The best sci-fi novels where food plays a defining role in the story

You can’t get much more food-oriented in science fiction than a novel called The Hunger Games, and true to its name, food and food politics play a central role in the book’s theme. The book’s author, Suzanne Collins, uses juxtaposition and food politics throughout the series to highlight the difference between the haves and the have-nots. While all the books in the Hunger Games series highlight these discrepancies, it’s Collins’s second book Catching Fire where the differences are most pronounced. The feast in the Capitol, along with its potions to induce vomiting (and by extension, encourage more eating), stands out in particular: The reaction of the book’s main character, Katniss Everdeen, herself a poor girl from the Seam of District 12 makes this scene both comical and revolting.

I first got introduced to the character Paul Atreides and the book Dune when I was 23 years old. Back then, I had little understanding of food politics, ecology, and the lengths that people are willing to go to control both of these resources. Today, as I reread the book for the second time, some 30 years later, I recognize that the book’s food themes are more relevant today than ever before. Paul’s journey as the person who eventually controls the spice is a lesson to all who are interested in food politics and diplomacy.

Milo Hastings’s book, The City of Endless Night, written right after the end of WWI, foretells Germany’s eventual rise to power again. The book’s main character Lyman De Forrest takes us through a socially stratified underground Berlin, where 300,000,000 people live. In the lower strata, every aspect of life, including how much a person gets to eat each day (based on their weight), is controlled. Despite being more than 100 years old, this book is surprisingly modern and the food politics are just as relevant.

When most people think about Orwell’s War of the Worlds, they rightfully think about invasion fiction. But what stands out to me as a food writer is how Orwell uses food—or the lack of access to it— to show us how quickly society would deteriorate in the event of an invasion—an alien invasion, in this case. One of the book’s most telling lines for a foodie like me was the last line of chapter 7. After having raced home to save himself from the invasion and to have dinner with his wife, the Narrator (who isn’t named in the book) states: “I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.” For him and many others, dinner with family and friends is the epitome of civilization.

It’s hard not to talk about the boy who lived without talking about the role that food plays in the Harry Potter books. It is a vehicle for so many storytelling elements. It highlights Harry’s malnourished state at home with his aunt and uncle; it sets the tone for life at Hogwarts; and it conveys British culture in a very real, though maybe not obvious way. The cultural aspect of food in Harry Potter is particularly of interest to me as a foodie and as a translator. The Potter novels are some of the most challenging books to translate, partly due to the culturally specific food that JK Rowling highlights in her books. Pretty delish, all in all.