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Robert Frost gave us little choice when he wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.”
What about plague, flood, zombies, killer robots, ocean acidification, nuclear accident and alien invasion? Fortunately, in these final days before climate collapse, our apocalyptic literature presents itself in a dark smorgasbord of flavors.
And now we have an apocalyptic novel that’s all about flavors. C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey is the powerful story of an ambitious chef determined to keep cooking even as 98 percent of commercial crops fail and the world’s food supplies dwindle to mush.
The unnamed narrator is in her mid-20s when a mysterious smog rises in Iowa and blocks the sun around the world. “Biodiversity has declined. Wild animals and livestock died due to lack of food,” she recalls. “It was like gray skies and gray kitchens. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quail, no grapes of the sour-green variety… no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.” On and on rolls this inventory of culinary devastation, an extensive catalog that only conjures up delicacies when it notices their absence. For a cook, such empty cupboards mean a tasteless existence supported only by mung protein flour.
Zhang is such a cool writer that salmon steaks in her prose could stay fresh for weeks. But there’s something absurd about this narrator’s single-minded obsession with haute cuisine in “The Road,” which sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” When the restaurant where she works in England runs out of supplies, she makes a bold decision: “I quit that job to recklessly, immorally, and desperately pursue the only job that gave me hope for salad.”
Colleagues think she’s crazy for giving up a steady job while millions of people die of hunger, but she’s enchanted by the chance to work as a private chef for a shadowy research community on a mountain near the Italian border. She shapes her resume, peppers her application with lies and agrees to a long list of restrictions.
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At this early point, “Land of Milk and Honey” begins to give off the faint scent of Julia Child on “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Connoisseurs of apocalyptic literature will also try a soup of “Oryx and Crake,” but Zhang clearly follows her own recipe.
The young chef arrives at an elaborate restaurant built on a cliff high above the border of acid smog. “I felt a euphoria like the first European colonizers must have had when they saw new land,” she says. There’s no one here, but she finds a box with flour, vanilla, eggs and fresh strawberries “as pliable as a woman’s inner thigh.” Inside is a note: “Impress me.”
She soon learns that she is working for a relentless, merciless man with dead shark eyes. As befits a science fiction autocrat with a god complex, he only speaks in pompous statements, e.g. B. “Fear was the whetstone that sharpened the instincts of those who first dared to hunt mammoths.” (Like truffle oil, a little goes a long way.) His scientists have discovered much of the lost diversity of the mammoths in an underground laboratory World restored, a veritable Noah’s Ark of “chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tuna, sturgeon, wild boar” as well as extinct grains, vegetables, fruits and spices. All of this – anything she wants – is at her disposal to prepare eight-course meals for wealthy investors hoping to escape Earth’s fate. It’s a kind of survival Tupperware party for billionaires. Every week she “governed the mighty with their tongues.”
C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold brilliantly reimagines the cowboy tale
Foodies who despair of science fiction being served up with pilled meals, Soylent Greens and replicator pot roasts will find a foodie’s dream in the Land of Milk and Honey. Honestly, this novel should come with linen napkins. The pages of Zhang’s “Connoisseurship of Loss” are filled with tuna ventresca, onion soup, petits fours, caviar, koshihikari rice on blood oranges, braised duck in macadamia milk, panna cotta, Spanish mackerel, mapo tofu lasagna and more. Nothing is too exotic or precious for this cuisine. (And don’t miss Zhang’s acknowledgments page, which features a fun list of meals peppered with the names of writers and books.)
The cook’s only companion in this top-secret community of wealthy survivalists is her boss’s beautiful daughter, Aida, who may be a distant relative of “Rappaccini’s daughter.” Aida is a brilliant geneticist with an unpredictable personality that is alternately bossy and childlike. Holed up in this artificial land of milk and honey, she and her father fight together against the Italian government’s interference, develop ever more creative biological creations and prepare for one final adventure of technological daring. But with seething fear, the young chef finally realizes that there is a reason why her unrealistic employer wanted an Asian woman of a certain age – and it has nothing to do with her skills in the kitchen.
The story remains exciting, unsettling and scary, but can feel strangely static. This effect is reinforced by Zhang’s aphoristic style and the feeling that these scenes are still remembered after many decades. Additionally, the narrator has an aversion to action, emphasizing reflection and undercooking moments of real drama. The result is an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay between environmental destruction and class. The bittersweet aftertaste makes you think about what you would do – or refuse to do – to experience the most important pleasure.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in iceberg lettuce.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
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