Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey is a haunting novel, the kind that consumes you long after you think you’re done with it. Certainly, it reverses the usual process: where a reader typically consumes, by the end, I felt consumed.

That said, for this reader, my initial attempt to read it caused a slow and uncomfortable indigestion, and I was tempted to abandon the book several times. I found Zhang’s prose felt overwritten, pretentious, too academically literary as if it had been pummeled, shaped, and reshaped in an MFA workshop where Zhang had been too eager to please an implacable professor. The food too, its descriptions and imagery, was overly reminiscent of the kind of unsatisfying fare one might find at Alinea or on Top Chef Season 2,349,349, pretty without satiety. But, in retrospect, having reached the end of the novel: that was the point.

I am glad I did not DNF the novel, and followed it through to the last “course.” It was well worth the patience.

Land of Milk and Honey is a speculative, near-future earth-bound science fiction. Written during the 2020-2023 Covid pandemic when the world had shut down and shut in, Zhang built an insular microcosm of our contemporary world. It is the same, yet different: more intensely bleak, more virulently violent, more callous. Readers, myself included, will easily recognize our pandemic selves in the characters of the novel.

The events of the novel take place in a bleak “what if” landscape, a world which is ravaged by climate change and late-stage capitalism, having never progressed further in its decolonization than our present. Food as we know it is scarce, GMO crops abound out of necessity. Nationalist and populist fears of scarcity have made political borders impermeable, except where power and money create porosity. A young Asian American professional cook trapped in immigrant, stateless limbo in Europe finds herself posing as a chef and working for a strange and shady corporation, one whose mission is evolutionary revolution. This is eugenics gone awry (as it historically has, no surprise here).