Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang | book review
A chef navigates survival, desire, and decadence in a smog-choked dystopian world
It happened again: I wanted a short palate cleanser and ended up reading a dystopian book. Let’s not psychoanalyse this.
Land of Milk and Honey is by C Pam Zhang, whose 2020 debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold was one of Obama’s favourite books of the year.
In this book, she returns to an arid setting. The narrator is an unnamed chef in her 20s and when a smog covers the world, killing 98% of crops and severely depleting the world’s food supply, she is desperate to cook something other than the rationed mung bean flour.
She finds herself on a white mountain in Italy on an unconventional work assignment, where the restaurant she is meant to cook in is ‘stunning, transcendent, a white-hot bullet between the eyes’, standing in contrast with the grit of the rest of the smog-covered world. I found the metaphor interesting. White and light are typically symbols of goodness and purity. In this case, however, they are taken to the extreme, even made perverse, and the ultra-rich inhabitants of this white mountain—chief among them the narrator’s also unnamed employer—try to cloak their extravagant self-preservation as something good.
As an outsider, the narrator is able to see through it. She was born in the US to a Chinese single mother and even when she has access to the most luxurious ingredients (Bresse chicken is a recurring symbol), her body physically rejects them. But she is slowly drawn in herself, first by Aida—her employer’s enigmatic daughter who is the scientific brain behind it all—and then by the world itself. The narrator becomes a symbol herself, a sexless, voiceless (literally) Asian woman, who plays the role of her employer’s wife (and Aida’s mother). Her employer’s obscenely rich investors willingly indulge in the curated narrative.
He was a man who studied pleasure, and that summer I came to understand the particular variety he served. It wasn’t tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor.
The narrator’s relationship with Aida is fraught, complex, tense. It is codependent, sexual, familial, and there is no real need to give it a single label. Aida starts aloof, an unknowable quantity partly due to her proximity to her unnamed father. But she invites the narrator into her world of scientific advancements and ruthless utilitarianism (what apple species do we need? can we save pistachios from going extinct simply because we, or our lovers, like them? what are cicadas useful for?), and the narrator too gets sucked in. To say she falls in love is a disservice. It is utilitarian in a way—two women clinging to each other in a dystopian reality where only those Aida and her father select can survive. But it also has its excesses (see: pistachios), and the narrator deeply admires Aida, even if she loathes her stances at times.
We are left wondering if Aida’s ruthlessness is of her own cultivation, or if she is the result of her father and the almost-impossible task she has been set. Aida is charming enough that I can understand her philosophy. She is fascinated by science and well-equipped to achieve her goal. She must, of course, fiercely and secretly protect her biobank as one misstep will allow the populist government will swoop in, distributing everything immediately with no regard for the future—it is too bad, but inevitable, that people outside starve in the meanwhile. She must, of course, sacrifice the golden monkeys who serve no utility, in favour of fauna that can thrive in the next world. In this light, Aida is merely a vessel doing the necessary work.
At the end of the day, does it matter? Aida has willingly circumscribed herself to this, and whilst she is tender and gracious, she is also not innocent.
When we take a step back, as the narrator does, we see how grim it all is. Aida is single-minded in a way that helps with her goals, but detaches her from the wider world. She lives in a bubble (or rather, a white mountaintop) where it is easy to think she knows best for wider society, having never been hungry. It is easy to decide who lives and who dies when she can take everyone and everything she loves with her, when the closest encounter she has with the ones who will be left behind is on a day trip the narrator drags her along to.
I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in. Not for me the solace of boeuf bourguignon; not for me the red wine and browned butter, that unctuousness proximate to rot or burning that stickied a diner’s tongue. I had lived too long in the low country. I had tasted bitter gray. Only ashes and lost empires in the crust of a kouign amann that would never shatter the same way again.
Perhaps the most stark moment for me is when the narrator is asked to prepare and serve preserved meat without being told what it is. We already know her employer’s penchant for the extravagant and exclusive. I was expecting some heritage variety of cow, perhaps unusual wild game. I was not expecting it to be woolly mammoth, exhumed to be a meal for his rich investors, the pinnacle of what money and power can bring you. It does not even matter that it literally makes them sick after—’[a]nyone who has fed the rich knows that, past a certain price, it is not a matter of taste, not hunger’.
His shaved fingers were long and brown and seemed possessed of extra joints as he plucked, almost delicately, at the mammoth. He sucked dark gobbets from his knuckles. He picked between his teeth. […] I saw the moment the diners’ revulsion changed as raw meat does upon hitting the pan, as raw fish did once adopted by the famous and wealthy and white; I carry with me this image of how disgust becomes desire. I don’t remember the taste of mammoth. That is beside the point. Can you imagine a swallow from the world’s last cup of natural gas?
Land of Milk and Honey is filled to the brim with metaphors without choking you with them. My favourite multi-purpose metaphor is the narrator’s (again, unnamed) Cat, whom she took from her mother in their heated last conversation. Cat is a mirror to the narrator, one who is ugly and unapologetic about his nature, stubbornly clinging to life regardless of what society deems his worth to be. Where the narrator tries repeatedly to nourish herself but fails, gouging herself in the mountain’s excesses only for her body to reject it, Cat understands his nature and does not even try, taking only what he needs for pure survival. But what he needs isn’t pretty. It is only when the narrator finally understands the ugliness of human nature that she is able to nourish them above, opening the way for the next stage of the story.
Unlike I Who Have Never Known Men, this book is bleak but hopeful. The narrator writes in the past tense; we know she has survived into a future that seems better. There is a clear purpose throughout, even if the means are questionable. Though the narrator spends the first part of the book trying to escape from a mung bean-filled world, she also remembers the good parts of the world, how scarce resources generated creativity and intricate understandings of the community. Someone who describes food so vigorously, much like in Butter, must have hope for the future.
In a world where billionaires are doomsday prepping by building their own societies on remote islands (like Zhang, I choose to leave some characters unnamed), Land of Milk of Honey is a realistic dystopia and also bears warnings about climate change that I found clearer and more imperative than in The Bee Sting. It tells us what could be if we operate in little silos, each subgroup choosing only to save itself.
Please let me know if you read this. I would love to have a chat about the Land of Milk and Honey. We can speak of golden monkeys, Bresse chicken, and how to lift the smog.
Book information
Title: Land of Milk and Honey
Author: C Pam Zhang
Published: 2023
Length: 240 pages
Book description
The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.