What does it mean for a book, a film or a game (or a piece of music, meme or painting) to be about food? Do people have to sit down to actually eat for a given text to be about food? Obviously, texts where this happens cannot help but say something about food, but food is narrated in many other ways as well. When analyzing how food is imagined in climate fiction, it is necessary to consider not just what fictional characters put into their mouths (although this is certainly important), but also how food is sourced, how it travels, how it impacts local and global economies, how it enables or consumes people and planetary resources, and how it makes possible (or impossible) the texts themselves. In this post, I want to briefly consider how these different foodways impact the climate fiction narrative.
It goes without saying that any climate fiction where people scavenge abandoned houses for things to eat is about food and how climate change produces food shortages. In stories such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) or Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012) people survive (or don’t survive) on the foods left behind by a now-defunct society. The Road is in many ways a novel about food and eating since the two main characters spend all their time searching for food and trying to avoid becoming food. The consumption of insect-based protein bars by the enslaved and precarious poor in Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer(2013) is another example of how images of food and eating help readers and audiences understand the relationship between climate change and a lack of food. In these texts, people are seen to be eating and what they eat (or do not eat) is often so different from what is considered food today that it forces the readers to consider their own relationship to food and the future.
However, food also appears in climate fiction texts as a product of an extractive system or as a set of (new) ecological and economic relationships. The project Future Food Imaginaries is premised on the crucial observation, made by the EAT-Lancet Commission amongst others, that the existing food system is eroding the planet. As many sociologists and scholars belonging to the emerging field of food regime analysis have noted, this is a system rooted in the colonial world-system described by Immanuel Wallerstein. Climate fiction is about food also when it discusses this food system or food regime, when it suggests alternatives to them, or when it connects them to particular diets. One of many climate fictions that explores food as a global system is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). This novel describes a future where most regular crops have collapsed due to genetic manipulation and mutant pests, and where international mega corporations are selling disease-resistant but infertile seeds to farmers all over the world. The seeds will yield a single harvest, forcing farmers to buy new seeds every season. In this way, The Windup Girl presents a nightmarish vision of how green capitalism has been able to combine a nominally sustainable agricultural system (this is a future that has abandoned the fossil-fuel economy) with the injustice that marks the present, unsustainable food system.
Finally, climate fiction is about food also in the sense that food makes certain narratives possible. The same word-system that is central to the existing food system or global food regime also feeds much of the global entertainment industry. This is not a trite observation. When Dunkin’ Donuts and Budweiser pay to display their logos in films such as Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), this limits what this film can say about the global food system. (Indeed, Godzilla: King of the Monsters was sponsored both by the US energy/fossil fuel industrial complex and by the US Department of Defense). In this way, climate fiction narratives are not only stories about food, they are also, in some notable cases, stories created with the assistance of the global, industrialized food system.