All City by Alex DiFrancesco: Climate (Food) Inequalities

A noted problem with much climate crisis discourse is that it tends to assume that the experience of ecological breakdown is shared equally across space and time. In the words of climate fiction scholar Matthew Schneider-Mayerson: “the advent of the Anthropocene concept has emphasized climate change as a slow-motion catastrophe facing an undifferentiated humanity.” However, as Schneider-Mayerson goes on to describe, and as Rob Nixon has influentially observed in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2013), the body of humans that experience disaster now and in the future is not undifferentiated. Climate change is lived very differently depending on where in the world you live, and how you are folded into the global economic system. As Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg have pertinently argued, “For the foreseeable future – indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earth – there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged. If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal, but uneven and combined” (66-7).

As discussed in other blog posts, climate fiction from what can be termed the Global North has struggled to communicate this unevenness. Indeed, seminal climate fiction texts such as Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012) (soon to be a major Hollywood film directed by Ridley Scott), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), and Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021) narrate future ecological upheaval from the perspective of white, middle-class people without giving much attention to how precarious communities have long struggled with the very problems that face the protagonists in these texts (an acute risk of suffering violence and a constant lack of shelter, food and potable water). 

In relation to such texts, Alex DiFrancesco’s All City (2019) stands out as a climate fiction story that centres on the lives of precarious communities and that highlights how long existing inequalities will impact the progress of socio-ecological breakdown. This novel describes the arrival of a future superstorm named “Bernice” in New York and how this storm makes large parts of the city uninhabitable. The water inundates large parts of the city, tumbling cars and drowning people in ways uncannily reminiscent of what happened in Valencia in November of 2024. To illustrate how differently this disaster impacts the lives of New Yorkers, the events are narrated by three different people. Makayla is a young woman of colour who is forced to work several jobs to pay constantly rising rents as her neighbourhood is gentrified. Jesse is an unhoused trans man living on the streets with other people ostracised because of their gender identity and/or ethnicity. These two protagonists are well aware of the coming of the storm, but they lack the financial means to escape the cataclysmic event and are thus caught up in the havoc that follows. In contrast, white art lover Evann, affluent because her landlord father has made millions gentrifying New York, can easily escape to her father’s “inland compound”. For her, the disaster is not, as for Makayla and Jesse, the loss of safe living quarters, schools, reliable health care, electricity, clean water, and food, but instead the ruination of her small luxury flat and the prized artwork and books she kept there.

Food is central to DiFrancesco’s endeavour to explain the uneven impact of climate change. On the very first page of the novel, Makayla laments the loss of a local bodega where she could afford to “get little bits of something, a cup of noodles or a dollar bag of chips”. Due to rising rents, this shop has now been replaced by a store that sells “travelled” pet food at exorbitant prices. Jesse, meanwhile, finds their food in dumpsters and trash cans. Once the superstorm has made life in many parts of New York impossible, Makayla finds refuge in an upscale apartment complex in a thoroughly gentrified part of Brooklyn. She is struck by the proportions of the accommodation she enters. In particular, the kitchen and its contents amaze her:

The kitchen was bigger than my entire apartment had been, with a huge, heavy wooden counter that wrapped around it, and shelves and storage spaces made of the same wood above it. The sink and the refrigerator shone deep silver. There was a walk-in pantry the size of my old bedroom. It was stacked up with all kinds of nonperishable foods—beef, turkey, venison, and ostrich jerky; wasabi peas; dried apricots; trail mix with raisins and little buttons of yogurt in it; cans of soup; cans of salmon, sardines, anchovies; glass jars of caviar; candied kiwi fruit; nuts; dates; cereal; crackers; chips; canned peaches, pineapple, tropical fruit. There was every food I could imagine, and some that I couldn’t.

In this way, food is employed in All City not simply to designate the shift between pre-crisis affluence and post-crisis scarcity, as is often the case in climate fiction. While the post-crisis phase in this novel is marked by food shortage, this is experienced mostly by people who were already struggling to find nutritious food to eat. The discovery of sudden abundance does not alter this situation. For Makayla and the people who join her in the novel, the abundance is painfully short-lived. For Evann – whose father eventually throws Makayla and the community she has helped create out of the apartment complex – the affluence has always been, and continues to be, a thing of course.