Land of Milk and Honey

Land of Milk and Honey imagines a near future in which a smog has killed most of the planet's plant and animal species, collapsing global food systems. The unnamed narrator, a chef stranded in the United Kingdom after the United States closes its borders, watches her once-vivid kitchen dull to gray as real ingredients — strawberries, avocados, herbs, nuts — disappear.

She's hired as a private chef for a secretive research community perched atop a mountain in the Italian Alps, one of the few places still untouched by the haze. The community was assembled by a reclusive billionaire and his geneticist daughter, Aida, in an effort to bioengineer crops that can survive the smog, and the chef is tasked with feeding its wealthy investors and working scientists using whatever real food remains.

As she settles into the role, she discovers that the mountain's abundance is a carefully maintained illusion, propped up by extreme inequality and secrets the community would rather keep buried. C Pam Zhang uses food, appetite, and taste as a lens on class and survival, building a spare, sensory novel about what people are willing to trade for comfort at the end of the world.