Tochi Onyebuchi was born in the US to Nigerian immigrants. He is known for the young adult War Girls (2019) and Rebel Sisters (2020), novels set in a future Nigeria ravaged by climate change and civil war. These texts are interesting as widely circulated sub-Saharan climate fiction, but Onyebuchi is also the author of specifically American narratives set in futures where the climate has been transformed by human activity. The most critically acclaimed so far is his novella Riot Baby (2020), a very angry, feverish and often poetic contemplation on structural racism, the disregard for black lives in America, and the US prison system. It is a story that locates the dystopian future it investigates to already dystopian pasts lived by many black people in the US; a history stretching from plantation slavery, to post-Civil War oppression, to the systematic persecution, killing and incarceration of impoverished black young men in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century America. Food is not a major concern in this story, yet it is very present both as a marker of a certain state of life and in the form of specific brands.
Riot Baby begins in Los Angeles in the early spring of 1991 shortly after the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. The story focuses on the young black girl Ella and her pregnant mother. They are doing the best they can to manage, but they live in a world made by equally violent gangs and policemen. As tensions rise following the acquittal of the officers that brutalized King, the mother is rushed to the hospital to deliver her child and, to the sound of escalating violence and rioting, Kevin (Kev) is born. [Plenty of spoilers follow in this post.]
For most of the novella, Kev is the first-person narrator of the story. When his voice emerges, the family has left LA for Harlem. Kev, the reader understands, is a bright kid, “goin’ to Harvard on some shit”, but it does not help him much in a place where he is surrounded by poverty and violence. Constantly harassed by police officers, he is moulded by the state into a person of violence. Before long, and as a result of a criminally slow court system rather than a criminal career, he finds himself in prison on Rikers Island. The description of this facility as a violent and inhuman hell draws from Onyebuchi’s own experience as a civil rights lawyer. Rikers is a place of almost constant abuse, where prisoners are singled out for beatings or worse in parts of the prison not seen by the cameras, where inmates fight with other inmates on a daily basis, and where misbehaviour is punished by month in dehumanizing solitary confinement.
Much of the story is stark and horrifically realistic, but there is also a crucial speculative element to the story that makes it possible for the author to explore the characters and events of the story in unique ways, to historicize the world they exist within, and to also speculate on the futures this world is likely to produce. After the LA Riots, Ella discovers she is in command of a “Thing” that allows her to know and reveal things and thoughts, to go unnoticed in crowds, to explode the heads of rats, and even to destroy buildings and vehicles. She makes little use of these destructive talents, but she does visit Kev regularly and shows him the world that exists outside of the confines of his prison. These images are welcome, but they are also sometimes terrifying. In this future:
Florida is riddled with radiation, ribbed by it, and craggy with decay. The Gulf of Mexico burps toxic waste onto the sores that litter Louisiana. Arkansas and Tennessee have turned blue and white under blankets of vengeful snow that come out of nowhere just to fuck with the climate change deniers.
Meanwhile, the state has become increasingly oppressive. The neighbourhood where Ella lives is now monitored by drones and guarded by officers in mini-tanks. Faces are scanned and compared to databases with known or suspected criminals and black bodies are tracked by automated gun turrets on the tanks and by a mechanised and similarly automated police force: robocops that follow the demands of ruthless algorithms. When Kev is finally released from prison and sent, with a chip in his thumb, to a sanctuary town peopled by black ex-convicts, his job is to manufacture components for these automated law-enforcing machines. This leads to Kev’s and Ella’s decision to use her powers to accomplish a violent revolution. This vision of “Fire and blood and screaming and singing” tells of a future where monuments “to the Confederates [are] pulverized into dust” and where police “stations [are] turned into husk” but also to mass death. The book ends before this revolution is enacted, but the vision that concludes the text remains fundamentally subversive of the dominant capitalist and racist society: “Apocalypse sweeps the South. Vengeance visits the North”.
Food and eating are not clearly defined themes in this story. As I argue above, the apparent concern of the novella is to show how what is referred to as the “climate emergency” in much white American fiction has been a crisis for black people since the introduction of plantation slavery. In this way, Onyebuchi can show how the climate crisis and the civil rights crisis are in fact part of the same meta-crisis. Kev’s incarceration is an effect of the same violent and extractive history that has radiated Florida and polluted the Gulf of Mexico. When food does appear in the novella, most of it has also been produced by this history, and it also assists in the production of it.
A significant contributor to ecological breakdown is what is often referred to as the industrialized “Western diet” rich in red, processed meat, preservatives, sugar and processed carbs and fats. It has been shown to produce a number of chronic diseases (obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular illnesses) and it is also, to again cite the EAT Lancet commission, “a major contributor to climate change”. The most extreme, but also most common, version of the Western diet is junk food – vending machine candy bars, hamburgers, sugary drinks, and deep-fried potatoes or chicken nuggets. This is a relatively cheap type of food, made for mass consumption, and, as such it causes trouble, especially for poor people. When fast food corporations target inner-city schools and city regions inhabited primarily by people of colour, they turn, as Andrea Freeman has argued, fast food into an instrument of oppression.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that most of the food that appears in Riot Baby is processed junk food. The park that was once frequented by the black Harlem community has been abandoned and now “holds only the rustling of empty burger wrappers and soda cups”. When Ella moves through an increasingly dystopian US, she sees how, in “some places, hypodermic needles litter the floor and babies, when they cry, reveal teeth rotted by the Mountain Dew that’s cheaper than the milk their mothers want to buy.” At prison, inmates consume Capri-Sun soft drinks and chocolate chip cookies, or are treated to “shitty” food that may have “worms in it”. One of very few images of food that is wholesome for both human bodies and the planet appears in a story told by Kev about “Bobby, who did a bid at Folsom in California”. While at this notorious prison, Bobby was put to landscaping duties but managed to use part of his time to secretly grow vegetables that were then smuggled back into prison: “a jalapeño pepper wrapped in a sandwich bag and smushed in his left boot and in his right boot a bundle of tightly wrapped green onion shoots. One guy brought back a watermelon slice, another some tomatoes.” In this way, the modern-day slavery performed by inmates in the US’s high-security prisons is matched by the creation of modern-day “slave plots” as described by Sylvia Wynter. These were the small pieces of land where slaves grew their own produce, food far more diverse than what came out of the monocrop plantations where they were forced to work.
Riot Baby is a story about socio-ecological breakdown or “climate crisis” that does not use food as a marker of future deprivation. In other words, the main characters do not trek across a ruined landscape in search of cans of food or people to rob or eat as in The Road or other seminal climate fiction texts. Rather, the descriptions of food and eating in this text help readers comprehend how the existing food system assists in the creation not only of ecological ruin but of deeply related social erosion. The same extractive system that creates global warming and pollutes ecosystems has also produced the diets and food items that assist in the ruination of poor black communities in this novel. At the same time, this this text produces glimpses of the kind of subversive food practices that may help restore both people and planet: the radical cultivation of vegetables and the insertion of such foods into the very heart of the oppressive machine.