ABSTRACT
How do creative writers approach the gendered roles relating to food selection and production in a climate-changed future? David Bell and Gill Valentine (1997, 3) acknowledge that “food has long ceased to be merely about sustenance and nutrition. It is packed with social, cultural and symbolic meanings.” These meanings are of particular importance, yet they have not garnered significant attention in literary criticism, nor have they been widely utilized in creative practice.
Current climate change literature and literary criticism focuses on any number of the anticipated consequences of climate change, but of particular significance for this chapter are the impacts on food and food production as they pertain to women, and the traditional domestic roles of women. Investigating Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy through an ecofeminist lens allows for a greater understanding of the linked impacts of climate change on the environment, on women, and on food. Food studies theories will also be drawn upon as a means of considering what Atwood’s texts are indicating around the control of food, what this says about current food trends such as organics and slow food, as well as the ways in which foodways can be a form of resistance and food choices can be a political act predominantly undertaken by women.
By exploring ecofeminism, food studies theories, and Atwood’s texts that respond to such theories, this chapter will analyze the representations of food, food production, women, and autonomy. The impact of food supply in a climate-change future will be critiqued through an engagement with literature that includes representations of food and the women who prepare it or not. Via such texts, this chapter will consider the gendered roles related to food’s impacts on society and culture, and how these texts engage with ideas of the autonomy of women in terms of food production.
