According to conventional understanding, climate fiction (sometimes abbreviated as cli-fi) is a “new literary genre that focuses on the consequences of environmental issues” and that helps people “thinking about the Earth’s sustainability” as argued by J. K. Ullrich in The Atlantic. Thus, “climate fiction represents a vital supplement” to climate science because it provides “insights into how it might be to feel and understand” in worlds transformed by the climate crisis (as proposed by Gregers Andersen in Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis. Some critics such as Amitav Ghosh have complained that there is very little (serious) fiction about climate change, while (more radical) scholars such as Mark Bould note that almost all texts produced today consider the climate emergency and the system that is producing it (yes, system, not humans – as this post describes), on some level. Indeed, there is a great number of stories out there, from Maja Lunde’s award-winning The History of Bees (2015) to Godzilla: King of the Monster (2019, sponsored by the US Department of Defense) that talk about climate change.
A problem is that much writing on climate fiction has grouped texts from different parts of the world together and assumed they speak in the same way about climate change. This is not the case! As the UN has observed, along with various climate organisations, social scientists, environmental historians and many literary scholars, climate change affects different parts of the world differently, with the Global South being much more severely affected than much of the Global North. Because of this, climate fiction from different parts of the world tells very different stories about the encounter with global warming or other types of biospheric breakdown.
This is important to remember when looking at how climate fiction describes food and eating in futures transformed by global warming. Food, eating and food security mean very different things in different parts of the world. This is while this project studies food from three different regions: the Nordic nations (characterized by strong welfare states, robust food security and limited climate upheaval), North America (a much more stratified society with pockets of considerable poverty and poor food security), and sub-Saharan Africa (where food insecurity is widespread and drought and/or flooding more common, and more difficult to manage).