Book review: Food scarcity haunts C Pam Zhang’s dystopian Land Of Milk And Honey

Land Of Milk And Honey

By C Pam Zhang
Fiction/Hutchinson Heinemann/Paperback/232 pages/$22.96/Amazon SG (amzn.to/48FTZzu)
4 stars

What’s a chef to do with no food to cook?

Years after a mysterious smog envelopes the world and destroys all crops and wildlife, an unnamed chef pursues the job of a lifetime – a private chef for an elite research institute rumoured to have brought ingredients and animals back from extinction through genetic experimentation.

The prose tantalises with rich, detailed descriptions of food and taste. But the profligate wastage of laboratory-grown produce by the chef’s rich employer and his daughter Aida is nauseating.

Recalling her first ventures into cooking, the chef says: “For myself, I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it.”

American-Chinese author C Pam Zhang has done her research, with a dedication page full of restaurants, books and foods that inspired and influenced her process. Praised for her immersive writing and exquisite craft, Zhang’s debut novel How Much Of These Hills Is Gold (2020) was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Being unnamed, the narrator becomes an everyman, easily relatable to the reader. The theme of the struggle to discover one’s sense of self is heightened as the chef takes on roles – chef, lover, substitute mother – without truly understanding who she is and what she wants to be until the very end.

Reflecting on her new job, she muses: “I had the job I’d once wanted, but she who stalked the halls had no taste for such ambitions. I was another ghost evoked through fragrance and steam, but more than family country lands home lovers careers I mourned the loss of myself: me.”

At times, the plot is lost amid beautiful, philosophical prose that the reader struggles to understand. Character development is minimal as the chef floats through work and despite an intense relationship with Aida. Even towards the end, the chef’s identity and personal desires feel second to her devotion to cooking and the struggle for happiness.

The novel elicits questions of what it means to preserve humanity, and evokes a haunting future if the earth were not cared for properly. Scarier than the betrayal humans freely dish out to one another and the planet is a sense that a future generation could truly live in a time when all food is manufactured into existence, left only for the richest.

If you like this, read: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (Tor Books, 2022, $22.40, Amazon SG, amzn.to/48wDtSG). Jamie Gray’s new high-paying position requires him to keep a secret that can change the world. When a rich but seedy corporation comes into the mix, Jamie has to decide if he should entrust the good of humanity to people desperate to flaunt their wealth and power.