Desire

Over the course of the novel, the author grounds her thematic explorations regarding desire within her narrator’s culinary inclinations and work. Although the narrator’s world has become increasingly desolate and dystopian, she is still driven by a desire to create and express via food. Indeed, the reason that she agrees to cross “into the land of milk and honey knowing nothing, not even the country’s true name,” is because the enigmatic mountain community promises the fulfillment of her yet unarticulated desires (8). Indeed it is not until she enters the kitchen and sees the strawberries that she truly recognizes the absence of desire in her own life. “For years I’d fed, survived, swallowed my portions of gray,” she says in Chapter 1 shortly after arriving in the mountain country, “but had I hungered for pleasure” (11)? Indeed, over the course of Land of Milk and...