Speculative fiction writer C Pam Zhang made a huge splash with her first novel, “How Much of These Hills Is Gold.”  

It was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and former President Barack Obama put it on his favorites list.

Now Zhang is back with a tasty new novel titled, “Land of Milk and Honey.”

It's about a futuristic America where crops have failed, a toxic smog has permeated many corners of the world, meals are made out of a grayish, nutritious flour and a wealthy industrialist has created a food reserve atop an Italian mountain.

When a young chef is hired to concoct lavish dinners from the vegetables and meats and grains stored in underground larders, she discovers the full breadth of what the capitalist and his daughter have planned.

Come for the intriguing plot, the interrogation of pleasure and appetite and the breathless romance that deepens the sense that this moment of indulgence and plenty is fleeting. 

But linger over these pages for Zhang’s luxuriant descriptions of the abundance of ingredients available to the chef and the decadent dishes that she creates from those ingredients.

Upon arriving at the fortress on the mountaintop, one of the chef’s first tests is to create a dessert from strawberries, a fruit long withered under the poisonous smog.  

As she blends sugar and butter and fruit together, the taste of the berries plunges her into a dizzying swirl of memory:  “...on my tongue it was summer and it was spring and seasons flourished and vine ran high. Butter and fruit: my mouth an orchard in the sun.”

In her author’s note at the front of the book, Zhang confides that she began the novel in the waning days of the pandemic after a meal with a friend at a Filipino restaurant in Seattle.  

She says, “I remember the pause as the food arrived over discussions of illness and hardship and labor. I remember us wordless, grinning, as we relaxed into being human.”

— Kerri Miller | MPR News