Mini-muse 004: Milk & Honey

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Hi little coven.

Last week, I inhaled C Pam Zhang’s short but luscious novel, Land of Milk and Honey.

Set in a distant future where a predatory smog has destroyed biodiversity the world over (no more fresh fruit, no more sweet cream, no more grazing livestock, just gummy, but functional mungbean flour), the novel reads like hungry feels: desperate and consuming; craving and hard-edged.

Our narrator, an unnamed and ambitious “mediocre cook” fudges her credentials to win a coveted role as private chef to a parasitic businessman controlling one of the world’s last surviving viable environments for raising crops and herds.

The plot ferries us from smog-ridden London to a mountain on the French/Italian border, high above the tide of crop-killing fumes. But despite the setting’s altitude, the narrative is a descent. In 231 short pages, Zhang plucks the reader, and our heroine, from the peak and plunges us into the sparkling dark of indulgence: everything that makes life’s luxuries sweet, and everything that turns pleasure into rot.

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Zhang’s voice is equal parts dreamy and blunt — a requirement for the task of this novel, which flits between calculated class criticism and decadent food writing.

I found the entire book immensely readable — luxurious but challenging, like the subject matter — but my favorite part didn’t find me until the acknowledgements in the book’s backmatter, where Zhang fills a page acknowledging the meals and restaurants that fueled her through writing process. “Wings at Brother Z’s Wangs, Nashville” “Eggplant Cookie at Gaggan, Bangkok” “Grains and seeds at Atelier Crenn, San Francisco”. The list goes on.

Here, the author’s love for food lifts off the page so viscerally that I tasted it. It closed the gap between the beautiful painting her prose had rendered throughout the novel and the photographic evidence of her obvious appreciation for good food.

Still-life with Fruits, Nuts and Cheese by Floris van Dyke, via Wikimedia Commons.

Without these acknowledgements, it might be easy to read the book as a cautionary tale against decadence. But while Land of Milk and Honey certainly warns against selfishness, against the cold and cunning mechanics of privilege, it celebrates what all that selfish privilege is in pursuit of: pleasure. The author’s writing journey, the acknowledgements reveal, was — like her protagonist’s — a pursuit of pleasure. Through the acknowledgements, Zhang honors, rather than denounces that pleasure… offers proof it can be found, even amidst all the obscuring smog and the bureaucracy and the violence that tries to bury it. Proof it can’t plant the seeds for something beautiful and generous — a sumptuous novel.

In the writing, she takes what she so clearly loves: food, flavour, indulgence and experimentation, and finds the fear in it… weaves a narrative that sings and cuts.

It’s a creative prompt worth chewing on: to lead with love but follow it all the way to the end of the line, where love ferments into something else. To ask the big questions on that precipice: What if I loved this too much? To articulate the answer in our art.

Tell me in the comments:

What’s the most delicious meal you ever ate?

What have you been musing about, lately?

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