Cooking, Postfood, and Our Posthuman Future in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

10.6153/EXP.201906_(41).0013

Nainu Yang

postfood ； the posthuman body ； technology ； cooking ； self-domestication

Ex-position

41期（2019 / 06 / 01）

187 - 207

英文

My goal in this paper is to discuss the relationship between food and the human in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. Influenced by capitalist production and consumption, nearly all the foods we currently consume come to us through the industrial food chain. I call this type of new food ＂postfood＂ in this article, for it is produced and manufactured differently from food in the past. Hannes Bergthaller once argued that humans invented numerous technologies of self-domestication to eliminate the brutality in their nature and become more civilized. I borrow his concept in my study and propose to conceive of cooking as one of the technologies of self-domestication. The way the human body processes food changes continuously with the advances of technology. In a highly industrialized society, the sophisticated industrial food chain further changes these technologies. Postfood gives rise to the posthuman body while calling into question the viability of a posthuman future. Through the post-apocalyptic narrative of the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood presents the possible consequences when food, technology, and humans rapidly co-evolve.

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