“You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth.” — from Land of Milk and Honey
The world is in crisis. From a cornfield in Iowa rises a (chemical?) smog, which blurs out the sun and destroys crops around the world. The dispossessed eat gray and tasteless food just to survive, amidst mass starvation. The wealthy retreat to expensive refuges, from which they plot a comeback and perhaps a way forward in the world.
C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey (2023) follows an unnamed young woman who is working as a chef in Europe as the U.S. and other countries are closing their borders. A Californian native, she nevertheless does not have a home to go back to. Her late mother’s home in California has just been burned down by rioters, and she is asked to pay “waste disposal fees and firefighting fees and city emissions fines.”
She learns of a job opening at an unnamed refuge on a mountain between Italy and France, and applies and garnishes her resume with some fake entries about trainings at Le Cordon Bleu. She is starved for taste after years of lack of access to fresh produce and would give up much for even a head of lettuce. The world has a wobbly work economy, and she is leaving behind some stability and a work visa to take a chance on access to fresh food.
She arrives at an isolated and mysterious research community that is known as “the land of milk and honey” by the commentators online and by the locals. The location is sufficiently out of the way that government and law enforcement do not have reach. Communication is also strictly limited and controlled.
The place first seems to be the stylish refuge of a wealthy unnamed man who is known for anticipating business needs and garnering immense wealth. Later, she realizes that this well-defended land is actively bioengineering seeds for food and bringing back extinct animals.
At 29, she is on probation for some weeks, and she needs to prove her skills. She meets the enigmatic head of the compound and his daughter, Aria, who is only 20 but a genius in evolutionary biology. She starts to realize that perhaps she was chosen for more than her basic cooking skills.
In her new role, our main character realizes food is not just about physical survival but nostalgia, ego fulfillment, and desire. Hunger is a physical state but also a psychological one. At one point, the protagonist observes: “Anyone who has fed the rich knows that, past a certain price, it is not a matter of taste, nor hunger.” It is also a tool by which people may project power and status, and to manipulate others. Hers is now a world of deep artifice.
She is overwhelmed when walking into a storeroom:
“I can only say what happened when I pressed my face to a wheel of ten-year Parmigiano, how in a burst of grass and ripe pineapple I stood in some green meadow that existed only in the resonance, like a bell’s fading peal, of that aroma. I can tell you how it was to cradle wines and vinegars older than myself, their labels crying out the names of lost traditions. And I can tell you of the ferocious crack in my heart when I walked into the deep freezer to see chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two. No more boars roamed the world above, no Öland geese, no sharks; the day I climbed the mountain, there vanished the wild larks. I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time.”
The compound has forbidden rooms that she knows not to go into. For all the high hopes of biodiversity preservation and learning, this is no promised land.
C (Chenji) Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey is an edgy novel, in a post-apocalyptic (and post-pandemic) style. The descriptions are lush, with rapturous descriptions of food but also a restraint in the main protagonist, who retreats to non-eating and coffee. The narrative moves apace, with surprising turns. This novel evokes the complex politics of food and class but without lapsing into easy stereotypes.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
