Summary

In the prologue, a young girl approaches the narrator and asks about her past as a chef. The narrator is surprised she is asking about “a period of time that her generation prefers to forget” (1). The girl’s questions bring the narrator back to her past, “to that country that no longer exists” (1).

In Chapter 1, when the narrator was 29, she fled “to that country,” because the rest of the world was desolate (3). After leaving California for England, America closed its borders and she was stranded. The earth was dying and the world was “plunged into famine” (3). When she applied for “an American reentry permit,” she learned that her late mother’s Los Angeles apartment had burned down and California had “become a food desert” (4).

Food became increasingly scarce. No longer able to cook with fresh foods, the narrator’s future disappeared. She...