Food, fears and anxieties in climate change fiction

Climate change fiction (cli-fi) is a relatively new and burgeoning genre. As creative writers, this paper’s co-authors find many questions regarding how to address our current climate crisis in ways that protest stereotypical representations and over-simplified political systems. In order to develop climate change fiction that engages with the climate as something more than a backdrop for the action or as an adversary for the protagonists, as authors of cli-fi, we need to interrogate the roles of recognisable details, such as food, in our fiction. In this paper, we use Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a case study of how cli-fi novels can interrogate climate change by making use of food as a symbolic and narrative device within the work. From that foundation, we argue that reading and research crystallises imaginative prowess and galvanises new ways of writing in the genre of cli-fi.