I just finished devouring The Hunger Games, a book that is obsessed with food. As I was reading, feeling both uneasy that this is children’s literature and completely impressed by the writing and the evocation of a post-apocalyptic world, I was also reminded of two other recent books I’ve read in the genre: Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road and Margaret Atwood’s much less successful The Year of the Flood.
All three books are grounded in the basic post-apocalyptic trope of survival. The chief enemy in the books are other people. The key to survival is food. The worst thing that can happen is you are reduced to cannibalism (that road leads to zombiehood).
I’m not sure if this is new, exactly, but it seems to me that most previous movies of this kind had built-in food systems. There are always human predators, but there are usually also ample canned goods. Or it’s simply not addressed. The resource they’re fighting over is oil, or water, or (as with zombies and aliens) it’s a more primal battle to stay alive.
The preoccupation with food in these books does seem to me to fit perfectly with our nation’s recent large-scale anxiety over how our food is grown, produced and packaged. Can it be an accident that these writers are putting forward that the way to survive that worst possible future that might be ahead (caused either by human violence, nuclear accident, epidemic or global climate change) is to know what plants are edible and what ones are medicinal, how to hunt and gather, preserve food and also barter and sell it?
The Road seems kind of old school in its approach to the problem of food procurement. The father and son are still mostly scavenging for canned goods. Their best stroke of fortune is when they come to an underground bunker filled with food. The film version made excellent use of product placement in the story, not just the Coke can which is in the book but also Spam, Cheetos, Bud Light and Smartwater (that one actually made me laugh when I saw it in the film– good thing they have those electrolytes for mental clarity!). The message is clear: we can live off the crappy excess of our agricultural-industrial complex for a long time.
Both of the other books, however, seem to revel in details of the meagre produce in the rooftop garden (YotF) or the glory of rabbit meat and mint leaves (HG). Hunger Games doesn’t seem to have a single scene that doesn’t revolve around food– either the lack of it, getting it or the quality of it. Every menu in the Capitol is chronicled in detail and we’re meant to marvel at the privileged folks’ lucky access to rich foods, sauces and desserts. The heroine is a hunter/gatherer of extraordinary skill and talent and the hero is a baker’s son.
I admit that my gardening definitely has some roots in an apocalyptic world view. I love the idea of being “off the grid” and the promise of having water and food and wood to burn in case of an emergency. I also know, of course, that I wouldn’t last a week! But it’s a nice sort of fantasy to think one is self-sufficient and providing food for one’s self. I believe more in McCarthy’s world, however, being able to depend on cans of chili and Cheetos, than in being able to live off the land.