Robert Frost gave us so 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 latter days before climate collapse, our apocalyptic literature comes in a grim smorgasbord of flavors.
And now we have an apocalyptic novel that is all about flavors. “Land of Milk and Honey,” by C Pam Zhang, is the haunting story of an ambitious chef desperate to keep cooking even as 98 percent of the commercial crops fail and the world’s store of food dwindles to gruel.
The narrator, unnamed, is in her 20s when a mysterious smog arises from Iowa and blocks out the sun around the world. “Biodiversity fell. Wildlife and livestock perished for lack of feed,” she remembers. “What it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind … no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.” On and on rolls this inventory of culinary devastation, a vast catalogue that invokes delicacies only by noting their absence. For a chef, such bare cupboards portend a tasteless existence sustained only by mung-protein flour.
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Zhang is such a cool writer that salmon steaks could stay fresh in her prose for weeks. But there’s something absurd about this narrator’s single-minded obsession with haute cuisine during what sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” As the restaurant where she works in England runs out of supplies, she makes a bold choice: “I quit that job to pursue recklessly, immorally, desperately, the only one that gave me hope of lettuce.”
The endive is near!
Colleagues think she’s crazy for giving up a steady job when millions are dying of famine, 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 hams up her résumé, spices her application with lies and agrees to a long list of restrictions.
At this early point, “Land of Milk and Honey” begins to emit the faint aroma of Julia Child on “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Connoisseurs of apocalyptic literature will catch a soupçon of “Oryx and Crake,” too, but Zhang is clearly following her own recipe.
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The young chef arrives at an elaborately appointed restaurant built on a cliff high above the acidic smog line. “I felt a euphoria such as the first European colonizers must have upon sighting new land,” she says. There’s no one here, but she finds a box containing flour, vanilla, eggs and fresh strawberries “as yielding as a woman’s inner thigh.” Inside is a note: “Impress me.”
She soon learns that she’s working for an implacable, pitiless man with dead shark eyes. As befits a sci-fi autocrat with a god complex, he speaks only in grandiose pronouncements, e.g., “Fear was the whetstone that sharpened the instincts of those who first dared to hunt mammoth.” (Like truffle oil, a little of that goes a long way.) His scientists in a subterranean laboratory have re-created much of the world’s lost diversity, a veritable Noah’s Ark of “chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars,” along with extinct grains, vegetables, fruits and spices. All of this — anything she wants — is available for her to prepare eight-course dinners for wealthy investors hoping to outrun the fate of the Earth. It’s a kind of survivalist Tupperware party for billionaires. Every week, she “steered the powerful by their tongues.”
Foodies who despair of science fiction served up with meals in pills, soylent green and replicator pot roast will find “Land of Milk and Honey” a gourmand’s dream. Honestly, this novel should come with linen napkins. The pages of Zhang’s “connoisseurship of loss” are stuffed with tuna ventresca, onion soup, petits fours, caviar, Koshihikari rice over blood oranges, braised duck in macadamia milk, panna cotta, Spanish mackerel, mapo tofu lasagna and more. There is nothing too exotic or precious for this kitchen. (And don’t miss Zhang’s acknowledgments page, which offers a witty list of meals sprinkled with the names of writers and books.)
The chef’s only companion in this tightly sealed, top-secret community of wealthy survivalists is her boss’s beautiful daughter, Aida, who could be a distant relation to “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Aida is a brilliant geneticist with an erratic personality, alternately imperious and childlike. Holed up in this manufactured land of milk and honey, she and her father are united in fighting off interference from the Italian government, devising ever more creative biological creations and preparing for a final adventure of technological audacity. But with simmering dread, the young chef eventually realizes that there’s a reason her reality-bending employer wanted an Asian woman of a certain age — and it has nothing to do with her skills in the kitchen.
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The story remains tense, unnerving and creepy, but it can feel strangely static. That effect is exacerbated by Zhang’s aphoristic style and the sense that these scenes are being recalled after many decades. Also, the narrator has an aversion to action that places the emphasis on reflection while boiling away moments of real drama. The result is an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class. The bittersweet aftertaste will leave you considering what you’d be willing to do — or resist doing — to experience the most essential 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.
Land of Milk and Honey
By C Pam Zhang
Riverhead. 232 pp. $28
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