Becky Chamber’s started out like many other up-and-coming science fiction/climate fiction authors by self-publishing her fiction. Her debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet began in 2012 through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Shortly after its original publication, it was picked up by a big publishing house, and it was subsequently shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Kitchies Golden Tentacle Award.
Much of Chamber’s writing can be defined as Utopian Weird. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and its sequels A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018), and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021) take place in a universe where a variety of species interact and collaborate. The ship the Wayfarer, which is at the centre of the series, is operated by humans, but also by the reptilian Aandrisk, the six-limbed Grum that looks like a cross between a lizard and an otter, that has six vocal cords and that change their biological sex from male, to female and on to a third, uncertain state (an idea borrowed from Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)). The ship’s navigator is a Sianat who, at an early age, was infected with a virus that makes it possible for him to compute journeys through interstellar space better than any computer.
Food is central to this interstellar, multispecies space crew, as it is in much of Chamber’s other fiction. In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Chamber’s considers how protein that is currently shunned in the Global North may be considered delicacies in a far (and distant) future. The novel follows the human Rosemary Harper, a privileged young woman who grew up on Mars but who is determined to flee the planet and her arms-dealing and disreputable father. Once she is hired as a clerk by the captain of the Wayfarer, she is confronted with the eating habits of the crew:
Dr. Chef proudly lifted a large arthropod from the grill with a pair of tongs. Its shell was blackened, and its legs curled under in even rows. It was about the size of Rosemary’s hand, wrist to fingertip. “I hope you like red coast bugs. Fresh, too, not from the stasie. I have a few breeding tanks in the back.”
Sissix gave Rosemary a friendly nudge. “We only get fresh ones for special occasions.”
“I’ve never had them, but they smell wonderful,” Rosemary said.
“Wait,” Sissix said. “You’ve never had red coast bugs? I’ve never met a Human who’s never had red coast bugs.”
“I’ve always lived planetside,” Rosemary said. “We don’t eat many bugs on Mars.” She felt guilty just saying it. Insects were cheap, rich in protein, and easy to cultivate in cramped rooms, which made them an ideal food for spacers. Bugs had been part of the Exodus Fleet’s diet for so long that even extrasolar colonies still used them as a main staple. Rosemary had, of course, at least heard of red coast bugs. The old story went that a short while after the Exodus Fleet had been granted refugee status within the Galactic Commons, a few Human representatives had been brought to some Aeluon colony to discuss their needs. One of the more entrepreneurial Humans had noticed clusters of large insects skittering over the red sand dunes near the coastline. The insects were a mild nuisance to the Aeluons, but the Humans saw food, and lots of it. Red coast bugs were swiftly adopted into the Exodans’ diet, and nowadays, you could find plenty of Aeluons and extrasolar Humans who had become wealthy from their trade. Rosemary’s admission that she’d never eaten red coast bugs meant that she was not only poorly traveled, but that she belonged to a separate chapter of Human history. She was a descendant of the wealthy meat-eaters who had first settled Mars, the cowards who had shipped livestock through space while nations starved back on Earth. Even though Exodans and Solans had long ago put their old grudges behind them (mostly), her privileged ancestry was something she had become ashamed of. It reminded her all too well of why she had left home.
This short passage identifies the excessive consumption of meat as a driver of inequality. As the progeny of an excessively privileged (and ruthless) family, Rosemary has consumed meat without considering how it is produced or its consequences for the planet/solar system or the people inhabiting this system. Against this history and situation, the consumption of “red coast bugs” is presented as a sustainable and ethical alternative. It connects with ongoing research that tries to source protein from insects. As this article argues, it is possible that a “novel foods” diet that includes insect protein may reduce global warming potential, water use and land use by over 80%.
That noted, it should also be observed that the consumption of the bugs in this passage is very similar to the consumption of red meat in the present. The bugs are grilled, blackened and moved around with thongs, and this makes them smell wonderful. To eat bugs in this passage is to consume a different type of protein, but the way this protein is cooked, and the ritual that surrounds the consumption of the food, is strikingly similar to how meat is cooked and consumed in the present. This means, in turn, that this insect protein enables the same kind of identity-making that meat performs in the present. If, as Claude Fischler has argued: “Food is also central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically and socially by the food he/she choses to incorporate” (275), it seems that the consumption of insect protein in Chamber’s novel may enable the same kind of identity construction as the consumption of red meat makes possible today. (This is a bit surprising since much of Chamber’s oeuvre challenges conventional gendered, racial and species-based identities, but I will ignore this for now).
By making the consumption of insect protein like the consumption of meat, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet participates in a project that intersects with the work that The Good Food Institute is undertaking. This institute promotes various alternatives to regular meat, sourced from animals. At the moment, the effort is geared towards the production of plant-based meat, cultivated (in-vitro) meat, and protein created through fermentation. This makes it possible to maintain particular and popular diets (and the type of identity production these diets make possible), but without the need to source unsustainable animal protein to maintain them.
It is obviously better to eat a plant-based burger than a meat-based version if you consider the limits of the Earth system. However, apart from the problem that the turn to soy is creating (https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/sustainable_production/soy/), the masculine/patriarchal consumption paradigm that informs meat-eating may be destructive in itself. This needs to be discussed in a separate blog post, but concepts such as the White (M)anthropocene suggests that climate change is gendered and racialised, and that global warming is driven by the same extractive imperatives that are often associated with patriarchy and hierarchical types of masculinity.
Tags: meat consumption, insect protein, utopia, food futures, novel foods