaine joins the knitting circle. (HGL 120)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_6

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The Heart Goes Last is a version of dystopia intertwined with other popular genres, including spy thriller, fairy tale, prison narrative, mob and Gothic fiction, and, surprisingly, grotesque, satire and comedy with Shakespearean resonances. Coral Ann Howells suggests that the hybrid form and fantastical plot twists “offer an updated version of Atwood’s genre-crossing strategies, exploiting the appeal of popular cultural material in order to engage readers’ interest in her satirical analyses of North American mass consumerism and her warnings against uncontrolled corporate power” (Howells 2017, 304). In this novel, food imagery and food metaphors are used to illustrate the genre switches: dystopian reality is illustrated by hunger, scarcity of satisfying food, dry and stale leftovers of junk food, while one of the novel’s master strokes of grotesquery is to have its centre of evil, Positron prison, serve haute cuisine. In contrast to both the Gilead novels, where food is old-fashioned to illustrate the Puritan inspiration of the Gileadean regime, and the MaddAddam trilogy, where food is designed to dazzle with technological innovations, in The Heart Goes Last, the food of the dystopian parts reminds us of the cheap junk food diet of today’s population, which makes it disturbingly realistic. In The Heart Goes Last , Atwood seems to be less interested in speculating about future dystopian scenarios than in elaborating the “possible disastrous consequence of the financial crash in 2008” (Howells 2017, 305). Stan and Charmaine, a young, married middle-class couple, have been reduced to sleeping in their car in dangerous post-industrial urban parking lots. They are left homeless after losing their jobs and house. The combination of insecurity, sleep deprivation, discomfort, lack of hygiene and, most of all, hunger and dissatisfaction, makes them join a new social experiment called Positron. Positron is a Faustian bargain: half of the time you live in the sweet safe little Utopian town of Consilience modelled on the 1950s American Dream, while the other half is spent incarcerated in prison. However, the Consilience town is just a more comfortable prison dressed up as the American dream: behind the omnipresent white picket fences, there is banned music, no contact with the outside world and censorship of the news. As their manipulative propaganda suggests: “[…] Isn’t it a human right to have a job? Ed believes it is! And enough to eat, and a decent place to live, which Consilience provides – those are surely human rights!” (HGL 147) The dystopian aspects of the Positron experiment are gradually revealed to include corruption, rigid control, neurosurgery, loss of individual rights, institutionalized executions and institutional power. This arrangement brings safety and full employment,

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and, of course, profit to some until the evidence is smuggled out by Stan (in a costume of Elvis Presley-themed sex-bot) on a flash drive. In the world of Positron, the inmates are subjected to strict discipline, allegedly to ensure its (pretentiously described) goals of safety, employment and peace. Foucauldian discipline is employed to control every aspect of life to produce subjected inhabitants and an ideal society. According to Foucault: Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to the permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility. (1995, 198)

Discipline and control are central to life in Consilience/Positron: the inhabitants are indoctrinated into the corporate ideology and practice selfdiscipline and self-censorship based on constant surveillance, the vague guidelines that the management issues instead of orders, and the ultimate threat of undefined disappearance. The brain modifications are secret, this is how the state controls the rebels and produces brain-modified slaves like Aurora. We soon learn that the disobedient inmates and/or nonconformists are executed using the Special Procedure that Charmaine performs: “Granted, it’s only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. […] It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that” (HGL 85). Charmaine demonstrates exemplary skill in navigating this corporate discipline, overcoming all her misgivings, even to the point of following instructions to kill her husband, Stan.

6.1

Starving for You: Food and Romance

There are many rules that the inhabitants need to follow, with compliance being enforced by continuous manipulation, propaganda and surveillance. Even so, small acts of resistance accumulate. If we read the novel against its literary predecessor Nineteen Eighty-Four, it suggests an explanation for the need for the strict regulation of sexuality. Food and sex are biological necessities, and they are usually associated with the private space, which the dystopian system might have difficulty in controlling. Like the

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Ingsoc regime in 1984, the Positron management wish to keep private space to a minimum by limiting the activities for which privacy is sought and redirecting people’s energy into the collective project. However, this authoritarian narrative is subverted. In The Handmaid’s Tale, there are hardly any characters who are not secretly and privately rebelling against the strict sexual policy of Gilead or flouting its rules. Likewise, neither Charmaine nor Stan are completely loyal to the Project. Although it is forbidden to have contact with your Alternate (who lives in your house while you are in prison), Charmaine falls in love with Max, and here Atwood relieves the dystopian gloom with her dark humour and some soft porn scenes: Max’s wife takes revenge and re-stages Max and Charmaine’s sex scenes with Stan, Charmaine’s husband. In her comparative analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Howells discusses Atwood’s genre revision of the dystopian tradition. She sees Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of their “main literary models” (Howells 2006, 164–5). Howells claims that Atwood’s uses a female narrator as a strategy which “reverses the structural relations between public and private worlds” of masculine dystopian discourse such as Orwell’s where the narrative is focalized through a male protagonist whose chief concern is “public policies and institutions of state oppression” (2006, 164). Atwood’s novel is also very Huxleyan: the way that they are supposed to feel good at all the time in Consilience/Positron is similar to using the drug soma in Huxley’s Brave New World to make people feel happy. Plus, the brain manipulative surgery is similar to the manipulative techniques used in Brave New World. In Huxley’s novel, everyone is conditioned to “work for everyone else” (Huxley 2007, 64), moreover, the embryos are chemically and physically manipulated into specific developmental hierarchies. Huxley makes use of hypnopaedia which is similar to brainwashing and propaganda used in Atwood’s novel. In The Heart Goes Last , the most significant revisions of the masculine dystopian paradigm are, I argue, the central place given to food and Charmaine’s deviation from the Positron regulations on sexual activities and partners. It is in fact the entry into sexual intrigue, and the friction between Positron’s efforts to control and profit from sexuality that create the cracks through which Stan and Charmaine will ultimately escape. It is interesting to compare the Gileadean regime from The Handmaid’s Tale on this point. It also allowed certain safety valves for sexuality such as the Jezebel’s night club, but without the apparatus for the construction and

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distribution of sexbots and with leaders more in control of their sexual urges than Ed, the chances of successful escape would be much lower. The sex scenes of The Heart Goes Last are played in a variety of registers. Charmaine describes her relationship with Max in terms of old-fashioned, sentimental romances while Max is using the raw, basic vocabulary of modern-day porn. Stan imagines himself as an irresistible stud for an insatiable Jessica but ends up as Jocelyn’s prisoner, experiencing porn from the perspective of a jaded performer. The cumulative effect is one of comic absurdity. As Howells points out: “Atwood’s dystopia comes to resemble a darkly comic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a place of illusion, masquerade, and mistaken identities” (2017, 306). Atwood’s dystopia has farcical undertones which are supported by enactments of sexual fantasies. The shift to the farce is underlined by images of food, prison food fights, prison feasts and alcohol orgies.

6.2 Dystopian and Utopian Undertones: Food and Place The imagery of food and eating illustrates both the twists in the plot and the genre changes. The kitchen becomes the location for the collapse of the safe and boring suburban life, predictable jobs and steady but dull conventional marriage of Stan and Charmaine after Stan finds a note hidden under the refrigerator: “I am starved for you!” (HGL 46). The kitchen space then changes from a private place of domestic safety and satiation to an unstable place of surveillance and complicated erotic intrigue, Charmaine (Jasmine) and Phil (Max), Jocelyn with Stan: “Somehow they’re in the kitchen – his kitchen, her kitchen, their kitchen. He’s sitting down. Everything here is familiar to him – there’s the coffee machine, there are the folded tea towels Charmaine set out before she left – but it all seems foreign to him” (HGL 103). Soon after that, Stan finds himself a prisoner in his own home. The theme of imprisonment is not tied to the place defined by bars and orange overalls but seems to run throughout the text in various modifications: the characters are imprisoned in their houses, relationships and job routines. Charmaine and Stan are imprisoned in their car; Stan is imprisoned in his house and in Jocelyn’s sadistically acted out sex games; later he is imprisoned in a box to smuggle out the incriminating data on the Positron project. When he is forced to stay at home with Jocelyn, he thinks about his imprisonment

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while trimming the hedge: “The hedge trimmer emits a menacing whine, like a wasp’s nest. The sound gives him an illusion of power that dulls his sense of panic. Panic of a rat in a cage with ample food and drink and even sex, though with no way out and the suspicion that it’s part of an experiment that is sure to be painful” (HGL 113). Stan may not have a deep philosophical understanding of freedom, but he recognizes when it has been taken away from him. Food and eating are major issues in each type of prison and the quality of food illustrates the genre variations. While Stan and Charmaine are imprisoned in their car and their financial situation, they only eat stale junk food: “They go for day-old doughnuts at the nearest strip mall, double chocolate glazed, and make some instant coffee in the car with their plug-in cup heater, which is a lot cheaper than buying the coffee in the doughnut place” (HGL 17). Their food is unappetizing and limited, but at least they are in control of getting it. This is a crucial moment when we consider the genre: dystopia is traditionally associated with a loss of control (over need for food, quality of food, availability of food). As I have shown, Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale has no control over her eating (she is forced to eat everything what is on her plate), she has no control over the quality of food (she must eat it whether it is undercooked or burnt), she has no choice as she depends on the system that delivers food to her as a Handmaid (it is the Marthas in both, household or social events). As is very clear, despite very poor quality of food in Stan and Charmaine’s pre-Positron life, they do have at least some control over their eating practices: “The air smells of rancid fat from the chicken wings place next door; customers bring them in here in paper bags, pass them around” (HGL 18). Even though they live on “some cheese slices and a leftover bagel” (HGL 21), they still have their free will. However, they trade their liberty for the comforts and apparent safety of another jail, an actual prison in the Consilience/Positron project. When they are being recruited for the Positron project, Atwood uses food as well as food metaphors to show how easy it is to manipulate the characters. Ed, the charismatic leader with TV commercial rhetoric, suggests that “you can’t eat your so-called individual liberties, and the human spirit pays no bills, and something needed to be done to relieve the pressure inside the social pressure-cooker” (HGL 46). The society of Consilience and Positron is a highly restrictive and, in fact, punitive establishment. The inhabitants are imprisoned both in their new houses as well as in the Positron prison without committing any crime. Ed uses

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egg imagery to describe the Consilience/Positron project: “Think of an egg, with a white and a yolk […] Consilience is the white, Positron is the yolk, and together they make the whole egg. The nest egg. […] There’s a final picture: a nest, with a golden egg shining within it” (HGL 51). But behind this powerful rhetorical newspeak is a gated community under constant digital surveillance. Ed fails to mention that the golden egg is the profit for corporations from “organ harvesting! Sex slaves created by neurosurgery! […] destruction of human rights” (HGL 305). Atwood mocks the TV commercials to show the power of food and food metaphors. In Positron prison, food is used to condition the characters into obedient and dull automatons producing golden eggs (sexbots) for investors to profit from.

6.3

Fasting Freedom and Feasting Prison: Food and Propaganda

Atwood’s dystopia makes a connection between hunger and freedom and, on the other hand, loss of human rights and good food. Stan’s and Charmaine’s dystopian pre-Positron life is clearly associated with the lack of quality food, so it is natural for propaganda to hold out a Utopian feast to entice the new citizens. As Ed clearly points out, “it’s a festering crap heap, out beyond the Consilience gates. People are starving, Scavenging, pilfering, dumpster-diving” (HGL 40). I argue that Atwood’s dystopia clearly associates the loss of human rights with feasting and freedom with fasting: Ed praises the prison food saying that it has “at least threestar quality” (HGL 52). There are many scenes describing indulgent communal prison lunches, they eat together, but they are not a community. These feasts are contrasted with the hunger that Stan suffers from when he is trying to escape the prison: “He eats the energy bar, which tastes like coconut-flavoured sawdust” (HGL 282). After his successful mission he stays with a group of Elvis impersonators in the Elvisorium where he waits to deliver a secret flash drive in his belt buckle. This life of near freedom is associated with bad food: “[…] eating much the same thing, however: undifferentiated foodstuffs. Things that come already sliced, things in foil packages, things in jars. The Elvisorium is not a gourmet establishment” (HGL 319). Atwood reinforces the link between hunger and freedom when she describes Charmaine’s escape. On her flight from the Positron prison to freedom, Charmaine is “surprised

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how hungry she is” (HGL 345). Atwood’s associating hunger with liberties emphasizes the importance and value of freedom and human rights: we do not live only to survive. However, Atwood points to yet another problem with human nature and liberty, there are many Connors and Jocelyns who know how to choose and what to choose and cut corners, but Atwood shows also Stans, intelligent and considerate people who wait for the others to “eat first.” Ambiguously, there is also Charmaine who needs to be safe, she is not confident and comfortable to choose her story, even if it is a love story or a story of her freedom. As for the food, the prison food of Positron is nothing like our conventional concepts of prison food. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that “mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement” (1995, 15–16). It seems that food quality as well as food availability might be a powerful tool to control, re-educate and punish the inmates. However, the Positron prison is introduced as a Utopian feast. Food has a quality of haute cuisine and the system provides more than enough food for everybody. Of course, Positron makes those who do not fit in with the programme disappear. First, it is the original prisoners, later, it can be anyone, including Stan. Most of the food is produced using the Consilience/Positron sources; the Project boasts of becoming self-sustaining (although Atwood ironically adds “except for paper products, and plastics, and fuel, and sugar, and bananas, and …” [HGL 80]). The emblematic food is chicken meat and eggs, which are familiar from the menus in Atwood’s other dystopias: The Handmaid’s Tale is centred around egg imagery; Oryx and Crake uses the ChickieNob, as an exemplary ersatz food; MaddAddamites would not eat eggs for the fear of post-apocalyptic toxic contamination. In The Heart Goes Last , every breakfast and the lunch usually contains eggs and chicken meat: “The lunch is chicken salad. It’s made with chickens raised right here at Positron Prison, in healthy and considerate surroundings, over at the men’s wing; and the lettuce and arugula and radicchio and celery are grown here as well. Though not the celery” (HGL 171). The Consilience/Positron’s talk of self-sufficiency is just a part of the utopian propaganda to promote its image as a utopian, secure and idealistic community. The fact that prisoners eat together suggests a community: “Eating together is a common signal among most peoples for friendship, truce, or celebration […] But just how common eating transforms itself

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from fuel to feast, from satisfaction of need to social bond, may not always be obvious” (Korsmeyer 2014, 187). How difficult this bonding can be, is well illustrated in the scenes when Charmaine has to stay in prison for one more month and thus, she must eat with a new group of women. They do not trust her, and she cannot trust them. The food imagery in Consilience/Positron prison points to several functions of food in the text: it helps to measure time through the very controlled rituals of breakfast, lunches, dinners, and special occasions (like a funeral or a date night), and its quality illustrates the atmosphere as well as the relationships between characters. As Erika Camplin points out, food in prison is “what paces a day, it is one of the reminders of ‘the outside’ and family, it is the foundation of an economy within the prison walls, and it is […] the number one topic of conversation” (2016, 10). As in regular prison, meals point to a specific time of the day, season or occasion. In the dystopian part, meals signal the breaks in daily routines: “In the evening, after four hours of towel-folding and the communal dinner – shepherd’s pie, spinach salad, raspberry mousse – Charmaine joins the knitting circle in the main room of the women’s wing” (HGL 120). In the Positron prison, all the meals are communal, however, no community is being formed: people do not trust each other, so they remain isolated. Out of the specific occasional meals, let us start by examining the recruiting dinner at the Harmony Hotel. The dinner serves to lure people to sign up for the Consilience/Positron experiment: Stan rolls an olive around in his mouth before chewing: it’s a long time since he’s had an olive. The taste is distracting. He should be more alert, because naturally they’re being scrutinized […] Everyone is so fucking nice! The niceness is like the olive: it’s a long time since Stan has encountered that muffling layer of smiling and nodding. (HGL 38)

The setting in a candle-lit restaurant called Together, with roses in vases is an obvious upgrade from their present situation. In Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, E. N. Anderson argues that “[e]lite groups always try to mark themselves off by consumption of special-status or prestigious foods […] and upwardly mobile people try to rise in respect by being seen eating those foods” (2005, 136). The couple is attracted to the Project not only because they are offered enough food to eat, but also because of the specific food and elegant setting they eat in, with a

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white tablecloth and plush carpet. This is a very tempting step up from their dirty car. One of the novel’s turning points is Stan’s (staged) funeral. The occasion is associated with plenty of food: “Egg salad sandwiches with the crust cut off. Asparagus pinwheels. Lemon squares. ‘To me? Respects?’ […] ‘I couldn’t, I couldn’t eat anything!’ Why does death make people so hungry?” (HGL 258). The funeral reception is an imitation of the traditional sharing of memories of the deceased over shared meals. In “‘Concern and Sympathy in a Pyrex Bowl’: Cookbooks and Funeral Foods,” Donna Lee Brien suggests that “despite widespread culinary innovation in other contexts, funeral catering bears little evidence of experimentation […] food from a fifties afternoon party” (2013, 1). However, since the community of Consilience/Positron town is not based on communal and/or familial bonds but on distrust and surveillance, the funeral feast is a sarcastic imitation of familiar foods and the atmosphere of the fifties “in which the most people had self-identified as being happy” (HGL 50). Charmaine learns only after the funeral that Stan is not dead and that her new mission is to seduce Ed to spy on him for Jocelyn. Ed’s and Charmaine’s first date after Stan’s death is at the Together Restaurant. Charmaine pretends to act like a fragile widow: “And here’s the steak in front of her, seared and brown, branded with a crisscross of black, running with hot blood. On the side, three mini-broccolis and two new potatoes. It smells delicious. She’s ravenous, but it would be folly to show it. Tiny, ladylike bites, if any. Maybe she should let him cut it up for her” (HGL 279). Charmaine thinks that Ed is behaving fatherly, so she “eat[s] up, like a good girl!” ( HGL 280) Jocelyn encourages Charmaine to trick Ed and perform what he expects from her. The dinner scene illustrates Ed’s possessiveness and his need for control, he is a caricature of a charismatic dictator with “lips glossy with fat” (HGL 280). The ironic picture of Ed as a dictator is supported by food metaphors. Atwood presents him as “the big cheese at Positron” (HGL 352), but behind that façade, he is a weak and greedy man. The novel is a mixture of genres and the food imagery illustrates the genre changes: from dystopia to caricature, from thriller to farce and romance.

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Prison Carnival: Fantastic Feasts and Alcohol Haze

A shift from a bleak dystopia of Positron prison to a grotesque is emphasized by a farcical prison food fight: “Lunch hour used to be stressful in the months just after he’d signed in. At that time there were still some bona fide criminals in the place […] Scuffs broke out over muffins, plates of scrambled eggs were shoved into faces” (HGL 78). Mixing eating and communal meal with dangerous-looking criminals who instead of knives and guns fight with desserts and soft scrambled eggs produce a comic, almost childish, effect. The prisoners do not follow any notions of etiquette, table manners; they ignore the orderly and civilized approach to food, transforming meals into a Bakhtinian carnivalesque. The grotesque effect is emphasized by their physical appearance: “Seriously shaved heads, deeply engraved tats that hooked the wearer to their affiliates and advertised feuds” (HGL 78). As Bakhtin (1984) observes, “[i]n grotesque realism […] the bodily element is deeply positive. […] All the bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” (19). The bodily element is supported with many scenes of carnival feasts and endless eating. The lower bodily stratum is linked with plump, fattening bodies: “[Stan]’s having a beer, that weak, urine-coloured beer they’re brewing now; plus a side of onion rings and some fries to share, and a platter of Buffalo wings. Sucking the fat off a wing, he reflects that he himself might have tended the owner of this wing when it had been covered with feathers and attached to a chicken” (HGL 219). He is given a new humorous name, Waldo and a sequence of events leads to him smuggling out the evidence of criminal misdeeds at Consilience/Positron in a way that is less spy thriller than a swift Shakespearean comedy, involving plot twists and doubles: Elvises, Possibilibots, Green Men. The bodily becomes enlarged to caricature in the last part of the novel, when Stan upgrades from one of the Elvises to a Green Man: “Clowns, jugglers, singers with guitars, zombie pirates, Batmen, whatever. Actors” (HGL 351). Clowns and jugglers are repertoire characters in Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The Positron produces Possibilibots, which are sexbots and they are a very profitable business, a metaphor for the greedy consumerism Atwood criticizes. Their production line gives the novel an almost hallucinatory quality: “There are moving belts conveying thighs, hip joints, torsos;

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there are trays of hands, left and right. These body parts are manmade, they’re not corpse portions, but nonetheless the effect is ghoulish. Squint and you’re in a morgue […] or else a slaughterhouse. Except there is no blood” (HGL 232). Howells suggests that “[o]nce again Atwood transgresses genre borders, highlighting narrative artifice in a plot that proceeds by an accumulation of sensational scenes and unexpected twists” (2017, 306). The shift from the dystopian to the grotesque is underlined by the novel’s treatment of alcohol. When alcohol is first introduced, it is low-quality beer that Stan drinks to numb himself against his growing disillusionment with Consilience/Positron. For example, he needs several beers to get through the Consilience Town meeting and its propaganda: “Headless chickens, no fucking way I’d eat that, thinks Stan. He’s downed three beers before the meeting started. […] It’s not beer, it’s horse piss” (HGL 98). So far this is a classic dystopian scenario, not so different from Winston Smith downing mugs of “oily” Victory Gin in 1984. According to Deborah Lupton, “Alcohol, taken in enough quantities, is assumed to have a directly physiological effect upon the body, inspiring exhilaration, relaxation, dulled senses” (1996, 31). Stan needs to dull his senses because his reality is boring and unbearable. As noted earlier, the novel’s grim dystopia gradually gives way to the carnival atmosphere of the grotesque. In the grotesque, alcohol’s analgesic properties are less important than its ability to provoke intoxication, excess and transgression. As Robert Duggan observes in The Grotesque in Contemporary British Fiction: “[…] the grotesque as an excessive aesthetic mode is associated with psychological and bodily excesses and issues from the breakdown of the ‘regulated’ imagination in dreams and through intemperate drug and alcohol-fuelled intoxication” (2013, 19). Charmaine drinks with Jocelyn and Aurora although she does not trust them and does not like them at first. Atwood selects types of alcohol to characterize the women: Jocelyn drinks scotch, which might be a sign of her privileged position (like O’Brien having access to wine in Orwell’s 1984), while Aurora and Charmaine drink cocktails. The fact that Jocelyn drinks scotch might be relevant: it is a sign of her class status, her power, and also as it is a drink associated with men, another feature of her shape-shifting trickster nature. She is muscular, she is dressed in business-like clothes and colours. On the other hand, feminine and caring types, like Aurora and Charmaine, drink cocktails. In their alcohol-induced friendliness and trust, Charmaine imagines Aurora’s damaged face as “scraping icing off a cake” (HGL 316) and such preoccupations with bodily excesses is a

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typical element of the grotesque. Another example of the presence of the grotesque is Stan’s work as a “chicken pimp” (HGL 82). This disturbing sex with chicken is turned into the grotesque when it is associated with food: “a man could look very undignified with a chicken stuck onto him like a marshmallow on a stick” (HGL 82). Similar association of food, body, violent acts and alcohol signifies a transgression of dystopian genre into the grotesque. The official view of drinking in Consilience is that they want everyone to have a good time, but not in excess, and not to develop medical problems. Despite intoxication’s negative effect on social productivity, it is often considered important in forming alliances and this is reflected in the novel: Stan drinks (disgusting) beer with his colleagues, Charmaine drinks cocktails with Aurora and Jocelyn. In “Comparing Drinking Toasts – Comparing Contexts,” Helga Kotthoff points out that “[e]ating and drinking are seldom just physical acts of consumption, but are rather culturally overlaid. Collectively relaxing with alcohol tends to give interaction an informal character, while toasting reformalizes it” (2013, 213). Toasting signals a formal event which is Ed’s and Charmaine’s first dinner date at Together restaurant. The formality of this occasion is underlined by the white tablecloths, candles and flowers as well as by Ed’s toast: “He raises his glass and says, ‘To a brighter future,’ which really means ‘To us,’ and what can she do but raise her glass in return?” (HGL 277) Her acceptance of the date is, in fact, her rebellion against the Positron project since she agrees to spy on the leader Ed. She has formed an alliance with Jocelyn and Aurora against Positron. Atwood has much of her characters’ bonding take place while drinking in ways that might be considered excessive. As to forming alliances, this bonding over alcohol and food is important right before they are preparing for the heist at the Ruby Slippers: “So the five of them end up playing Texas hold’em for grapes and pieces of cheese off the Cheese Assortment plate Con’s ordered in and drinking Singapore Slings because Con’s never had one and wants to try it, but they can only have three each because they have to be fresh for the next day” (HGL 350). Alcohol might play a role in reducing Charmaine’s hostility towards Aurora: “Maybe she’s having a belated best girlfriend. Though it might just be the effect of her fourth Campari and soda, or is it a gin and tonic, or maybe something with vodka?” (HGL 316). As Charmaine drinks with her new friends, she not only develops a sense of trust in them, but paradoxically also a more sober view of what is happening at Consilience/Positron.

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However, Charmaine never really opens up. Aurora talks about how she lost her face but Charmaine kept her secret. This might be important to Jocelyn as she might be using Charmaine for the other characters (like Ed) to open up and become vulnerable. The novel ends with a Shakespearean feast, celebrating multiple marriages of comically incompatible couples: Max (after neurosurgery) and Aurora, Jocelyn and Stan’s brother Connor, Ed and Lucinda Quant, Veronica and her blue bear, and re-united Charmaine and Stan: “The cake is white, with blue-and-pink icing in a design of bluebirds holding ribbons and festoons of roses in their beaks and claws” (HGL 365). The order is re-established, Charmaine’s neurosurgery should guarantee domestic bliss. However, Atwood’s ending re-opens the possibilities after Jocelyn tells Charmaine that they never performed the neurosurgery that would alter make her a sexual slave for Stan. Charmaine, although happy to have escaped the controlling and threatening dangers of Positron, is disappointed with the restoration of her individual agency. As Charmaine tries to explain: “‘Love isn’t like that. With love you can’t stop yourself.’ She wants the helplessness” (HGL 379). By creating a dizzying carnival scenes Atwood emphasizes the serious issues from the beginning of her dystopia: there is no other way out of the crisis caused by manipulation, consumerism, corporate power, and greed. Atwood challenges the notion of the restoration of the social order, which is a typical element of comedy. Her ironic use of classical comic paradigms (doubling of characters, feasts, multiple weddings) shares the subversive spirit of farce, ridiculing the rules of the social order, but, nevertheless, presenting that order as inescapable. So far, most dystopias have proved it: mind-control is at the centre of all repressive and totalitarian regimes. The brainwashing practised by the Gileadean regime in the two Gilead novels as well as digital media and CorpSeCorps psychological manipulation of the ruling Corporations in the MaddAddam trilogy are more influential than any physical forms of control, such as the public executions in The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy. For the characters subjected to endless manipulation and brainwashing, it becomes difficult to distinguish between utopia and dystopia; both after all are relative and might be contextual for the individual. Moreover, the regimes feed the citizens food that influences their rationality and emotional responses, like Happy pills in warm milk for the unhappy brides in The Testaments , occasional spiking of juice in The Handmaid’s Tale,

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prison feasts in The Heart Goes Last , and secrets in the MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood suggests that indeterminacy seems to work against the dogmatism included in a utopian/dystopian binary. However, she also points to a difficulty in recognizing it. In the closing dialogue of The Heart Goes Last , Charmaine manifests her own inability to understand that she is supposed to take responsibility, to be active in the construction of her own utopian life story. To Jocelyn’s parting remark “The world is all before you, where to choose” Charmaine (both comically and alarmingly) replies, “How do you mean?” (HGL 380). Charmaine is not just a comic character. Atwood reveals only parts of Charmaine’s past. For example, Charmaine hints about her father but never gives more details. This might be relevant to Charmaine’s people-pleasing nature and obedience. Moreover, Atwood does not give Charmaine teenage rebellion. Without a chance to act out, make mistakes and learn from them, she might not be able to understand liberty. She goes straight from her insecure childhood to adulthood, being stuck in her sweet girl like looks and behaviour. Atwood demonstrates how deeply marked Charmaine has been, not only by Positron’s indoctrination, but also by her childhood abuse. The book is obviously sceptical about the benefits of liberty and readers might be re-thinking the effects of Charmaine’s freedom.

Works Cited Anderson, E. N. 2005. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Camplin, Erika. 2016. Prison Food in America. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Duggan, Robert. 2013. The Grotesque in Contemporary British Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Howells, Coral Ann. 2006. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”. In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells, 161–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Howells, Coral Ann. 2017. “True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited In Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, And Hag-Seed.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 11 (3): 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpx010. Huxley, Aldous. [1932] 2007. Brave New World. London: Vintage Books. Korsmeyer, Caroly. 2014. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Kotthof, Helga. 2013. “Comparing Drinking Toasts—Comparting Contexts.” In Culinary Linguistics: The Chef’s Special, edited by Cornelia Gerhard, Maximilliane Frobenius, and Susanne Ley, 211–241. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.10.09kot. Lee Brien, Donna. 2013. “‘Concern and Sympathy in a Pyrex Bowl’: Cookbooks and Funeral Food.” M/C Journal 16 (3). Available at: http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/655. Date accessed: 8 Jan 2019. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications.

CHAPTER 7

Hybrid Genres: Festive Intertextuality and Hungry Reality

Abstract The chapter sums up Atwood’s use of food in speculative novels. Atwood’s writing process itself resembles cooking—the combination of ingredients from various genres, including the traditional and popular, to create new challenges for readers’ literary tastes. Her postmodern, intertextual writing combines ingredients from apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, thriller and other traditions to give full flavour to her stories of mad scientists (Crake, Ed), beautiful lovers and liars (Oryx, Max, Nick), lonely survivors (Snowman, Offred), warm and friendly mother figures (Toby), fairy godmothers (Jocelyn, Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, nerds (MaddAddamites), religious sects (the God’s Gardeners and the leaders of Gilead), the persecuted and enslaved citizens of the Republic of Gilead, the Pleeblands and the Positron prison and even post-human cyborgs (Crakers, pigoons). The chapter concludes that the food motifs in Atwood’s fiction include the use of food to signal hierarchy, dominance and tyranny based on class and gender. Moreover, the problem of hunger, either psychological or physical, signals a loss of contact with the natural and authentic. Keywords Margaret Atwood · Speculative fiction · Egg imagery · Humanity · Storytelling

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8_7

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I even missed the junk food we’d eaten. (T 325) Like complaining that the food’s too delicious. What kind of complaint is that? (HGL 375)

Having explored the uses of food, cooking and eating as themes and metaphors in individual novels, it is interesting to consider the ways in which Atwood’s writing process itself resembles cooking—the combination of ingredients from various genres, including the traditional and popular, to create new challenges for readers’ literary tastes. Her postmodern, intertextual writing combines ingredients from apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, thriller and other traditions to give full flavour to her stories of mad scientists (Crake, Ed), beautiful lovers and liars (Oryx, Max, Nick), lonely survivors (Snowman, Offred), warm and friendly mother figures (Toby), fairy godmothers (Jocelyn, Aunt Lydia in The Testaments ), nerds (MaddAddamites), religious sects (the God’s Gardeners and the leaders of Gilead), the persecuted and enslaved citizens of the Republic of Gilead, the Pleeblands and the Positron prison, and even post-human cyborgs (Crakers, pigoons). Atwood also rises to another traditional challenge for innovative chefs—to find a flavour that is new enough to revive the bored palate but also familiar enough not to be rejected. According to Coral Ann Howells, Atwood’s position “represents a balance between respect for genre traditions and an insistent challenge to traditional limits” (Howells 2000, 140). Atwood’s chosen ingredients are rich in associations, so the innovative writings call into question not only genre boundaries, but also the political, ecological and economic ideologies that lie behind them. Serving the flavour of the future is a special challenge. Atwood’s hybrid novels hint at several possible futures. In some (e.g. MaddAddam), the technologically and economically enhanced position of anthropocentric human dominance is removed and we confront a richer ecology in which humans face a more perilous but also more interconnected existence. In others (e.g. the Corporate world of Oryx and Crake), the technological enhancements and anthropocentricism are taken to unsustainable extremes that eclipse all other flavours. Thus, the impression of the future is represented by a recombination or change in the quantities of already existing genre elements. Susan Watkins suggests that an ingredient many recent apocalyptic fictions have reduced in their texts is the tragic narrative of blame: “the

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importance of plural, hybrid narratives and spaces that reproduce or rewrite the contortions or conundrums of the apocalyptic future(s) that face us” (2012, 134). In the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood opens a possibility of survival amidst cataclysm and gives her reader some hope: her breakfasts and communal dinners are expressions of this (cynical and sceptical) optimism. None of Atwood’s novels considered in this book—the Gilead novels, the MaddAddam trilogy and The Heart Goes Last —can be labelled with one single genre. They are hybrid texts that incorporate elements of a wide variety of genres, predominately science fiction, speculative fiction, utopia and dystopia (which are fused in Atwood’s concept of “ustopia”) to underline the political and environmental issues they deal with: Ingestion and consumption turn into titillating subjects for science fiction, a genre that, by imagining alternatives to present realities, constitutes an intrinsic critique of the status quo. More or less gently, it prods its audience to face the fact that the world in which they live is neither natural nor absolute. This approach is not unique to sci-fi: after all, hypotheses and projections about the future are a common ingredient of politics. (Parasecoli 2008, 63)

However, instead of bleak descriptions of hunger, striving and gloomy projections of meals in pills and food tubes that is a common element of dystopias and science fiction (Clute et al. 2021), Atwood’s trilogy domesticates and familiarizes the post-apocalyptic future with old-fashioned meals and eggs in a totalitarian regime trying to fix population and environmental crises with puritanism (The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments ), by scenes of cooking soup, preparing pancakes and brewing (bad) coffee in a world almost emptied of humans by a pandemic (the MaddAddam trilogy), and with grotesque prison feasts in The Heart Goes Last . Atwood uses food to feminize the traditionally masculine genres. She also uses food to subvert the potentially rigid boundaries of the genre: instead of political and technological preoccupations, she lets her characters concentrate on food and thus, she emphasizes their human aspect over the sterility of technology. Her novels are set in a relatively near future where there is still a recognizable daily life—including cooking and eating. Speculative fiction is not just about predicting the future though. As Daphne Patai observes, it helps us “break through the crust of the

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obvious” and see the world we live in more critically (1983, 152). Speculative fiction thus encourages us to question our world here and now. Even if Atwood’s books are creative feasts of genres, playful mixtures of comic and tragic, utopian and dystopian, apocalypse and hope, romance and grotesque, the conditions of the worlds illuminated by her metaphors of food suggest that the taste of humanity’s possible futures will be bitter. The food motifs in Atwood’s fiction identified by the present work include the use of food to signal hierarchy, dominance and tyranny based on class and gender as well as the problem of hunger, either psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. Moreover, food signals genre changes. In looking at the Gilead novels—The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments —we considered the role of food and its symbolic qualities. Food is an indicator of class, power, and gender for the citizens of Gilead. Their food is old-fashioned: eggs, cooked vegetables, canned fruit, occasional chicken, to illustrate the Gileadean inspiration in the simple lifestyle of the Puritans. The strict categorisation of people according to their function in Gilead is also reflected by their meals and availability of food. The Handmaids, who serve to bear children to the Commanders and their Wives, must eat food that can be characterized as baby food: chicken, milk, steamed vegetables, some fruit. They must eat up everything on their plates, which underlines how powerless they are. They are not allowed alcohol or coffee. They are forced to abide by the dietary recommendations for pregnant women whether they are pregnant or not. However, it is not only the Handmaids whose diet is restricted: even the leaders of the Republic cannot freely choose what and when to eat. The Wives, even if they are granted the privilege of alcohol on special occasions, cannot buy and cook their own meals. Such images help us to see that dystopian and utopian impulses blend in Atwood’s novel. The pervasive egg imagery is used to illustrate the issues of impaired fertility caused by pollution, war and nuclear catastrophe. The egg is a powerful symbol that appears prominently in (almost) all of Atwood’s novels and short stories. In the Gilead novels, eggs symbolize not only reproduction, but also associate women with consumables: their bodies are cut down and fragmented to their reproductive parts and they are given a use-by date. Such fragmentation is underlined by the fragility of an egg. In the wake of the Crake-made pandemic in Oryx and Crake, Snowman, is hungry and dying. His post-apocalyptic environment seems

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to him a wasteland, littered with empty food containers left behind by the pre-apocalyptic civilization after it was wiped out by the virus in the BlyssPluss Pill. There is a strong association of food, waste and death. Food crises in the pre-apocalyptic society lead to the industrialized mass production of pseudo-food (franken-food, ersatz food) full of chemical additives and genetic modifications. It tastes like garbage and it is not satisfying. It leaves the novels’ sensitive characters hungry for real food, genuine cakes and authentic meat, and it triggers feelings of nostalgia. Atwood uses a network of metaphors linking food, waste and death to create a platform for the central problem of the novel: the BlyssPlus Pill that kills almost the whole of humankind. The concept of the medicinal effect of food is weakened by the disappearance of real food: no one is cooking their own meals, everything is mass produced and substituted by (the pharmaceutical) industry. Thus, food and its potential healing aspect becomes (rather paradoxically) associated with death. Medicinal products, drops and pills are no longer based on plants and natural ingredients. The key ingredients are now word play and propaganda. As in other aspects of Atwood’s dystopian world, the link between natural pharmacy and healing is much weaker. Moreover, the depletion of nutritional value in food mirrors the decay of human relationships, family dynamics, parenting and sexuality in pre-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake, where their non-commercial, natural forms are marginalized and replaced by unfulfilling, artificial substitutes. This emptiness and frustration produce a hunger for genuine relationships and real food. There is a powerful connection between the emotional aspect of food and memory. In Oryx and Crake, food triggers memories, not only of past food, food rituals and experiences around specific meals. This crisis is trending towards the point of starvation. The pre-apocalyptic society of Oryx and Crake is metaphorically and literally starving. It has exhausted not only the natural food sources, but also human relationships and human solidarity. Atwood depicts western greed culminating in cannibalism, both literal (eating SecretBurgers in The Year of the Flood) and metaphorical (Oryx as an edible woman). The Year of the Flood maps out the world of Oryx and Crake from the perspective of three pleebland female followers of the God’s Gardeners sect. The God’s Gardeners grow vegetables, chant naïve hymns and shun fast fashion and daily showers. However, they nourish their friendships and relationships and take loving care of each other. To survive the prophesied Waterless Flood (which might be Crake’s pandemic), they

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build Ararats to store dried fruits and food. Ararats are not only storehouses packed with food, but also archives of memories, since Gardeners are encouraged to use their memory to store important information for surviving outside society and after its downfall. Thus, the process of remembering and restoring information and stories seems to be as essential for the survival of humanity as food. Food is a leitmotif in The Year of the Flood. Not only the character’s struggle for food while trying to survive the Waterless Flood, but it is a political sign as well: food and its production become points of political resistance. The God’s Gardeners believe in the healing power of natural products. Food (honey, mushrooms, herbs) heals wounds, cures diseases and saves lives as long as it is in its natural state. Although Atwood frequently uses stereotypically masculine and feminine food preferences in her portrayals (men associated with meat, women with sugar), there are also moments when food imagery subverts traditional stereotypes. Moreover, the God’s Gardeners’ (religious) system of belief in simplicity and asceticism is fundamental to the critique of the antediluvian dystopia’s consumerism. Atwood portrays the God Gardeners’ pacific (although trained in self-defense) vegetarian religious sect in opposition to the cannibalistic violence and predator–prey brutality of the rest of her fictional human world. Atwood also uses food and eating imagery to communicate her characters’ emotional states. As the novel is centred around a greedy and over-consuming society, the food metaphors highlight emotions such as envy and jealousy that, as Atwood’s novel suggests, might be the root of the wild, materialistic appetites of the Compounds and the Pleeblands. Our examination of The Year of the Flood shows that Atwood juxtaposes food and sex metaphors. As central factors in biological reproduction, food and sex are both vital for the survival of humanity. In Atwood’s fiction, sexualized associations between food and sex intensify the sensual experience, and frequently, they are both linked with pain, disgust and violence. It is significant that sex and food both seem to have gone bad. Just as eating is problematized in both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, pleasurable sexuality is rare. In Atwood’s dystopia, food is seen as dangerous and it is associated with death. Sex is equally unsatisfying, and often manifests as sexual violence and rape. These associations are intensified in MaddAddam. The chapter “MaddAddam: Eating and Storytelling” discusses the third novel of the eponymous trilogy. Atwood’s MaddAddam fuses utopia

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and dystopia into the Paradice, where liobams, pigoons and the Crakers eat grass together, and it is unclear whether this is because they have achieved a post-apocalyptic interspecies harmony or because there is just nothing else to chew. Hunger is not only a metaphorical, socio-cultural and emotional phenomenon, but rather a very urgent biological need: Snowman is on the verge of starvation because he is wounded, Zeb had to turn to cannibalism to survive. On the other hand, Amanda refuses food because of her deep trauma. Atwood frequently juxtaposes images of food and the abject, which gives dystopian undertones to her writing. To highlight the power of the abject, Atwood mixes the processes of eating and digesting. In general, cultural rituals enable the policing of ambiguous boundaries by clearly defining clean/dirty, orderly/disorderly, pure/polluting, but the MaddAddam trilogy often subverts and breaks these boundaries, the natural/artificial boundary included, so that the new Paradice is genetically spliced and hybrid. This chapter also discusses cannibalism, which is another motif that Atwood frequently draws upon in her novels, either metaphorically or literally. The cannibalism in the novel may embody the characters’ transgression of traditionally accepted boundaries: Zeb’s cannibalism can be seen as a powerful survival mechanism, while the Painballers eat human flesh to reinforce their position of power. Cannibalism also helps to classify the characters of the book into categories associated with culture or nature and shifts in these categories. The residents of the cobb house (the former Gardeners and MaddAddamites) keep morning breakfast rituals. Although the traditional breakfast menu includes eggs, this food item appears only in Toby’s nostalgic dreams. But what they really miss at breakfast time is having a decent cup of coffee. Drinking coffee-substitutes helps them to keep the morning ritual of planning the day, sharing stories and bonding, which is very important for their survival and the establishment of a multi-species community (with Pigoons and the Crakers) based on tolerance and mutual understanding. The MaddAddam world is a radical break from endless feasting on a devastated and enslaved nature, but also a hopeful peek into a less greedy and more balanced future. The Heart Goes Last is an Atwoodian dystopia interwoven with other popular genres. The use of food images and food metaphors illustrate the genre transitions: the dystopian post-industrial decay is illustrated by hunger, scarcity of nourishing food, dry and stale junk food leftovers, while the grotesque plot twists of the novel are highlighted by feasts of

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haute cuisine in Positron prison. The dystopian side of the Positron experiment includes corruption, rigid control, neurosurgery, loss of individual rights, institutionalized executions and institutional power. This arrangement brings safety and full employment, and, of course, profit to some until damning evidence of abuse is smuggled out on a flash drive by Stan disguised as an Elvis Presley sexbot. In the world of Positron, the inmates are subjected to strict discipline, ostensibly on grounds of safety, employment and peace. Imagery of food and eating illustrates both the twists in the plot and the genre changes. While the couple is trapped by their bleak financial situation, they only eat stale junk food. Although this food is tasteless and hard to come by, they are in control of getting it. This is crucial when we consider the genre: dystopia is traditionally associated with a loss of control (over need for food, quality of food, availability of food). When they are being recruited for the Positron project, Atwood uses food as well as food metaphors to show how susceptible to corporate manipulation her protagonists have become. Atwood’s dystopia makes a connection between hunger and freedom on the one hand and loss of human rights and good food on the other. Stan’s and Charmaine’s dystopian pre-Positron life is clearly associated with a lack of quality food, so it would be natural for propaganda to suggest a Utopian feast to entice the new citizens. By associating hunger with liberties, Atwood emphasizes a key aspect of human rights and human dignity: we do not live only to survive. As for the food, the prison food of Positron is nothing like our conventional concepts of prison food. The emblematic food is chicken meat and eggs, which appear on Atwood’s dystopian menu very often: The Handmaid’s Tale is centred around egg imagery; Oryx and Crake uses the ChickieNob, as the paradigmatic ersatz food; MaddAddamites would not eat eggs for the fear of post-apocalyptic toxic contamination. In The Heart Goes Last , eggs are served every morning and the lunch menu usually features chicken meat. The shift from the deadly orderliness of Positron prison to the vivacious grotesque is emphasized by a farcical prison food fight. Alcohol sprees take place when the dystopia shifts into the carnivalesque. Atwood also shows how alcohol can lubricate bonding. This is another sign of her ironic take on dystopia. Dystopia is traditionally associated with the isolation of the protagonist and alcohol prohibition. In The Heart Goes Last , dystopia disintegrates into farce, which is supported with images of boozy parties. Through the sharp contrast created by the novel’s finale

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of dizzying carnival scenes, Atwood emphasizes the serious issues from the beginning of her dystopia: one does not escape out of consumerism, corporate power, and greed, one must learn to manipulate them to create an enclave for autonomy and happiness. Ed thinks Positron works as a society of discipline (the prison being its archetype), with panopticon surveillance making sure everyone adheres to the norm, but Jocelyn collects information and uses it to spin stories to manipulate Ed. Societies of Control need a constant supply of information, so Jocelyn lubricates everyone with booze to get them generating information. This might also be why the food is surprisingly tasty—not just a sort of Huxleyan soma numbing people to their disciplined environment but a way to get people to open up and provide information for Jocelyn’s operations. This book has investigated many possible interpretations of food in Atwood’s dystopias. Here, food is endlessly interpretable as a biological necessity, as an indulgence, as a memory, as hope, as something to share with the community, or something to die from alone. Food is only one of the ingredients of Atwood’s literary method, but it is highly versatile: it can be a signifier of class, power hierarchy and gender, it can be the battleground for environmental, economic and cultural problems. This is all present in Atwood’s writing, along with surprising elements to whet her readers’ appetites, and surprises to shift our perspective on everything we know and are comfortable with. Food, thus, domesticates the unfamiliar, alien environment of her speculative fictions: be it the theocratic household of the Commandant after a nuclear catastrophe, a polluted wasteland after a pandemic or a strict prison.

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Index

A alcohol, 4, 29, 42, 113, 120, 121, 128, 132 Alderman, Naomi, 17 Alias Grace, 13 alternate history, 5, 8 apocalypse, 5, 7, 8, 19, 20, 50, 67, 68, 104, 128 apocalyptic, 2, 3, 5–9, 11, 14, 19–21, 48, 50–53, 59–62, 67, 85, 90, 97, 98, 100, 104, 105, 116, 126–129, 131, 132 appetites, 6, 16, 59, 73, 75, 77, 130, 133 auto-cannibalism, 16

B Belasco, Walter, 17, 30, 32, 56, 57, 73, 76, 79 bodies, 6, 8, 15, 18, 19, 30–34, 37, 39, 41, 49, 74, 94, 102, 119, 128. See also body Bodily Harm, 12, 16

body, 9, 12, 15, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37, 39, 42, 49, 50, 60, 61, 78, 79, 81, 92–96, 116, 120, 121 bread, 29, 33, 36, 37, 55, 100 Butler, Octavia, 17 butter, 38, 41, 49, 55, 75 C cakes, 3, 29, 51, 129 canned food, 27–29, 53, 67, 128 cannibalism, 2, 3, 9, 11–13, 15–18, 27, 31, 39, 59–61, 72, 83, 95, 97, 101, 129, 131 Carnal Appetites , 82, 84 Carter, Angela, 17, 83 Cat’s Eye, 12 cheese, 13, 29, 44, 55, 75, 114, 121 chicken, 12, 16, 27, 36, 52, 55, 114, 116, 119, 121, 128, 132 Christou, Maria, 15, 16, 27–29, 53 climate fiction, 6 coffee, 29, 30, 35, 52, 57, 81, 97, 102, 113, 114, 127, 128, 131 Cooke, Natalie, 10

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Labudova, Food in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19168-8

143

144

INDEX

cooking, 4, 11, 13, 17, 26, 35–38, 44, 71–73, 79, 82, 85, 98, 99, 126, 127, 129 cyber punk, 8 D dairy, 16, 75 death, 3, 18, 19, 28, 53–58, 61, 68, 83, 92–95, 118, 129, 130 dessert, 28, 29 diet, 12, 16, 19, 27, 30, 50, 56, 75, 78, 81, 85, 95, 98, 101, 110, 128 dystopian, 2, 4–9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 48, 58, 66, 68, 78, 91, 110–112, 115, 117, 120, 121, 123, 128, 129, 131, 132 dystopia(s), 2–5, 8, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 44, 50, 53, 68, 69, 83, 91, 110, 113–115, 118–120, 122, 126, 127, 130–133 E Eagleton, Terry, 9 eating, 2–4, 6, 8, 9, 11–18, 20, 21, 26, 28–32, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 50–53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 92–97, 99–103, 113–117, 119, 126, 127, 129–132 edibles, 37 eggs, 13, 16, 27, 28, 30, 31, 75, 76, 79, 83, 104, 115, 116, 119, 127, 128, 131, 132 environmental, 3, 5, 6, 9–11, 16, 18, 57, 66, 74, 77, 78, 85, 91, 105, 127, 133 F Falk, Pasi, 27, 35, 53, 81

food, 2–4, 6, 8, 9, 11–15, 17–21, 26–32, 34–39, 42–44, 48–61, 66–69, 71–75, 77–85, 90, 92–96, 98–103, 105, 110, 112–119, 121, 122, 126–133

G genre boundaries, 2, 3, 5, 11, 126 genre conventions, 3 genre hybridity, 14

H Hag-Seed, 13 ham, 29, 97, 101 healing, 34, 57, 68, 71, 77, 129, 130 Hengen, Shannon, 10 herbal tea, 34 Howells, Coral Ann, 5, 10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 39, 40, 50, 110, 112, 113, 120, 126 hunger, 2, 11, 13, 18, 26, 35, 36, 38–40, 43, 44, 51, 62, 66, 68, 82, 83, 92, 93, 95, 110, 115, 127, 129, 131 Huxley, Aldous, 26, 29, 112, 124 hybrid genre fiction, 2

I intertextuality, 9, 11, 14

J junk food, 4, 12, 20, 42, 53, 74, 80, 84, 110, 114, 131, 132

K Killgour, Maggie, 17 kitchen, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36, 42, 52, 84, 104, 113

INDEX

L Lady Oracle, 12, 16, 76 Lee Brien, Donna, 4 LeGuin, Ursula, 17 Life Before Man, 12 Lupton, Deborah, 17, 29, 35, 38, 42, 51, 52, 54, 67, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77–81, 93, 97, 101, 120

M Mackintosh, Sophie, 18, 68, 78 The Water Cure, 17 MaddAddam, 2, 3, 5–7, 10, 15, 16, 20, 66, 76, 78, 80, 82, 85, 90–93, 95, 96, 99–102, 104, 105, 110, 122, 126, 127, 130, 131 meat, 13, 15, 16, 18, 30, 37, 48, 52, 54–56, 59–61, 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 79, 81–83, 95, 98, 101, 102, 116, 129, 130, 132 milk, 29, 30, 38, 44, 75, 78, 100, 122, 128 Mohr, Dunja, 28, 30, 31, 52, 99, 102, 103 Morton, Timothy, 9 mushrooms, 60, 68, 72, 77, 130

O oral/orality, 31, 35, 40, 53 oranges, 29 Oryx and Crake, 3, 5–7, 19, 20, 48–53, 55–61, 66, 76, 80, 90, 91, 96, 99, 104, 112, 116, 126, 128–130, 132

P Parasecoli, Fabio, 6, 8, 11, 17, 79, 100, 127 Parker, Emma, 12–16, 27, 31, 39

145

Payback, 10 petroleum fiction, 6, 7 pharmakon, 58 Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, 4 pill, 58, 69 post-apocalyptic, 2, 4, 7, 9, 18–20, 48, 53, 60, 61, 66, 68, 91, 104, 105 post-apocalyptic genre, 4, 53, 66 power, 2, 3, 6, 12–14, 18, 20, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 36–38, 43, 44, 49, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62, 71, 75, 78, 83, 94, 96, 99, 104, 105, 110, 114, 115, 120, 122, 128, 130–133 Probyn, Elspeth, 17, 82, 84 pseudo-foods, 19 R rituals, 2, 9, 20, 21, 28, 29, 61, 68, 72, 77, 85, 90, 94, 96, 98–101, 117, 129, 131 Rockoff, Marcus, 15, 49, 57, 74, 75 S Sasame, Kiyomi, 14, 15, 27, 31, 39, 42, 51 Sceats, Sarah, 14–16, 28, 40, 42 science fiction, 2–5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 110, 126, 127 Sheckels, Theodore F., 10 speculative fiction, 2, 4–8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 48, 83, 126, 127 Stein, Karen, 10, 14, 15, 31, 62, 66, 76, 91 storytelling, 2, 9, 13, 20, 99 sugar, 31, 34, 42, 52, 56, 79, 81, 101, 116, 130 Surfacing , 12, 16, 76 survival, 2, 5, 9–12, 15, 17, 26, 50, 52, 62, 67, 68, 70, 71, 76, 82,

146

INDEX

85, 92, 95, 99, 101, 104, 127, 130, 131 T taste, 20, 35, 40, 42–44, 51, 73, 74, 84, 97, 104, 117, 128 Taylor, Chloe, 16, 82, 102 testimonial literature. See testimonies testimonies, 26, 44 The Blind Assassin, 13 The Edible Woman, 11, 15, 16 The Handmaid’s Tale, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 15, 18, 19, 26, 27, 30, 33, 36, 44, 112, 114, 116, 122, 127, 128, 132 The Heart Goes Last , 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 19, 20, 110, 112, 113, 116, 123, 127, 131, 132 The Natural Way of Things Wood, Charlotte, 18 The Passion of New Eve. See Carter, Angela The Robber Bride, 13 The Testaments , 2, 3, 5, 6, 15, 18, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 36–38, 41, 44, 122, 126–128 The Water Cure. See Mackintosh, Sophie

The Year of the Flood, 3, 5, 6, 16, 19, 59, 66, 68, 69, 72–74, 76, 79, 80, 82–84, 90, 91, 102, 103, 129, 130 Tolan, Fiona, 5

U ustopia, 6, 91, 127 utopias, 7, 8, 14, 91

V vegan/veganism, 16, 75, 76, 105 veganism, 75 vegetables, 27, 52, 53, 76, 98, 128, 129 vegetarianism, 10, 12, 15, 75, 77, 82

W Wilson, Sharon Rose, 10, 12, 14, 15 wine, 29, 38, 98, 120 women, 3, 12, 14, 15, 17–20, 26, 29–42, 44, 60, 66, 70, 76, 78, 79, 81, 84, 94, 98, 117, 120, 128, 130 Wood, Charlotte The Natural Way of Things , 18, 44