By David Sutton
A number of scholars in Anthropology and related disciplines have posed the question “What is the Future of Food?” in our times of polycrisis and a seemingly broken food system (see for example, Sophia Roosth’s (2013) discussion of the ambitious aims of Molecular Gastronomy, and Ben Wurgaft’s Meat Planet (2019), 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, 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—interested 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—I’ve always included a unit of the class on food. This unit features pieces like Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Calorie Man” on a future controlled by Monsanto-like seed companies, and Meg Ellison’s “Pizza Boy,” 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’ “Minnesota Diet” on a food crisis in a somewhat more utopian future and Vina Prasad’s “A Series of Steaks” on a meat-deprived future where counterfeit meat is produced through 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). The ways that the experience of 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’s Remembrance of Things Past, from which I riffed a title to my book exploring the relationship of food and memory Remembrance of Repasts (Sutton 2001).
Coming across C. Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, 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 tells the story of what happens after a climate apocalypse called “the smog,” briefly described as acidic conditions and a loss of sunlight that leads to the corresponding loss of 95% of the world’s 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—which, in famous quote intoned by Charlton Heston in the movie of the same name, “is people!”—the 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 “Soylent.”
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 “no more lemon trees fragrant on the slopes of Greece, no more sugarcane striping Vietnam, no more small, sweet Indian mangos” (Zhang 2023:1). After this climate catastrophe, there is no culinary “fusion” 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: “In England, the shrinking supplies of frozen fish were reserved for kippers, or gray renditions of cod and chips…back to stodgy safety” (Zhang 2023:5).
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’s 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 “taste.” 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 “apex predators.” 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.
In some ways, the book picks up on themes of the lack of taste and general cluelessness of the superrich, as explored in recent films like The Menu, 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’s daughter, provides balance to this portrait. She is full of energy and desire, takes great pleasure in eating her way through the chef’s many test-meals, while also running the biodiversity lab. The daughter and the chef become lovers, and the daughter plays foil to the chef’s doubts about the morality of the mountain’s enterprise, giving Zhang the chance to provide a more thoughtful view of the wealthy. The self-absorbed buffoons that make up the mountain’s guest list are epitomized by the ultimate “Apex Predator,” 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’s ultimate plans and who demands the kind of “bend-the-knee” 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.
Zhang’s description of the meals served to potential investors are both beautifully detailed and elliptical, leaving enough to the imagination and to a reader’s interpretation to allow 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 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 of the .01% that makes up the social milieu of the mountain and its community, and the neo-Darwinian fables they thrive on: “Optimal, he said as he timed footraces and sent out recipes for nutrient analysis. He served out success alongside the world’s decay, an intoxicating flavor sweet with fear and rotted by pride. Apice, [Italian for Apex], he said when he revealed that the average resting heart rate of residents was in the top two percent. Apice” (Zhang 2023:103-4).
Land of Milk and Honey 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’s cat and serving as a faux-mother as well as lover to Aida, strangely parallels the chef’s slow process of reconnecting with the world and regaining her sense of taste and her desire: “This 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” (Zhang 2023:120), and “[Aida] gave me custard apples, loquats, damsons, songs of vine and hive and rivers through sun-drenched afternoons when time hung suspended in amber” (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: “Once, I heard a journalist say she did not know what she thought until she wrote it; I didn’t know my own mind until I tasted” (Zhang 2023:125).
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, 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 can’t be separated from this emotionally-rich context (see Sutton 2023). 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 “the smog.”
But Aida’s research lab and the chef’s connection to her own moral center and past experiences are ultimately on a collision course. Aida quotes controversial Whole Earth catalog cofounder Stewart Brand: “We are as gods and have to get good at it” (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 She voices her desire for “a decent California burrito” (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—not through laboratory science, but through cooking’s old-fashioned science of the concrete. Reading Land of Milk and Honey 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), with Mammoths, and Tasmanian Tigers—both featured in the novel—soon to follow, was a reminder of how close science fiction sits to our current reality. Hallam Stevens documents one biotech company’s recent attempts to de-extinct wooly mammoths in order to turn them into mammoth meatballs as a way, they claim, to promote sustainability and “’eat our way out of extinction’” (2024:48). Their lab-grown meatballs aspire to be cruelty-free, and paleo—the original paleo, in fact.
Some of Colossal’s 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’s founder Ben Lamm frames his justification with the importance of wolves to Native Americans: “’There was this desire to bring back what they called the Great Wolf,’ [Lamm] claimed. Without missing a beat, however, Lamm adds, ‘And this is really important’ Lamm said—was that dire wolves are top-line talent in pop culture. They aren’t just in Game of Thrones. Dire wolves have starring roles in the video game World of Warcraft…the Grateful Dead even have a song called ‘Dire Wolf’” (Max 2025:37). The current U.S. administration has even cited the re-birth of the “dire wolves” as a triumph of innovation over regulation (Max 2025:38). Lamm would fit very well among the “Apex Predators” on Zhang’s 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 (or in this case old), shiny and cool.
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, “To survive: to eat” (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 century anthropologist Robertson-Smith (1907). But in my work I have argued that too often anthropologists ignore how 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’ memories and their desire for the never before tasted—including hunting and consuming one of the charismatic megafauna that has been resurrected in the laboratory—play 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’s is a world where the climate catastrophe is seen very much through the lens of how, for those who don’t 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.
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), Papacharalampous (2023) and Low (2023). Fictional explorations like Land of Milk and Honey 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 and writing about food without considering the complex role of pleasure in our current circumstances makes for a very anodyne meal.
David Sutton is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 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 “The Hospitality Illusion,” 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, 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.
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