In Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel Hail Mary (2021), a microscopic alien life form has begun to consume the sun’s energy. This is slowly bringing about a new ice age that will eventually kill all human life. Humanity’s only hope is a star 16 light years away. Unlike other stars in the vicinity, this is not deteriorating. Fortunately, the solar energy that the alien life form is absorbing can also be harvested, making it possible to build a near-light-speed space vessel and explore the star. Once there, Dr Ryland Grace – the only human astronaut to have survived the trip – discovers that another intelligent species suffering the same solar deterioration has also sent out an expedition. In most of the novel, the human protagonists and a member of this alien species collaborate on a solution to the threat the microscopic life form constitutes. They soon learn to talk to each other and as time passes and food stores grow shorter, they talk also of food. Grace is telling his alien friend that he is unhappy about the emergency rations he is forced to eat. He wants “real food”. “Why you say ‘real food,’ question? What is non-real food, question?” the alien asks.
“Real food is food that tastes good. Food that’s fun to eat.”
“You have not-fun food, question?”
“Yeah. Coma slurry. The ship fed it to me during the trip here. I have enough to last me almost four years.”
“Eat that.”
“It tastes bad.”
“Food experience not that important.”
“Hey.” I point at him.
“To humans, food experience is very important.”
“Humans strange.”
Hail Mary is an example of a number of texts that register the ongoing biospheric crisis but displaces it with a crisis trigger that has nothing to do with humanity, industry or capitalism. This should be duly noted since this allegorical setting does not force the text to engage with any of the actual drivers of the biospheric crisis. Instead, the solution is to fly into interstellar space and seek the solution there.
While this deserves attention, the passage cited above also reveals how central the “food experience” is to humans. The transition to sustainable food systems is difficult to accomplish precisely because of the centrality of certain food experiences, and because these are tied to particular cultures and identities.
What I’m getting at is this. Grace in Hail Mary is obviously a male astronaut, and he rehearses many of the identity markers that come with being a (reasonably) young American male. These manifest in many ways, often through sports, but often also via food. At the very end of the story (spoiler), mission accomplished, Grace accompanies a beetle-like alien to this alien’s home planet. Once there, he subsists on artificially produced vitamins and other nutrients, and he satisfies his appetite with a hamburger the meat of which is created in-vitro, using his own DNA. He calls it a ”meburger”: “I love meburgers. I eat one every day”.
This is the happy ending of the novel; a hero who eats his own body in space every day for the rest of his life. It makes sense within the universe the novel conjures, but it is a sad prospect for future food and a planetary diet. Hail Mary may be a novel that celebrates human ingenuity, but it is also about the perceived need to eat in certain ways, and how only meat-based dishes make food fun. Of course, there is a gothic horror hiding in plain sight in this ending: a man with nothing to eat except himself until he is consumed by time. In this way, the novel reluctantly furnishes a vocal and terrible, yet very telling, metaphor for the current climate crisis.