The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

Food for Survival in
Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Worlds

Kiyomi SASAME*I.
“[A]uthors could be divided into two groups: those that mention food,indeed revel in it, and those that never give it a second thought” (1). So
writes Margaret Atwood in the Introduction to The Canlit Foodbook:
From Pen to Palate-a Collection of Tasty Literary Fare (1987). Obviously Atwood herself belongs to the former group. It is only natural,
therefore, that the works of Atwood, whose main thematic concern issurvival, are especially saturated with food. Surprisingly enough, herinterest in food and eating had been awakened long before she started awriting career. In the same Introduction she looks back on her childhood:“I think I ﬁrst connected literature with eating when I was twelve andreading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut up romantically in a tower, butwhat did she have to eat?” (1).
What does a woman have to eat? That is the question Atwood has been
exploring in much of her writing. As a Canadian woman writer, Atwood
has mostly examined the survival of Canadian women in terms of theirrelationships to food. She explains that authors put various foods in theirworks because “they reveal character, slimy as well as delectable”(Canlit 2). In the case of Atwood’s dystopian novels The Handmaid’s
Copyright © 2010 Kiyomi Sasame. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University

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Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) foods do much to reveal not only
the character of the protagonist but also the society in which she or he isstruggling for survival.
In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood presents a totalitarian society inwhich women are not allowed to have any kind of freedom. Oryx and
Crake deals with the survival of all humankind in an age of genetic engineering. These two dystopian novels, unlike most of Atwood’s novels,
are set not in Canada but in the United States. When asked why she had
not set The Handmaid’s Tale in Canada, she replied:
The States are more extreme in everything. . . . Canadians don’t swing muchto the left or the right, they stay safely in the middle. . . . It’s also true thateveryone watches the States to see what the country is doing and might bedoing ten or ﬁfteen years from now. (Ingersoll, Conversations 223)

As Coral Ann Howells suggests (“Dystopian Visions” 163), this reply
may also be applicable to Oryx and Crake.
Although these dystopian novels set in the future are sometimes called
science ﬁction, the author herself deﬁnes them as speculative ﬁction that“can speak of what is past and passing, but especially of what’s to come”(“Handmaid’s” 515). Atwood’s speculative ﬁctions The Handmaid’s
Tale and Oryx and Crake describe unusual things happening in the
United States, but Atwood emphasizes that both novels invent “nothing
we haven’t already invented or started to invent” (Writing with Intent
285). Therefore, they are not coinages of fancy but reﬂections of reality.
By focusing on food in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, which
is sometimes regarded as a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, I will examine how she uses food to reveal society as well as character.
II.
Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984, the year that
reminds us of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen EightyFour. While Atwood admits that Orwell was “a direct model” for The
Handmaid’s Tale, she says she wanted to “try a dystopia from female
point of view” (Writing with Intent 291). She states that “[a]ll ﬁctions
begin with What if. . . ?” (97). For instance, “[W]hat if you wanted totake over the United States and set up a totalitarian government, the lustfor power being what it is? How would you go about it?” (98). The
answer is The Handmaid’s Tale.

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In this futuristic novel Atwood presents the Republic of Gilead, amonolithic theocracy established in the United States. Gilead is a totalitarian regime that reﬂects the American neoconservatives and the New
Right of the 1980s and also the New England Puritanism of the seventeenth century. The narrator of this novel describes how the United States
has undergone a coup: “It was after the catastrophe, when they shot thepresident and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared astate of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time”(174).
In the process of this “revolution” by the army, women in the UnitedStates are deprived of jobs, property, family, even their names. By thetime the construction of the Republic of Gilead is completed, women are
denied any rights and power and are classiﬁed only according to theirroles. Fertile women, the red-clad Handmaids, are sent to privilegedchildless couples, the Commanders and their Wives all dressed in blue,
to bear a child for them. That is Gilead’s solution to the falling birthrateof Caucasians, which is one of the most serious problems in the UnitedStates in the novel. The green-clad women, called the Marthas, are responsible for cooking and household chores at the Commanders’ houses.
Women who are sterile or insubordinate to the regime are dressed in gray.
Deﬁned as Unwomen, they are sent to the Colonies, where they areforced to clean up the toxic dumps and the radiation spills until they aresoon killed. The role of the Aunts, who wear Nazi-like brown uniforms,
is to train the Handmaids to become obedient surrogate mothers for theCommanders and their Wives.
Although the ideas Atwood expresses in this novel seem singular, theauthor says that “[t]here is . . . nothing in the book without a precedent”(Writing with Intent 100). Even adopting the surrogate mothers to counteract the falling birthrate draws on Genesis as Atwood indicates in oneof the epigraphs. “The Ceremony” in which the Handmaid and theCommander have intercourse with the Commander’s Wife behind theHandmaid on the bed may look ridiculous, but the Handmaid, theCommander, and his Wife correspond to Bilhah (the maid), Jacob, andRachel in Genesis, in which Bilhah bears a child for the childless Jacob
and Rachel.
The narrator of this novel is the Handmaid called Offred. Her nameindicates that she is the property of the Commander Fred. From Offred’s
point of view the various ways in which Gilead controls women are presented. The Handmaids are shut up in a limited space like Rebecca in
Ivanhoe, although Atwood never fails to mention what they eat. As

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Emma Parker points out, “[o]ne of the main ways the system of oppression is enforced is through food” (118). The comparison between what
and how Offred eats in Gilead and pre-Gilead clariﬁes the restrictions
imposed on women in Gilead. To control what women eat is to control
their bodies and souls. As is often pointed out, the most distinctive difference between Gilead and pre-Gilead is whether women have freedomof choice or not. At the training center Aunt Lydia gives a lecture to theHandmaids: “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia.
Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom
to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it” (24). According to Aunt Lydia, America was dying “of too much choice” (25).
People in Gilead are forced to believe that letting women choose whether
or not to bear a child caused the falling birthrate in the United States.
This opinion of Aunt Lydia’s is applicable to the choice of food, too. In
this novel, people in the United States could choose any kind of food toeat, even ones that were bad for you. On the other hand, in Gilead foodis strictly controlled.
Boiled eggs, a chicken thigh, a baked potato, green beans, salad, toast,and canned fruit. Or coffee, beer, and cigarettes. Which would one think
is a more wholesome diet? Needless to say, the former, what Offred eats
in Gilead, is much healthier than the latter, what she used to enjoy in preGilead. Full of “vitamins and minerals,” food given to the Handmaid is“good enough . . . though bland” (65). Since a Handmaid must be “a worthy vessel” (65) to bear a child, coffee, tea, alcohol, and cigarettes are
forbidden. Some critics like Sarah Sceats see an echo of Puritanism insuch strict restrictions in Gilead: “It is, in keeping with the puritan ethos,a restricted diet, though restrictions have as much to do with the powerof the restricters as absolute health considerations for potential mothers”(111).
The Gileadean restrictions on food often contrast in Offred’s mind
with the freedom of choice she had in the United States. For example, inGilead ﬁsh is seldom available, while there used to be a wide variety ofseafood before. Offred observes:
The ﬁsheries were defunct several years ago; the ﬁsh they have now are fromﬁsh farms, and taste muddy. The news says the coastal areas are being“rested.” Sole, I remember, and haddock, swordﬁsh, scallops, tuna; lobsters,
stuffed and baked, salmon, pink and ﬂat, grilled in steaks. Could they all be
extinct, like whale? (164)

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The novel, however, contains almost no descriptions of people eating therich variety of food they had in the United States. Having freedom of
choice itself is more signiﬁcant for Offred. It is because, as Sceats correctly comments, “[t]he sheer variety of the ﬁsh Offred remembers . . .
stands for the diversity of ideas, beliefs and discussion, now suppressed”(111). Offred associates this freedom of choice with former happy days
with her husband and daughter, whom she has never seen again since thethree of them were captured by government troops. Even merely having
coffee and reading the newspaper (both of which she no longer has accessto) with her husband on Sunday mornings is what she now greatly misses.
Walking down the street where an ice cream shop used to be, Offred
remembers her daughter, who used to choose the kind of ice cream notby the name but by the color.
The healthy foods the Handmaid eats form “symbolic representationof wombs and fertility” (Stein 200). Reading The Handmaid’s Tale andfocusing on food, we notice that there are frequent references to eggs,
inevitably suggestive of reproduction. Eggs also have more complex
implications in this novel. On the one hand, eggs imply power in thesense of being capable of producing a new life, but, on the other hand,
they are fragile, as a broken egg in this novel reminds us.
The situation of the Handmaid similarly contains conﬂicting elements.
In Gilead a Handmaid is protected as a child-bearer. Yet, if she cannot
prove herself to be a capable child breeder, she is sent to one of theColonies as an Unwoman. Atwood has Offred ponder the parallels
between eggs, the female body, and her situation:
In front of me is a tray, and on the tray are a glass of apple juice, a vitamin
pill, a spoon, a plate with three slices of brown toast on it, a small dish containing honey, and another plate with an eggcup on it, the kind that looks likea woman’s torso, in a skirt. Under the skirt is the second egg, being kept
warm. The eggcup is white china with a blue stripe.
The ﬁrst egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it’s now in the waterysunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning,brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained;
small pebbles of calcium are deﬁned by sunlight, like craters on the moon.
It’s a barren landscape, yet perfect; it’s the sort of desert the saints went into,
so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what
God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface,but inside.

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The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at theegg gives me intense pleasure.
The sun goes and the egg fades.
I pick the egg out of the cup and ﬁnger it for a moment. It’s warm. Women
used to carry such eggs between their breasts, to incubate them. That would
have felt good.
The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on
the ﬁngers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I
have an egg, what more can I want?
. . . I slice the top off the egg with the spoon, and eat the contents. (110–11)

This passage is an extract from the chapter titled “Birth Day,” in which
one of the Handmaids, Ofwarren, gives birth to a baby girl. Her baby islater found to be an unhealthy one and is destined to be shredded. If a
Handmaid bears a healthy baby, she is considered to be a victor. On theother hand, an unhealthy baby endangers the mother’s life. Women’srole is not only to “lay eggs” but also to “incubate them.” Birth literally
entails death, as Glenn Deer sees “[t]he connection of birth to death, theﬁne line between power and failure, fertility and sterility” (102) in thisGileadean birth scene. Deer also mentions that “the two eggs, one on topof the other, are like a model of the Gileadean birth scene, with theCommander’s Wife seated up and behind the Handmaid” (102).
Atwood’s description of Offred’s observation of the egg has provokedmuch discussion. Deer analyzes the change in Offred’s language:
Offred begins with the neutral description “the egg is white”; she then moves
into a ﬁgurative language that is resonant with female symbolism: the egg iscompared to the moon; the moon becomes a desert, place of spiritual trial
and of revelation. An alternating emphasis between fertility and sterility,
energy and entropy, is played out—the egg literally seems to throb with temperature changes. (102)

Hilda Staels comments on Offred’s recurrent use of the images of an egg.
Being “no more than white and granular on the outside,” Staels remarks,“[t]he egg is an image for the barren surface of Gilead and for the condition of the protagonist’s outer body, which are ‘deﬁned by sunlight’ orby the logocentrism of the rulers.” At the same time, Staels ﬁnds that in
the glowing egg “a red, hot pulsing process of life is hidden” (122).
The reference to a broken egg is also noteworthy. As has been mentioned, the fragility of an egg suggests the delicate situation of theFOOD FOR SURVIVAL IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S DYSTOPIAN WORLDS

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Handmaid herself. The Commander makes a reference to eggs thatreveals his insensitivity. He says to Offred, “You can’t make an omelette
without breaking eggs” (211). Karen Stein interprets this as “dehumanizing and cannibalizing the victims” (200), arguing: “Thus women
become for him the eggs which are broken and consumed to create a better life for the patriarchal ruling class” (201). Parker is another critic who
ﬁnds “symbolic cannibalism” in the relationship of the Commander toOffred: “While Atwood explores the power dynamic of eating and noneating, she simultaneously confronts the relationship between consumer
and consumed” (126). At one point the Commander confesses to Offredthat he used to work in marketing research. This choice of occupation
seems to underline his position as consumer. When confronted with theCommander, Offred compares herself to candy, as if she realizes that she
could be consumed: “I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me
and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red” (138).
III.
So far, we have seen food as a metaphor for the power of the oppressors. Now let us consider how food also functions as the subversive
power of the oppressed. There appear some kinds of food that are noteaten but that have other uses. They can be symbols of the Handmaid’s
weak resistance. The most striking example is butter. Every time butter
is served, Offred, like some other Handmaids, does not eat it but uses it
as hand lotion or face cream:
I rub the butter over my face, work it into the skin of my hands. There’s nolonger any hand lotion or face cream, not for us. Such things are consideredvanities. We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important. The outside can become hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like theshell of a nut. This was a decree of the Wives, this absence of hand lotion.
They don’t want us to look attractive. For them, things are bad enough as itis. (96)

Using butter as a lotion or cream is the Handmaids’ resistance, not only
to the Commanders’ Wives, who deny them their femininity, but also to
the Gilead regime as a whole, which has reduced them to “containers.”
Far from being mere containers, the Handmaids are women with suppressed emotions of love. Through such use of butter Offred articulates

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her hunger for love and her strong wish for the recovery of their lost
freedom: “As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we canbelieve that we will someday get out, that we will be touched again, inlove or desire” (96–97). In this scene Offred displays some wisdom andis able to use imagery to view her own situation in a somewhat humorous
way, even though she remains conﬁned in harsh circumstances. She
terms this use of butter as a lotion “buttering” and describes herself as
follows: “Buttered, I lie on my single bed, ﬂat, like a piece of toast” (97).
Here Offred conveys the notion that woman, like a piece of toast, is indanger of being devoured.
Sugar is another symbol of resistance. When Offred is still at the training center for the Handmaids, the rebellious Moira, Offred’s friend fromthe pre-Gilead period, is punished and severely injured after an unsuccessful attempt to escape. Offred together with some other Handmaids
steal packets of sugar for Moira because “it was the only thing [they]
could ﬁnd to steal. To give” (119). Ordinary food like sugar has become
not only a symbol of resistance but also a means of communication
among the Handmaids. Parker maintains that here food implies power:“The food which is intended to control becomes a means of subvertingthat control” (119).
The Handmaids are restrained in terms not only of food but also ofspace. Offred is conﬁned in a small room at the Commander’s house thatshe ﬁrst refuses to call her own but later begins to call hers. The roomhas only one small window, which only opens partly. On the wall there
is a picture with no glass over it. Here the Handmaid has no freedom,even to commit suicide, though she despairs and wishes to die.
The other space the Handmaid is allowed to be at in the Commander’shouse is the kitchen, where she is told by the Marthas what to buy formeals. It is the Handmaid’s job to go grocery shopping paired withanother Handmaid. Those limited spaces—the Handmaid’s room, thekitchen, a route to the grocery store—are all related to food. In her small
room the Handmaid eats her meals alone. In the kitchen she is given a
token that she can exchange for food, and she goes out only for grocery
shopping. In this way the Handmaid is completely enclosed in a women’s
sphere. However, these spaces also offer the Handmaid the possibilityof resistance and communication.
Like food, the kitchen at the Commander’s house serves to reveal
various aspects of Gilead. The kitchen where Offred’s meals are prepared is in a sense the headquarters that controls her life. At the same

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time, it is one of the few places where she can communicate with others, even though “[t]he Marthas are not supposed to fraternize with [theHandmaids]” (11).
The kitchen where two Marthas, Rita and Cora, are baking bread andpreparing coffee looks normal and peaceful on the surface. Among
unusual things about the society of Gilead, Atwood repeatedly emphasizes the normality of its kitchen. The following scenes expose Offred’s
longing for the normal life in pre-Gilead:
The kitchen smells of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminds me of other kitchens,
kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers; although my own mother did
not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother.
This is a treacherous smell, and I know I must shut it out. (47)
[Rita] goes to the sink, runs her hands brieﬂy under the tap, dries them on
the dishtowel. . . . The dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these ﬂashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes.
The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick. I see the dishtowel, out ofcontext, and I catch my breath. For some, in some ways, things haven’tchanged that much. (48)Remembering things in “former times” with her family makes Offred
hope to return to normal life. In other words, the kitchen is a place where
Offred desires the recovery of her sense of humanity and believes in thepossibilities of its realization. When she watches Rita making bread, she
aspires to touch the bread because she wants to feel “the resistant warmth
which is so much like ﬂesh” and “hunger[s] to commit the act of touch”(11).
Through food, nonverbal communication between the Handmaid andthe Marthas is established. Sceats indicates that “food provides a meansof expression” (112). Cora, the younger and warmer Martha, disguises
Offred’s wasted food such as a broken egg because she is aware thatleaving anything from of a meal will endanger Offred. It causes Offred
to feel a link between them. Even the cold-hearted Rita pops an ice cube
into Offred’s mouth when she is overheated from wearing the stiﬂing
red clothes. Thus the kitchen has become the only place that enables
Offred to feel at least the possibility of a human touch.
Near the end of the story the kitchen plays a signiﬁcant role in fulﬁlling Offred’s strong wish for a human touch. Realizing that her husband
is unable to impregnate his Handmaid, the Commander’s Wife suggests

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that Offred have sexual intercourse with the Commander’s young chauffeur, Nick, in order to get pregnant with apparently the Commander’schild. Even though it is illegal and risky, Offred, out of her hunger for
love, agrees to the proposal. On the night of the ﬁrst attempt Offred goesout through the kitchen in order to get to Nick’s room: “I open the kitchendoor, step out, wait a moment for vision. It’s so long since I’ve been outside, alone, at night” (260). After that, she visits Nick’s room time andagain without the Commander’s Wife’s knowledge. Every time Offred
opens the kitchen door and sneaks out:
I became reckless, I took stupid chances. . . . I would go along the hall anddown the Marthas’ stairs at the back and through the kitchen. Each time I
would hear the kitchen door click shut behind me and I would almost turnback, it sounded so metallic, like a mousetrap or a weapon, but I would notturn back. (268)The kitchen has been traditionally the center of the women’s sphere.
However, opening a kitchen door may lead Offred to freedom. Actually,at the end of the tale Offred tells how some men, including Nick, takeher out of the Commander’s house. Nick whispers to Offred that he is amember of Mayday, the underground organization devoted to conducting Handmaids to Canada, like the Underground Railroad in the time ofslavery in the American South. Still, Offred cannot be sure whether these
men are really about to free her or arrest her, but she has no other choice
but to trust Nick. Offred closes her tale as follows:
Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I havegiven myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.
And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light. (295)

In a sense opening a kitchen door to visit Nick’s room has made it possible for Offred to trust him and, in the end, to get away from the Commander’s house.
The Gilead regime controls the Handmaids’ shopping expeditions.
Still, the grocery shopping is signiﬁcant for the Handmaids. They haveto go in pairs to spy on each other, but they can secretly exchange useful information. Offred learns from her shopping partner, Ofglen, that
there is the underground rescue organization called Mayday. If Offred
had not obtained this information about Mayday, she might have hesitated to trust Nick when he claimed to be a member.

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Since Offred is well fed, she seldom feels hungry. She ﬁnds it rather
difﬁcult or even repulsive to eat up all the food she is given. As is often
pointed out, “[h]er physical rejection of the food . . . symbolizes her mental and emotional rejection of the tyrannical regime she lives under”(Parker 118). Yet there are a few occasions when she expresses real
hunger. It is, however, a hunger not for food but for something she ismissing in this regime. On one of the grocery-shopping expeditions
Offred and her partner encounter a trade delegation from Japan, whichstill seems to be a free nation. Seeing Japanese women’s short skirts,
high-heeled shoes, and heavy makeup, Offred, whose body is completely
covered by a red dress, thinks, “I used to dress like that. That was freedom” (28). Finding a Japanese woman with painted toenails, Offred
remembers the smell of the nail polish she used to use. She identiﬁes herself with the Japanese woman. “I can feel her shoes, on my own feet.
The smell of nail polish has made me hungry” (29). This is the ﬁrst timein the novel that Offred says she is hungry.
What Offred misses most in Gilead is love. When asked by the Commander what is overlooked in Gilead, Offred answers: “Love, I said.
Love? said the Commander. What kind of love? Falling in love, I said”(220). Of course, it is almost impossible for Offred to materialize thislonging for love. Still, as mentioned, she tries to search for a humantouch. Even before the Commander’s Wife proposes she have sexualintercourse with Nick to conceive a child, the young Nick makes her hungry. She feels as if Nick were edible. “I want to reach up, taste his skin,he makes me hungry. . . . It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to befelt so greedily, to feel so greedy” (98–99). Because of this, Offred
repeatedly has clandestine meetings with Nick despite the risk. Nick’s
room is the only place where she can feel love, even if “[n]either of themsays the word love, not once” (270). Offred, who wishes to believe that
she is pregnant with Nick’s baby, ﬁnds herself losing interest in escape,though Ofglen offers her a chance to be rescued by Mayday: “I no longer
want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom. I want to be here, with
Nick, where I can get at him” (271). Hunger for love has made Offred
apathetic about getting free and deprived her of all energy to take action.
There is one time when Offred feels ravenously hungry. After she issummoned to witness the brutal executions of the rebellious Handmaids,
she reveals her extreme hunger:

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Death makes me hungry. Maybe it’s because I’ve been emptied; or maybe
it’s the body’s way of seeing to it that I remain alive, continue to repeat its
bedrock prayer: I am, I am, I am, still. . . .
I think of the word relish.
I could eat a horse. (281)Roberta Rubenstein terms Offred’s hunger expressed in this passage as“both literal and symbolic” (19). Whether it is literal or symbolic, her
hunger reminds us of the simple fact that we eat in order to stay alive.
When she goes back to her room, for the ﬁrst time in this novel she eats
up a meal voraciously as if she wanted to feel she was still alive:
For lunch there was a cheese sandwich, on brown bread, a glass of milk,celery sticks, canned pears. A schoolchild’s lunch. I ate everything up, notquickly, but reveling in the taste, the ﬂavors lush on my tongue. (282)

Atwood demonstrates another hunger, hunger for words, in the Scrabble scene. In Gilead women are prohibited from reading and writing.
When the Commander summons Offred to his study, however, he allows
her to read the black-marketed magazines and asks her to play Scrabble
with him. This illegal act gives her pleasure, which she articulates as if
she were eating something delicious.
The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell.
Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint,
cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into mymouth. They would taste also lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the
tongue, delicious. (139)The Scrabble scene has drawn much critical attention. Parker argues that
this scene “perhaps best exempliﬁes how food functions as a metaphor
for power” and that “[t]he control of words and food, both forms of power
denied to women, are united in the image of Offred eating the Scrabble
letters” (119). Howells sees in Offred’s desire to eat the letters an analogy with the subversive power Hélène Cixous displays in her feminist
text “The Laugh of Medusa”:[Offred’s] image of the Scrabble counters as candies, which she would liketo put into her mouth, makes beautifully literal equivalent for Cixous’s metaphor for women’s seizing language “to make it hers, continent it, taking it
into her mouth” (Howells, Margaret Atwood 104)

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Lorna Sage calls Offred’s desire, represented by in this word game,“erotic charge” (167). At any rate, the Scrabble scene serves as a kindof comic relief in this dystopian novel, otherwise so full of darkness.
Offred herself feels like laughing when she hears that the Commander
wants to play the word game. At the same time, this request indicates theCommander’s isolation. The game played by the oppressor and theoppressed shows that both sides hunger for a human touch and also that
there can be a sort of communication between them even though we canhardly call this companionship. Sherrill Grace asserts: “Scrabble becomes a vivid image of what is necessary to human beings and what isrepressed, withheld (it cannot be absolutely destroyed) in Gilead” (197).
Offred’s hunger for words is demonstrated in her reading in theCommander’s study, too. She reads magazines and novels greedily, as
if she were starving. Manuel Benjamin Becker argues that in this scene“Offred is . . . aware of the sexual connotations language has” (30).
On these occasions I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to
get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it
were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would
be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere. (184)

In Canlit Foodbook Atwood states that “[e]ating is our earliest
metaphor” because “we eat before we talk” (Canlit 2). Atwood’s viewis embodied in the relationship between food/eating and words/readingin The Handmaid’s Tale.
IV.
In “Writing Oryx and Crake” Atwood once again insists that“[e]very novel begins with a what if ” and explains: “The what if of
Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’realready on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces?
Who’s got the will to stop us?” (Writing with Intent 285–86). In Oryx
and Crake Atwood presents us with the question of where we will beat the end of the road we are now taking and whether or not we willsurvive in a time of global warming, overpopulation, and genetic engineering. To put it simply, the topic of this dystopian novel is the survival of humankind itself. In this novel, Atwood, who has in the past
been concerned about the survival of women, chooses a male protagonist for the first time.

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Oryx and Crake is set somewhere along the coast of the United States,
probably in the late twenty-ﬁrst century. At the beginning of this novel
we encounter a man who calls himself Snowman starving and scavenging for food. He seems to be the last man on this planet. Does this man
embody the future of humankind? What made him a lone survivor? Welater ﬁnd that his civilization was destroyed by bioterrorism. Using
ﬂashbacks, Atwood demonstrates the postapocalyptic world in which
Snowman is struggling to survive and the before-plague world where
Snowman was called Jimmy. In The Handmaid’s Tale the life in preGilead that is narrated in the past tense is close to ours. On the other hand,
Jimmy’s life, which is also told in the past tense, seems to predict our
future and is full of unfamiliar products. Still Atwood emphasizes that
this novel is not a fantasy. In “Writing Oryx and Crake” she reveals that
her habit of clipping small items from newspapers made her realize that“trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities” (Writing with Intent 285).
Throughout the text there are so many coinages used to name creatures and foods made by genetic engineering that the world of Jimmy/
Snowman often seems incomprehensible. Yet, if we analyze this novel
by focusing on food, it may help our understanding of this complicatedbiotech world, although the role of food seems to be less signiﬁcant thanin The Handmaid’s Tale. Foods in this novel are simply classiﬁed into
two kinds—artiﬁcial foods and real/natural foods, which were alreadybeginning to become hard to get during Jimmy’s adolescence. The abundance of artiﬁcial foods and the concomitant shortage of real/natural
foods epitomize the world presented in this novel.
In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale food is restricted by the autocratic
regime. In Oryx and Crake people simply need to produce artiﬁcial foodsin order to survive. Even in Jimmy’s boyhood “the deterioration of theenvironment has led to the extinction of countless species” (Ingersoll,“Survival” 165), and new creatures immune to diseases had been created by biotechnology. Jimmy’s earliest memory is of a huge bonﬁre inwhich an enormous pile of cows, sheep, and pigs were burnt in order toprevent disease from spreading. To replace them, scientists had alreadystarted to work on creating new species and growing some organs.
Jimmy’s father, “a genographer, one of the best in the ﬁeld,” works on
the pigoon project, whose goal is “to grow an assortment of foolproof
human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs thatwould transplant smoothly and avoid rejection” (22). In our own lives

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we have already witnessed the burning of diseased animals and thefabrication of new creatures. As Earl G. Ingersoll indicates, probably“Atwood draws here on the television images of burning carcasses ofcattle with ‘Mad Cows’ Disease’ and ‘Foot and Mouth Disease’ in GreatBritain” (“Survival” 165). Hearing news of cloned cows, we share thefear of the young Jimmy, who is upset by the possibility of eating “pigoonpie” or “pigoon cakes.”
In our everyday lives the safety of genetically modiﬁed food has been
discussed. In Oryx and Crake genetically modiﬁed foods are much moreprevalent than real foods, and wars over ﬁnancial interests in “gen-mod”
products have begun.
The wars were over the new Happicuppa bean. . . . Until then the individual
coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and needed to be
handpicked and processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa
coffee bush was designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously,
and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines.
This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and theirlabourers to starvation-level poverty. (179)This passage is surely a reﬂection of what is happening in our own time.
Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale “there is no mention of government at
all in the novel” but “[h]ierarchy is also present in a society” (Somacarrera55). In Oryx and Crake it is not the case of an autocratic regime like
Gilead, but elite scientists who have power. Numerous biochemical
experiments are conducted in carefully guarded company compounds
where top scientists like Jimmy’s father and their families live. The
masses live in the cities, “pleeblands,” that are crowded with “addicts,
the muggers, the paupers, the crazies” (27).
Originally, artiﬁcial foods must have been made for the sake of humanbeings. Some soy products like soy-sausage dogs and “SoyOBoyburgers”
at least appear healthier than American fast food, and a chocolate-ﬂavored energy bar may be nutritious and convenient for their busy lives.
These are kinds of processed foods we are familiar with. However, some
artiﬁcial foods seem to be the product of the elite’s egoism and seem
repulsive. “ChickieNob” is such a new creation. It is a chicken with
twelve drumsticks but without a head, which makes it easier to eat. At
ﬁrst, Jimmy ﬁnds such chicken “horrible” and avoids eating it, but
gradually he becomes used to its “bland tofulike consistency and [its]104

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inoffensive ﬂavor” (292). The kanga-lamb served at a ﬁve-star restaurant is “a new Australian splice that combined the placid character andhigh-protein yield of the sheep with the kangaroo’s resistance to disease”(292).
What Jimmy treasures, and Snowman yearns for, are not these artiﬁcial foods, but real ones. One of his few happy childhood memories ishaving “a genuine cake,” which was made, or at least bought, by aPhilippine housekeeper named Dolores, whom he misses a lot: “Heclutches on to the reality of those cakes; he closes his eyes, conjures themup, hovering all in a row, their candles alight, giving off their sweet, comforting scent of vanilla, like Dolores herself” (50). Dolores is also theone who “cooked his egg just the way he liked it” (30). In this novel
Dolores is the only person who is good at cooking.
Food that is termed real or genuine has rarity value and is considered
to be a luxury. Jimmy’s friend Crake is a biochemistry genius and goesto a prestigious college, while Jimmy goes to a third-rate arts and humanities college, the Martha Graham Academy. The meals served at the twoschools differ signiﬁcantly: “The food in Crake’s faculty dining hall was
fantastic—real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha
Graham” (208). Even Crake, who is indifferent to food, seems to be
impressed by real oysters and “real Japanese beef, rare as diamonds”(289) at a restaurant.
Jimmy’s preference for real foods over artiﬁcial foods shows that heis suspicious of artiﬁcial things. Jimmy’s mother shares his suspicion.
While his father highly values the safety of the compound, his mother iscritical of its artiﬁciality and disdainfully calls it “just a theme park” (27).
Jimmy’s mother, who used to work as a microbiologist, denounces her
husband’s project as “immoral” and “sacrilegious” and says, “Why can’t
you get a job doing something honest?” (57). Fiona Tolan argues that
“his mother . . . in an increasingly genetically modiﬁed environment,
struggles to maintain a division between the artiﬁcial and the real” (277).
Indeed, she might have tried to do so at ﬁrst. However, her sulky attitude at home shows her present hatred of the world they are living in.
She is, in fact, the only person who takes action to overthrow the existing conditions. After smashing her own and her husband’s computers,
she ﬁnally disappears, leaving a letter to her son in which she says, “I
have taken Killer [Jimmy’s pet] with me to liberate her, as I know she
will be happier living a wild, free life in the forest” (61). Just such “awild, free life” is what she herself aspires to. She can be a person “who’sFOOD FOR SURVIVAL IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S DYSTOPIAN WORLDS

105

got the will to stop” scientists who keep on going to extremes. Jimmy,
however, later learns that his mother has joined the Resistance and been
executed.
Crake is at the opposite extreme from Jimmy’s mother. He avows that
he believes neither in God nor in Nature. He himself manipulates theecosystem as if he were a god. As one of the elite scientists says, “it madeyou feel like God” (51). Crake’s lifework, termed “Paradice [sic],” is tocreate humanlike creatures, Crakers, to replace human beings. The Crakers
are “programmed to drop dead at age thirty” (303) in order to avoid overpopulation. Among the Crakers there is to be no feeling for “territoriality” (305), since they are made to be vegetarians. Similarly, racism will
not exist because the Crakers’ skin colors are too versatile—“chocolate,rose, tea, butter, cream, honey” (8). In order to realize this plan, Crake
plans to exterminate all humans by means of a deadly virus. Anotherthing he must do in order to complete this project is to make Jimmy
immune to the virus by vaccinating him without his knowledge andentrusting him to take care of the Crakers after all other human beings
have died out.
Why does Atwood make Crake choose Jimmy to be the last man on
this planet? Elaine Showalter concludes that “[p]erhaps Atwood intends
us to believe that language, imagination and a religious sense will ultimately overcome scientiﬁc engineering, that word people will inherit theearth” (35). Whereas most of the characters living in the compounds arebrilliant scientists and called “number people,” Jimmy, who is “high on
his word scores but a poor average in the numbers columns” (173), is a“word person.” In the age of bioengineering, which underrates the powerof words, Jimmy hangs on to words:
He compiled lists of old words too—words of a precision and suggestivenessthat no longer had a meaningful application in today’s world. . . . He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children
abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them. (195)

Jimmy’s love for old words and his love for genuine foods seem to havesomething in common. It may be the feeling of nostalgia for the worldthat is in danger of becoming extinct.
Even while being on the verge of starvation, Snowman/Jimmy realizes the value of words, saying, “It’s comforting to remember that Homosapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language” (99). Like Offred,

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Snowman feels a hunger for words when in an extreme situation. Whenscavenging for food at a desolate house, Snowman comes across somebooks—“a dictionary, a thesaurus, a Bartlett’s, the Norton Anthology ofModern Poetry” (233)— and thinks approvingly that the dead resident
must have been “a word person.” At another house he unexpectedly hears
a human voice coming from the radio he ﬁnds in the cupboard, eventhough the language the voice is speaking is not English. While scavenging for food, which is essential for survival, Snowman thus ﬁnds
words that are also indispensable. Eleonora Rao concludes that for him
words are “also salvation, a way to remind him that he is still human andalive” (111).
As artiﬁcial foods and real foods are contrasted in the novel, there isalso an opposition between the values of science and reason and the values of language and art. Critics discuss this opposition in terms of gender: “Jimmy and his defense of ‘the arts’ are positioned as ‘feminine’and self-indulgent, while Crake and science are gendered ‘masculine,’
in a blatantly masculinist performance of power” (Ingersoll, “Survival”
166). Sharing this view, Howells underscores Atwood’s attempt to“erode binary opposition” by making “both her protagonists male”(“Dystopian Vision” 170). It should also be noticed that Atwood arranges to have Oryx, a female character, as Crake’s partner. In literarytexts, normally women represent the life of emotion and imagination,
but here Oryx sides with Crake in believing that “[h]e wants to make theworld a better place” (322) with the power of science and plays the roleof the Crakers’ teacher.
Oryx is the most enigmatic character in this novel. Jimmy and Crakeﬁrst ﬁnd her on a child-pornography site and later come to love her.
Showalter sees Oryx as “the vehicle . . . for Atwood’s indignation atchild slavery, prostitution, sex tourism and other extreme forms offemale victimization” (35). Oryx, having been born in a poor Asian family and obliged to become “a sex worker” even in her early childhood,is clearly a victim. However, she is more than a symbol. She is a realist
who sees through the fact that a man who “wanted to make a proﬁt fromyou would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much”(126). At the same time, this mysterious woman awakens Crake’s
humanity and his sense of romanticism at the last moment. When the
pandemic is about to wipe out all human beings, Crake slits Oryx’s throat
and lets Jimmy shoot him dead.

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Atwood presents two surprising things at the end. First, the Crakers,
who are not designed to have enough intelligence or feeling to have areligious sense, begin to worship Snowman. Second, Snowman, who
considers himself to be the last man on the planet, ﬁnds that there are,after all, three more survivors. It seems, therefore, that Crake’s project
has met with failure. In other words, this biochemistry genius has failed
to recreate the world as he wanted to. In an interview Atwood has said
that she likes to “leave the ending open enough so the reader can makesome choice” (Ingersoll, Waltzing Again 262). With Snowman, the readers cannot tell whether the other survivors will accept him or attack him.
At least, however, we can assume that this is not the end of humankind.
Making one of the survivors a woman, Atwood provides a fair chancethat the life of human beings will continue. No matter how powerless
Snowman is, Atwood entrusts the future of humankind to this word person, not the number person.
V.
Quoting novelist Alistair MacLeod, “writers write about what worries
them,” Atwood has asserted in “Writing Oryx and Crake” (2003) that“the world of Oryx and Crake is what worries me right now” (Writing
with Intent 286). After witnessing how, in Australia, the Aborigines “hadlived in harmony with their environments,” after seeing on a boat in the
Arctic “how quickly the glaciers were receding” (Writing with Intent
284–85), and after being stranded at the Toronto airport on September
11, 2001, Atwood completed this dystopian novel about the survival of
humankind. In her foreword to Victory Gardens: A Breath of Fresh Air
by Elise Houghton (also published in 2003), Atwood declares that “[f]orHomo sapiens, the major question of the twenty-ﬁrst century will be,
How will we eat?” (Writing with Intent 311). Atwood’s interest in foodor eating was aroused by the question, what did the heroine have to eat?
About a half-century later, in this question—how will we eat?—we cansee her interest has been greatly broadened.
Still, Atwood’s concern about “survival” has been consistent, whether
her protagonist is female or male. Through the protagonists’ hungers, as
depicted in two dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and
Crake, Atwood demonstrates what is essential for us to survive. By leaving the ending open in both novels, she requires her readers to think about

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what is necessary to be a human. Her message seems to be simple andclear: “Man cannot live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4).
Atwood concludes the essay “Writing Oryx and Crake” as follows:“[N]o matter how high the tech, Homo sapiens sapiens remains at heart
what he’s been for tens of thousands of years—the same emotions, thesame preoccupations” (Wiring with Intent 286).
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