By David Sutton<\/em><\/p>\n A number of scholars in Anthropology and related disciplines have posed the question \u00a0\u201cWhat is the Future of Food?\u201d in our times of polycrisis and a seemingly broken food system (see for example, Sophia Roosth\u2019s (2013) discussion of the ambitious aims of Molecular Gastronomy<\/a>, and Ben Wurgaft\u2019s Meat Planet <\/em>(2019<\/a>),\u00a0 among others). One way to address this question is through the imagination of possible futures provided by science and speculative fiction. I have been teaching a class for the past 12 years, inherited from my colleague Rob Corrucini when he retired, called Anthropology Through Science-Fiction<\/em>, where I explore the multiple intersections of imaginations of others that these approaches provide (of course, with plenty of Ursula K. Le Guin). Because my main identity is as a food anthropologist\u2014interested as much in how we remember foods past as in how we experience the sensory aspects of food in the present, and imagine a more equitable food future\u2014I\u2019ve always included a unit of the class on food. This unit features pieces like Paolo Bacigalupi\u2019s \u201cCalorie Man\u201d on a future controlled by Monsanto-like seed companies, and Meg Ellison\u2019s \u201cPizza Boy,\u201d in which food becomes a language of resistance across an inter-galactic battlefield. A few other stories that have been particularly useful and well-received by students include Charlie Jane Anders\u2019 \u201cMinnesota Diet<\/a>\u201d on a food crisis in a somewhat more utopian future and Vina Prasad\u2019s \u201cA Series of Steaks<\/a>\u201d on a meat-deprived future where counterfeit meat is produced through\u00a0 3-D printers and human skill. Of course there are many more. These stories provide speculative near- or far-future possibilities which are also, of course, trenchant commentaries on contemporary times and trends that help us to think about where we might be headed and perhaps how to avoid some of these potentially apocalyptic outcomes. My food research has increasingly taken a sensory turn, trying to understand the oft-neglected aspects of the experience not just of taste, but of all the sensory dimensions of eating (see Sutton 2023, Sutton and Vournelis 2025<\/a>). The ways that the experience of\u00a0 taste is often taken completely out of context in the scientific laboratory, detached from other senses and disembedded from the powerful everyday and ritual practices which give it meaning. This has meant that I often find fiction to be more inspiring in my research, none more so, perhaps, than Marcel Proust\u2019s Remembrance of Things Past, <\/em>from which I riffed a title to my book exploring the relationship of food and memory Remembrance of Repasts <\/em>(Sutton 2001).<\/p>\n Coming across C. Pam Zhang\u2019s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey<\/a>,<\/em> gave me a lot to think about along these lines. But more than other such stories, the book treated food as an experience where sensory pleasure is absolutely central: survival, yes, but what about taste? Land of Milk and Honey <\/em>tells the story of what happens after a climate apocalypse called \u201cthe smog,\u201d briefly described as acidic conditions and a loss of sunlight that leads to the corresponding loss of 95% of the world\u2019s crops and livestock. This leads to mass starvation in many countries, and survival conditions in some countries, mostly in Europe, through the discovery of a mung-bean\/soy\/algae crop that can be grown in the dark and turned into a tasteless flour product. Unlike Soylent Green\u2014which, in famous quote intoned by Charlton Heston in the movie of the same name, \u201cis people!\u201d\u2014the mung-bean flour is not hiding its real identity. It is nutritious but anodyne, food stripped of all pleasure, indeed, much like the actual product, popular among the tech-bro set now marketed as \u201cSoylent.\u201d<\/p>\n In the wake of this climate catastrophe, the story is told from the point of view of an unnamed Chinese-American chef desperate in the face of kitchens full of mung-bean flour to recuperate her senses. She craves the taste of a strawberry or something green in a landscape featuring \u201cno more lemon trees fragrant on the slopes of Greece, no more sugarcane striping Vietnam, no more small, sweet Indian mangos\u201d (Zhang 2023:1). After this climate catastrophe, there is no culinary \u201cfusion\u201d either, as countries not ruled by famine fall into a nationalist-driven culinary stripping down to the most basic dishes and flavors. As the chef reflects: \u201cIn England, the shrinking supplies of frozen fish were reserved for kippers, or gray renditions of cod and chips\u2026back to stodgy safety\u201d (Zhang 2023:5).<\/p>\n Under these conditions, the chef (and main protagonist of the novel) jumps at the possibility of a job cooking for a rich, mysterious entrepreneur who has bought a zone of self-government on a mountaintop in the Italian alps. Freed from Italian law, he and other rich investors fund a biodiversity lab with the purpose of bioengineering food crops that might withstand the smog. The chef\u2019s world on the mountain is mostly taken up with her employer and his daughter, Aida (one of the few main characters who is named in the book). The former is portrayed as a cruel man with no knowledge of food or \u201ctaste.\u201d He speaks the language of optimization and hides a wound of abandonment by his first wife, a Korean woman, for whom the chef is some kind of strange replacement. He only seems to take pleasure in roping in more investors from among the tech and oil billionaires and other dregs of the super-rich by playing to their fantasies that they are \u201capex predators.\u201d This designation presumably makes them worthy of fantastical meals which, until the chef begins to make her mark, involve famed traditional dishes from the past.<\/p>\n In some ways, the book picks up on themes of the lack of taste<\/em> and general cluelessness of the superrich, as explored in recent films like The Menu,<\/em> in which many of the restaurant patrons see dining as a chance to flaunt their wealth, not to gain a deeper understanding of food cultures and the social relations that create them. However, Aida, the employer\u2019s daughter, provides balance to this portrait. She is full of energy and desire, takes great pleasure in eating her way through the chef\u2019s many test-meals, while also running the biodiversity lab. The daughter and the chef become lovers, and the daughter plays foil to the chef\u2019s doubts about the morality of the mountain\u2019s enterprise, giving Zhang the chance to provide a more thoughtful view of the wealthy. The self-absorbed buffoons that make up the mountain\u2019s guest list are epitomized by the ultimate \u201cApex Predator,\u201d Kandinsky, an Elon Musk stand-in, who is the big fish that the employer is trying to reel in as an investor in the mountain\u2019s ultimate plans and who demands the kind of \u201cbend-the-knee\u201d behavior, or even more extreme signs of obeisance currently fashionable in the tech-bro billionaire orbit. Aida and the chef, on the other hand, engage in a more equal dialogue, parsing out the possibilities for moral action in a deeply compromised world.<\/p>\n Zhang\u2019s description of the meals served to potential investors are both beautifully detailed and elliptical, leaving enough to the imagination and to a reader\u2019s interpretation to allow\u00a0 questions of motivation and morality to remain suspended as the chef struggles with her own appetites or lack thereof. Surrounded by the colors, flavors and ingredients that she has so long been deprived of, however, she finds herself unable to eat, longing for the grey\u00a0 mung-bean flour that would keep her attached to the real world. As she learns more about the mountain and the plans of her employer and his daughter, she is both attracted to the hope of recaptured colors, smells and tastes, while at the same time repulsed by the preoccupation with optimization<\/em> of the .01% that makes up the social milieu of the mountain and its community, and the neo-Darwinian fables they thrive on: \u201cOptimal<\/em>, he said as he timed footraces and sent out recipes for nutrient analysis. He served out success alongside the world\u2019s decay, an intoxicating flavor sweet with fear and rotted by pride. Apice<\/em>, [Italian for Apex], he said when he revealed that the average resting heart rate of residents was in the top two percent. Apice<\/em>\u201d (Zhang 2023:103-4).<\/p>\n Land of Milk and Honey <\/em>is not just about the future of food, even though food appears in one form or another in most of its pages. It is also a book about family, as both the chef and Aida struggle in different ways with estranged mothers. For the chef, the loss of her mother, with whom she had a very difficult relationship, is paralleled with the loss of the desire for tastes and smells of the pre-smog world. Coming to terms with her memories of her mother, which involves caring for her mother\u2019s cat and serving as a faux-mother as well as lover to Aida, strangely parallels the chef\u2019s slow process of reconnecting with the world and regaining her sense of taste and her desire: \u201cThis was the summer of my de-extinction, of life streaming back to its source. In the cool deep of the labs I witnessed the birth of the first Tasmanian tigers\u201d (Zhang 2023:120), and \u201c[Aida] gave me custard apples, loquats, damsons, songs of vine and hive and rivers through sun-drenched afternoons when time hung suspended in amber\u201d (Zhang 2023:121). As landscapes of her past enter the news with possibilities of smog-reprieve, the chef cooks her way back to the taste of her childhood in Oregon and Southern California. These culinary memories are reproduced through a scallop, dulse and agar concoction, as she reflects: \u201cOnce, I heard a journalist say she did not know what she thought until she wrote it; I didn\u2019t know my own mind until I tasted\u201d (Zhang 2023:125). <\/p>\n These insights parallel many of my own understandings of the workings of food memories. While we all have such memories to one degree or another, I found in my work in Greece that the more these memories were embedded in particular social and emotional contexts, the more powerful they became. Kollivo, <\/em>for example, is a dish made of boiled wheat, seeds and nuts, covered with sugar, and served at memorial services for the dead. It represents both the potential for rebirth (symbolized by the seeds of various kinds), and the ongoing generosity of the dead person, and its taste <\/em>can\u2019t be separated from this emotionally-rich context (see Sutton 2023<\/a>). Similarly, the food memories described by the chef, are, for her, total social facts which allow her to reconnect to a past beyond simple fragments and start to piece together some of the aspects of her life that were most unsettled even before \u201cthe smog.\u201d<\/p>\n But Aida\u2019s research lab and the chef\u2019s connection to her own moral center and past experiences are ultimately on a collision course. Aida quotes controversial Whole Earth catalog cofounder Stewart Brand: \u201cWe are as gods and have to get good at it\u201d (Zhang 2023:168), driving her lab on to create the charismatic megafauna that end up on the plates of its investors. Tasting recently extinct species that have been resurrected, which provides a frisson of excitement for the investors on the mountain, is, however, a bridge too far for our chef. Witnessing it, indeed, starts to push her away from her employer and Aida, though not away from pleasure itself \u00a0She voices her desire for\u00a0 \u201ca decent California burrito\u201d (Zhang 2023:201), as well as the Jian Bing (Chinese savory crepe) that a street vendor living amidst the smog in Milan has creatively managed to regenerate\u2014not through laboratory science, but through cooking\u2019s old-fashioned science of the concrete. Reading Land of Milk and Honey <\/em>while simultaneously learning about the real-world company Colossal, with its claims to have made the dire wolf de-extinct (although the meaning of this is hotly contested, see Max 2025<\/a>), with Mammoths, and Tasmanian Tigers\u2014both featured in the novel\u2014soon to follow, was a reminder of how close science fiction sits to our current reality. Hallam Stevens documents one biotech company\u2019s recent attempts to de-extinct wooly mammoths in order to turn them into mammoth meatballs as a way, they claim, to promote sustainability and \u201c\u2019eat our way out of extinction\u2019\u201d (2024:48). Their lab-grown meatballs aspire to be cruelty-free, and paleo\u2014the original paleo, in fact.<\/p>\n Some of Colossal\u2019s justifications for dire wolf resurrection, indeed, echoed some of the claims of Aida and her father, playing on both the symbolic and the practical. Colossal\u2019s founder Ben Lamm frames his justification with the importance of wolves to\u00a0 Native Americans: \u201c\u2019There was this desire to bring back what they called the Great Wolf,\u2019 [Lamm] claimed.\u00a0 Without missing a beat, however, Lamm adds, \u2018And this is really <\/em>important\u2019 Lamm said\u2014was that dire wolves are top-line talent in pop culture. They aren\u2019t just in Game of Thrones<\/em>. Dire wolves have starring roles in the video game World of Warcraft<\/em>\u2026the Grateful Dead even have a song called \u2018Dire Wolf\u2019\u201d (Max 2025:37). The current U.S. administration has even cited the re-birth of the \u201cdire wolves\u201d as a triumph of innovation over regulation (Max 2025:38). Lamm would fit very well among the \u201cApex Predators\u201d on Zhang\u2019s mountain, sure that the technological solutionism that Silicon Valley offers justifies their money and power, even if they are ultimately just pitch-men for something new <\/em>(or in this case old), shiny and cool.<\/p>\n Similar to Lamm, Aida and her father, in different ways, continue to make the case for calculation and optimization in a Hobbesian world where, indeed, \u201cTo survive: to eat\u201d (Zhang 2023:173), while drawing from the tools of ritual and sensory stimulation to entangle their investors. Commensality, or eating together at the same table, has long been recognized in anthropology as a powerful ritual of identity maintenance, going back to the work of 19th<\/sup> century anthropologist Robertson-Smith (1907).\u00a0 But in my work I have argued that too often anthropologists ignore how <\/em>the sensory practices of eating together can create, not just reproduce, group identities (Sutton 2021). Rituals of commensality, including the meals that play on both the rich patrons\u2019 memories and their desire for the never before tasted<\/em>\u2014including hunting and consuming one of the charismatic megafauna that has been resurrected in the laboratory\u2014play\u00a0 an important role in binding the diverse group of superrich into a larger whole. Such sensory-stimulating rituals convince them to be willing to commit to the unusual future that Aida and her father have planned. The chef, on the other hand, struggles to hold out for a world where pleasure can still tie you to ordinary worlds of affect freed from calculation. This is, then, unlike the fictions of Kim Stanley Robinson (2020), Paolo Bacigalupi (2009), or Octavia Butler (1993), which put their emphasis directly on the crisis itself and potential solutions or struggles. Zhang\u2019s is a world where the climate catastrophe is seen very much through the lens of how, for those who don\u2019t count themselves among the superrich, to live a meaningful, desire-filled life amidst the ruins. How Zhang resolves all this I leave to the reader.<\/p>\n In a broader sense, I would return to the point that anthropological work on food has often ignored its more sensory aspects, and how the sensory experience of cooking and eating provides insight into questions of everyday life, ritual, power and the future of our food system. These are some of the issues that I have begun to explore my research, and they can also be found in a few other recent works such as that of Graf (2024<\/a>), Papacharalampous (2023<\/a>) and Low (2023<\/a>). Fictional explorations like Land of Milk and Honey <\/em>should be part of this discussion as they are particularly useful in suggesting lines of thought to explore how some of these dimensions of taste play out, and of course, suggest ways to write about the senses in more evocative language. Most of all, the novel is an excellent reminder that thinking\u00a0 and writing about food without considering\u00a0 the complex role of pleasure in our current circumstances makes for a very anodyne meal.<\/p>\n David Sutton is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale<\/a>. He also teaches regularly at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. Since the early 1990s he has been conducting research on the island of Kalymnos, in Greece, concerned with memory, food, and experiences of continuity and change. He also writes about his ambivalent feelings about restaurants (see \u201cThe Hospitality Illusion,\u201d Gastronomica 24(2):1-5). He is a member of the board and co-editor of the weblog for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition<\/a>, where he also hosts a series of video interviews on the origins and development of food anthropology. When not thinking about food, he works on the anthropology of movies and has written about everything from The Godfather to The Big Lebowski, Arrival and Midsommar. He loves cooking, foraging, reading speculative and other fiction, and suffering the woes of a life-long Mets fan.<\/em><\/p>\n References Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Anders, Charlie Jane. 2018. \u201cThe Minnesota Diet.\u201d Slate Future Tense<\/em>. https:\/\/slate.com\/technology\/2018\/01\/the-minnesota-diet-a-new-short-story-by-charlie-jane-anders.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bacigalupi, Paolo. 2008. \u201cThe Calorie Man.\u201d In Pump Six and Other Stories. <\/em>San Francisco: Night Shade Books.<\/p>\n Bacigalupi, Paolo. 2009 The Windup Girl<\/em>. Hoboken, NJ: Nightshade Books.<\/p>\n Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower<\/em>. New York: Warner Books.<\/p>\n Ellison, Meg. 2022. \u201cThe Pizza Boy.\u201d In Rebecca Roanhorse, ed. The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy<\/em>, 9-17. New York: Mariner Books.<\/p>\n Graf, Katharina. 2024. Food and Families in the Making: Knowledge Reproduction and Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco.<\/em> New York: Berghahn Books.<\/p>\n Low, K. 2023. Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia. <\/em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n Max, D.T. 2025. \u201cInside the Lab Where Scientists are Bringing Back Extinct Animals.\u201d New Yorker<\/em>. https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/newsletter\/the-daily\/inside-the-lab-where-scientists-are-bringing-back-extinct-animals<\/a><\/p>\n Papacharalampous, Nafsika. 2023. The Metamorphosis of Greek Cuisine: An Ethnography of Deli Foods, Restaurant Smells and Foodways of Crisis<\/em>. New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n Prasad, Vina Jie-Min. 2017. \u201cA Series of Steaks.\u201d Clarkesworld <\/em>Issue 124: January. https:\/\/clarkesworldmagazine.com\/prasad_01_17\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thegeekanthropologist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/screenshot-2025-06-30-at-10.17.32e280afam.png?w=657\")
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