This is another too-long blog post. Sometimes, you just have to give a novel the space it demands. So here goes: One of the most critically acclaimed and influential climate fictions from North America is Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Published in 2003, it was written at a time when the concept “Anthropocene” had only begun …
Oryx and Crake: Atwood, Food and the Capitalocene Read More »
This is the introduction to a special issue I edited with food scholar Ana Grgic. The article Climate Diaspora and Future Food Cultures that is write about here is part of this issue. As the abstract notes, the issue takes as its starting point the fact that much food culture is diasporic today. Thus, diasporic food cultures enter dominant societies through a variety of manners and spaces, in homes, at food fairs, restaurants, through cookbooks, in supermarkets, but also in visual media. With this as …
Special Issue Introduction: Representation of Diasporic Food Cultures Read More »
I spoke on the topic “Fiction and Food Futures” at the Tasty Future Festival on the 16th of April, 2024. This event took place at Linnaeus University and was organized by Paula Schneewind and Larissa Zeiler, two MA students on the program Design+Change. The day consisted of a series of open lectures, a workshop, a luncheon and a …
The publication of Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl in 2009 marks an important stage in the writing of North American climate fiction. The novel was awarded the Nebula, Hugo, John W. Campbell, Compton Crook and Locus awards in 2010, as well as a host of other prizes. It is clearly inspired by previous sci-fi such as the early …
The first publication of the project is now online (Open Access). This is the article Climate Diaspora and Future Food Cultures in Snowpiercer (2013) and The Road (2009) that I (Johan Höglund) wrote with my colleague Niklas Salmose. It is part of a special section (soon) published in the journal Food Culture and Society and I edited this section with food studies scholar Ana …
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 …
(Beyond) junk food futures in Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi Read More »
Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind (2020) was well reviewed when it came out. It has also been turned into a Netflix movie, directed by Sam Esmail (best-know for the award-winning television series Mr. Robot) and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Myha’la, among others. This post is mostly about the novel, but it also …
As part of the project, I have organized sustainable dinners in collaboration with restaurants. The aim of these dinners has been to raise awareness of how the dominant food system contributes to global warming and to familiarize people with sustainable foodways: to introduce the idea that sustainable dinners can be tasty even though they are mostly vegan …
Foodunfolded is funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) located in Leuven, Belgium. I think there is good reason to worry about the potential of any initiative that emerges out of the attempt to enhance life within a particular region of the planet. That noted, Foodunfolded does try to understand how food …
Godzilla (or Gojira as the Japanese original calls this monster) is a cross-cultural franchise begun in 1954 in post-war Japan. Since then, the monster has mutated and invaded a number of other nations. The first attempt to launch an American Godzilla film occurred in 1998 when TriStar released Godzilla and Godzilla the (animated) series. This attempt petered out due to …