Climate diaspora and future food cultures in Snowpiercer (2013) and The Road (2009)

ABSTRACT This article takes as its starting point the realization that existing food regimes and the food systems that enable them are the main drivers of climate change. This, the article notes, is a systemic challenge, but also a profoundly cultural issue as the way that people eat is deeply connected to questions of identity and belonging. The article enters this field of inquiry by studying how the awareness that current food systems are unsustainable is being mediatized and narrated in popular fiction and film. This media often depicts humans in worlds where the current food system has collapsed, forcing also people in the Global North to move or otherwise adapt to a changing climate, and, in the process, to profoundly alter the way they eat. The article discusses two visual texts: Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), and John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009). The analysis of these texts shows that they employ food, eating and migration to make life in a future transformed by climate change comprehensible to the reader. The article also investigates how the fiction studied connects food and eating to the existing world-system and thus to the material history that is driving the climate crisis.


Introduction
Mobility has always been a fundamental human condition.As Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe observe, movement is "the founding condition of rather than the exception to social life" (2019, 290, italics in the original).Utilizing the petro-accelerated transportation network globalization has supplied, people in the Global North travel to other regions, nations and continents for work and pleasure: to set up new offices, go to conferences, visit friends, enjoy (or introduce) new cuisines.However, less privileged people typically find their ability to move severely restrained.Escaping from poverty, war or other disasters is becoming increasingly difficult when new walls, surveillance technologies and border strategies are constructed, and when the figure of the migrant is demonized in political posturing or media (Drywood and Gray 2019).Caught in refugee camps, forced to move on foot, inside steel containers on trucks, or by boat through dangerous seas, the migrants and asylum seekers from the Global South struggle to move.The displaced and diasporic thus collect both in impermanent and permanent spaces: in formal and CONTACT Johan Höglund johan.hoglund@lnu.seinformal camps and shelters -from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya (the world's largest refugee camp) to the officially disbanded "Jungle" in French Calais -and in the mega cities and peripheries of new host nations.
In the foreseeable future, such displacement is likely to increase significantly.What climate scientists and many scholars in the humanities and social sciences have come to term the Anthropocene epoch or event (Gibbard et al. 2022), or, following the work of Jason W. Moore, the Capitalocene, will be characterized by increasingly severe weather events, and by spreading drought, soil erosion, flooding, and desertification. 1 As a result, more people will be deprived of the land that currently feeds them, and conflict over the land and the resources that remain will further accelerate new migration and refugee movement.It has been estimated that up to 1 billion people will be forced to migrate due to climate change by 2050 (IEP 2020).Most of these people will be trying to escape parts of the Global South that have become too hot, too wet, too violent or too poor to safely sustain human life, but parts of the Global North will also be affected by extreme weather events, water shortages and reduced access to the resources on which what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the capitalist world-system depends (2004).In addition to this, it will become increasingly necessary to provide refuge in the Global North to those who are forced to escape the most acute effects of the climate emergency.If mobility is a fundamental human condition, climate diaspora will in all likelihood be a major way in which such mobility takes shape in the coming years.
Food is an essential component in this development in many different ways.As observed by the EAT-Lancet Commission report Healthy Diets From Sustainable Food Systems (2019), current food regimes and the food systems that enable them are the main drivers of climate change.As the authors of this report argue: Civilisation is in crisis.We can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources.[. . .]The dominant diets that the world has been producing and eating for the past 50 years are no longer nutritionally optimal, are a major contributor to climate change, and are accelerating erosion of natural biodiversity.Unless there is a comprehensive shift in how the world eats, there is no likelihood of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)-with food and nutrition cutting across all 17 SDGs-or of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change.(Willett et al. 2019, 386) In this way, the existing food system is profoundly unsustainable and one of the major reasons why there is a climate emergency in the first place.As such, the food system in general -and the globalized, meat-oriented, and commercially driven, Western diet in particular -is an engine of ecological degradation and thus also of forced climate migration and diaspora.
This, in turn, means that food and eating are central to the effort to prevent accelerating climate change.To alleviate its erosive potential, food must be grown, harvested, transported, preserved and cooked in ways less detrimental to the planet (see Herrero et al. 2020).However, this transition must also be cultural and social to encourage and enable people to turn to more sustainable diets and food cultures.At the present moment, the understanding that diets have an impact on the climate is spreading and significant funding has been diverted to finding new plant-based or insect-based alternatives to the dominant diets (see Mazac et al. 2022).However, as organizations such as Demand Generation Alliance (DGA) observe, less attention has been given to the need to change people's attitudes to food and eating.To accomplish such change, it is vital to map and come to terms with the sociocultural drivers that steer diets.In other words, it is necessary to understand not only what people eat, but why people eat certain foods rather than others.Food choices, as this article will return to, are deeply embedded in gendered, ethnic, religious and nationalist modes of being and belonging and, as such, they are very difficult to shift.
This article enters this field of inquiry by studying how the awareness that current food systems are unsustainable is being mediatized and narrated in popular fiction and film.Scholarship in literature and critical food studies has begun to consider the way that speculative fiction imagines eating in futures altered by ecological erosion, encounters with alien worlds, or other profound transformations of the existing (and uneven) worldsystem.In particular, the special issue of Science Fiction Studies edited by Nora Castle and Graeme Macdonald (2022) and work by Maughan (2018), Wurgaft (2020) and Castle (2022) have explored what can be termed speculative food futures.This article builds on this work by focusing on the specific intersection of diaspora, displacement, nostalgia and sustainable future food discourses.As the article describes, Western popular media forms have long speculated on how climate change, societal erosion and dystopian or utopian responses to such change, will affect eating.This media often depicts humans in worlds where the current food system has collapsed, forcing also people in the Global North to move or otherwise adapt to a changing climate, and, in the process, to profoundly alter the way they eat.This media also explores futures in which radically new food systems and food cultures have appeared and investigates how people will respond to these new systems.This article discusses two such visual texts: Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013), adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, and John Hillcoat's The Road (2009), adapted from Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-prize winning novel by the same name.
The article makes the point that these two seminal climate fictions take place in futures where society has collapsed due to biospheric breakdown.This collapse is described through food shortage and the radical conversion of previous food cultures.The purpose of the article is thus to investigate how these two films, as exemplars of Western climate fiction, imagine that people in the Global North, geographically or temporally displaced by the climate emergency, will eat.Moreover, the article discusses how the characters of these texts will experience and think about the way they are eating.The point here is not that these texts are predictive in the sense that they enact modes of life and ways of eating that are likely to materialize in the future.This does not mean that the futures and the food traditions they imagine may not come about in one form or another, but the focus of the article is to study what these texts tell us about how people (in the Global North) are responding to the need to eat differently.In other words, we read these films as popular, mediatized expressions that can help explain prevalent attitudes to existing unsustainable food cultures, and to the unavoidable arrival of other food cultures.
To come to terms with these shifts, we center the concepts of diaspora and nostalgia.Migration, we argue, has temporal, geographical and emotional components.To migrate is to journey through both time and space, and such travel is always marked by affect.As the migrant travels, he/she/they is made different by the transformation of the landscape, the encounter with new languages, bureaucracies, prejudices, borders and, of course, food traditions.Furthermore, as Alastair Bonnett argues, spatial reorientations, which include "mobility, landscape, environment and the hunger for the place called home, are powerful tropes of the nostalgic imagination" (2).Hence, the instability experienced by migrants produces an often clearly voiced longing for home, and for the traditions and uninterrupted temporalities offered by home.This is true also for the subject who remains in place when the world that surrounds the subject radically changes.To journey into a future where what we understand as modernity has collapsed is a form of migration, only the subject travels through time rather than through space.Like other types of migration, this is experienced, among other ways, through encounters with new types of food.In what follows, we thus treat the imagined entry of the human into a climate-transformed future as a type of displacement from the physical comforts this human, or its parents/ancestors/older friends understood as constitutive and natural.In other words, the article explores how the dystopian, itinerant, futures that these films envisage confront audiences with radical shifts in the way that food is manufactured, ritualized and consumed today.It should be noted that the type of diaspora experienced by the characters of Snowpiercer and The Road is much more dramatic than that lived by those centered in other articles of this special section.However, as in these other contributions, the characters that we encounter in these speculative texts also understand the past from which they have been displaced through food and eating, and they also negotiate worlds deeply informed by race, gender and capital.

Imagining climate change food futures
The Road and Snowpiercer belong to a genre that scholarship has termed "climate fiction" or "Anthropocene fiction" (Andersen 2020;Mehnert 2016;Trexler 2015).This is usually defined as a subgenre of science fiction and as such it is fundamentally speculative.In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unknowable (Ghosh 2016), novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh has influentially argued that conventional realist fiction has struggled to engage with climate change.Premised on an Enlightenment paradigm that states that what can be recorded in the novel is what can be perceived by the naked eye, it is structurally unable to contemplate something so vast and widely disseminated as catastrophic climate change.Thus, as Ghosh puts it, "the very gestures with which it [realist fiction] conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real" (23).The difficult work of narrating climate breakdown has instead been performed by what Ghosh refers to, somewhat despairingly, as the "outhouses" of realism's manor building.These "were once known by names such as 'the Gothic,' 'the romance,' or 'the melodrama,' and have now come to be called 'fantasy,' 'horror,' and 'science fiction.'"(24).
Ghosh's thesis has since been problematized by a number of literary critics and film scholars who observe that there is, in fact, a considerable realist production that attempts to talk about climate change through long historical perspectives or by exploring catastrophes such as Katrina or the pollution of the Niger Delta.Examples include Ron Rash's realist histories of unsustainable forestry in the Appalachian region, C. Morgan Babst's The Floating World (2017) about Hurricane Katrina, or Helon Habila's feverish but still realist description of Nigerian oil extraction in Oil on Water (2010).This scholarship also observes that Ghosh makes little room for the symbolic and oblique as it is used by the realist narrative.In view of this, Mark Bould (2021) has commented that all fiction that directly engages the "capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal histories, systems and structures that are historically and foreseeably responsible for climate destabilisation, and through which it has, is and will be experienced" (4) can be considered climate narratives of a sort.That said, texts that attempt to extrapolate the dire predictions of the IPCC into a not-sodistant future are by definition speculative even if they, as in the case of McCarthy's The Road, explore this future via a mostly realist register.In other words, to explore how humans (from the Global North -the audience of most of this fiction) will live, feel, understand, and eat in a future further transformed by global warming, it is necessary to imaginatively enter such futures.Once the author or filmmaker has done so, possibilities abound.The story can be set only a few years from now and describe a sudden and shocking deterioration of the existing food system, or it can be located in a more distant future where climate, technology and society have undergone profound transformations and where new food systems and diets have emerged.
A problem for any author (or critic) of climate fiction is the vast temporal and geographical scale of planetary climate breakdown.Timothy Morton (2013) refers to climate change as a "hyperobject," arguing that objects like global warming, climate or oil that are "massively distributed in time and space relative to humans" (1), have become newly visible to humans, largely as a result of the very mathematics and statistics that helped to create these disasters.As we glimpse them through our reams of data, "[h]yperobjects compel us to think ecologically, and not the other way around" (48).However, The sheer size of the climate change hyperobject makes it difficult for the author to envision and enter it into fiction, or any other type of mediation.In view of this, literary critic Timothy Clark (2015) has focused on the problem of "scale framing" and noted a number of key narratives and tropes through which authors (and ecocritics) seek to resolve this issue.He finds that literary texts about the climate emergency use "miniaturization" (75) to describe how a limited number of people within a bounded geographical area are affected by climate change.Thus, climate change can take the form of "xenophobic images of claustrophobia-inducing urban crowds" (87).Such images bring into focus the unsustainable nature of contemporary urban modernity (even as it also raises other fears about being erased as an individual in an increasingly intercultural and stratified society), but they also help bring about an understanding of climate change as, simultaneously, a personal lived experience and a planetary condition.
As our analysis makes clear, the two texts in focus in this article also engage the problem of scale, but rather than depicting the paralyzing throng of the modern city, these texts play out in futures where humans have become scarce.In addition to this, these texts' main strategy for engaging with the enormous scale of planetary climate change is to explore how food is sourced, food systems changed, food cultures altered and the performative act of eating transformed.In this way, food in these narratives is not simply a kind of background hum, a representation of a routine activity in all people's lives, it is how these texts explain what climate change and, specifically, (temporal and geographical) climate change diaspora, mean to people who used to take food and eating for granted.In other words, and to develop the aim stated above, in this article, we show how food functions as a narrative strategy that makes climate change comprehensible to the reader.Through images of how people eat or do not eat, (or how they feed, or do not feed), and of what constitutes food and what does not, it becomes possible to imaginatively enter a future drastically transformed by the climate emergency.In the process, these narratives conjure very specific climate food futures and speculate on how the people displaced within these futures will respond to them.

Future food cultures in climate fiction
Snowpiercer takes place in a near future where an attempt to cool the planet by spreading a compound known as CW-7 into the atmosphere has misfired. 2The planet has become entirely frozen and most forms of life have gone extinct.The only people who have survived this catastrophe are on a train built by the railway engineer Wilford.This train is driven by an "eternal engine" and runs on a track that circles the entire planet, waiting for the day when the Earth will begin to thaw.Wilford has thus "saved humanity," but he has also reproduced the social and economic hierarchies that have, in fact, produced both climate change and the train.The environment of the passenger train affords excellent opportunities to visualize such hierarchies.Thus, the train is divided into sealed compartments with an enormously privileged strata in the 1-class front coaches, and an utterly impoverished and disenfranchised community in the tail section.
Snowpiercer's miniaturization of climate change works on many different levels.As passengers on a constantly moving train, all people have now become climate migrants both in the geographical and the temporal sense.At the same time, the mobilities of the tail compartment are enormously constrained.A series of fortified doors guarded by brutal guards make sure that there is no movement from the back to the front.The people in the back are kept alive only because, to keep on running, the comforts of the 1-class passengers, and Wilford's "eternal engine," demand cheap and disposable labor.In particular, Wilford requires children small enough to be inserted into the machine itself (as children were in early nineteenth-century industries).The people at the end of the train are thus what Zygmunt Bauman calls "human waste" (2004); an immobile and superfluous yet somehow necessary consequence of the capitalist modernity that still structures social relations inside the train.
By depicting the future as a train engineered to preserve the class privileges endemic to the capitalist world-system, the film can be said to note the systemic origins of the climate emergency.Specifically, the film illustrates Malm and Hornborg's (2014) polemic thesis that for "the foreseeable future -indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earththere will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged.If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal, but uneven and combined" (66-67).Indeed, for the firstclass passengers, the climate emergency is not an emergency at all, but a journey toward an opportunity to resurrect capitalism in a thawing world.This is evident in the plush comforts that exist in these front compartments, but it is primarily visualized through food and eating.
The film opens in the tail section of the train where the racially stratified and utterly precarious community is waiting for their daily meal.This, the audience discovers, is a black and gelatinous protein bar.People belonging to the section are brought to order by brutal, heavily armed and armored guards.A line is quickly organized so that people can pick up their bar in an orderly fashion.Using only their hands, they seize and eat the bar, many still walking.Nobody enjoys the meal, and the consumption of the bar is mechanical and devoid of ritual.At the same time, as the audience discovers later on in the film, it is an improvement on the consumption habits that existed before the bars were introduced.Curtis, the protagonist of the story, vividly remembers what life was like when he had just been made to board the train: "It was chaos [. . .]No food, no water.After a month we ate the weak.Do you know what I hate about myself?I know what people taste like.I know that babies taste best."Thus, the black bars have allowed the people of the tail section to emerge out of cannibalism into another and more sustainable diet.
Even so, the bars and the way they are consumed denote a fundamentally different type of consumption.In fact, it can be argued that Curtis and his fellow travelers are not actually eating at all, as this activity is typically understood in food studies.As described by Pamela Kittler et al. (2016): Eating is distinguished from feeding by the ways humans use food.Humans not only gather or hunt food, but they also cultivate plants and raise livestock [. ..]Humans also cook, softening tough foods, including raw grains and meats, and reducing toxic substances in other items, such as certain root vegetables.This greatly expands the number and variety of edible substances available.[. ..]Humans use utensils to eat meals and institute complex rules, commonly called manners, about how meals are consumed.(1) The way that the passengers in the back of the train consume their protein bars has little in common with the practice of eating as defined here.The consumption of the bars is much more akin to what Kittler et al. refer to as feeding.This is what animals (and nursing children) engage in, an activity devoid of culture that serves only to introduce nutrition into the body.
Because the people inhabiting the tail section are not eating in the way this activity is described by Kittler et al., they are not able to engage in the type of performative identitymaking that such consumption conveys.As Claude Fischler (1988) has remarked: The way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organization, and at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently.Food is also central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically and socially by the food he/she choses to incorporate.(275) In this way, the absence of food and food cultures at the tail section of the train is also the absence of the identities through which humans are made.It signals to the people in the tail that, in the eyes of those who are feeding them, they are little more than animals.
Several of the people lining up for the black bars were born on the train and have never tasted anything else.However, older passengers are certainly aware of other ways of consuming nutrition.They once made themselves through the various cuisines and food traditions that used to exist, and it is clear that they have told the younger ones about this.One of many who complain about the protein bars and the way these are consumed is Edgar, a young man born on the train.He predicts that the "bastards in the front section" are "eating fucking steaks."He then exclaims "I want steak" only to then turn to Curtis to ask "what does steak look like?"Obviously, Edgar cannot remember or properly long for a type of food he has never consumed.Rather, his longing for meat is the longing for a different identity and a different subject position within the train.
In this way, the black protein bars introduce the theme of food that structures much of the narrative.The bars also set the plot of the film in motion.For some time, Curtis has found short messages inside some of the bars.These encourage him to organize a revolution: to move forward in the train, to seize power.Thus prompted, Curtis and his fellow travelers from the back overpower the guards and break through the doors that keep them confined.Entry through the first door provides access to the section where the black bars are produced.In vast tanks, cockroaches are ground to paste.Curtis and his fellow travelers have thus been consuming a kind of insect that subsides on waste.The passengers, and possibly also the audience, balk at this abject and appalling source of nutrition.
In the next compartment, the angry insurgents face a number of leather-clad, maskwearing, ax-wielding guards who cut into them.They barely survive the onslaught but with much of the militia now out of the way, they can move relatively unhindered through the next couple of sections.The first stop is a beautiful greenhouse where lemons, oranges, tomatoes, chilies, cucumbers and other vegetables grow toward the glass ceiling.Gardeners are attending to the plants and a woman sits knitting on a chair in the middle of the room.As they move further on, they find themselves walking through an enormous aquarium where all types of fish swim.At the end of the section, a chef is preparing sushi nigiri, served on a specially designed plate with wasabi, slices of lemon, thinly cut cucumber, and a ginger rose.The insurgents sit themselves down before the chef and smell the pieces of sushi with incredulity before putting them into their mouths.This is clearly a different type of serving than what they have had since boarding the train; a beautiful and ritualized meal meant to be savored by both the palate and the eyes.None of the insurgents seems to remember how to do that and as they wolf the food down they watch a vast harbor where cranes, supertankers and fishing vessels have stranded, broken up and frozen over.It is a reminder of the relationship between the fish they eat, the natural world, and the capitalist world-system that once serviced the world with food sourced from all over the planet.
Once they have finished their meal, they walk through a gigantic meat locker where hundreds of chickens, lambs and entire sides of beef are hung from hooks.This is the type of food that Edgar and other travelers born on the train longed for but never got to taste while on the train.It exists, in this scene, only in its raw form; not as a meal, but rather as an uncomfortable reminder of the violence inherent in the meat-based, capitalist food system.They exit this locker and enter a schoolroom where a heavily pregnant young teacher instructs pre-teen children to express their admiration for Wilford and his train.If the train stops, "we will all die," the children chant.Because the train has just completed another circumvention of the planet, a cart full of boiled eggs is wheeled into the schoolroom.Thus, the insurgents encounter another type of ritualized food, but before they have the time to enjoy it, the schoolteacher finds a machine gun buried beneath the eggs and proceeds to shoot at Curtis and the other rebels.Again, they manage to survive, but they must now hurry toward Wilford and the locomotive.They move through what amounts to a nightclub, where scantily clad young men and women drink colorful drinks, dance ecstatically to thumping music, take drugs and fall over each other in plush sofas.As in the other compartments, this section makes itself through the ingestion of certain types of food and drink.The drinks mark both the possession of certain privileges and a certain becoming through consumption.
At the end of the film, Curtis is allowed to enter the locomotive where Wilford tells him that he is expected.It is in fact Wilford who has passed Curtis the messages inciting insurgence.The rebellion was encouraged as an attempt to cull the superfluous human population on the train.Wilford also tells Curtis that he has been grooming him for his own exalted position.It is a position of great responsibility, but it also comes with certain food privileges.Thus, when Curtis enters the locomotive, Wilford is frying them a steak each.He serves it with potatoes and assorted vegetables on exclusive tableware, and there is red wine in crystal glasses.As Edward suggested, they are eating "fucking steak" at the front of the train.This final meal is the inversion of the consumption of the black protein bars at the beginning of the film.Here, the rituals and materiality of privileged eating remain in place.Curtis looks with something akin to desperation at Wilford when the latter begins to eat, the silverware clattering on the expensive porcelain plate, but Curtis never touches the food.Rather than prolonging the train's journey, and its radically uneven distribution of food and other resources, Curtis assists in sabotaging the train with the help of improvised explosives.When the detonation creates a gigantic avalanche that rolls over the tracks, the enormous vehicle breaks apart.The coaches of the train crash into each other and derail.When the crash is complete, two survivors (a small black boy and a young Asian girl, both from the back of the train) confusedly make their way out of the wreckage into a bitter cold but not entirely lifeless environment.On a hill in the distance, a polar bear is watching them.
Throughout Snowpiercer's depiction of climate breakdown and diaspora, food and eating are central and help explain the drivers of the climate collapse that have frozen the planet.The way that the front compartments consume, their hedonistic enjoyment of sushi, meat, alcohol, and drugs, is made possible by the suffering of the people of the tail sections.The fact that they subside on protein bars made out of cockroaches is what allows the front section to dine on fresh vegetables, red meat and raw fish.To continue consuming fine food and drink, the people at the front must also condone, or turn a blind eye to, the regular culling of the people of the tail section.In this way, the film highlights how social injustice is built into, and enables, the present global food system.The way that the front of the train eats is thus part of a material class history of the climate crisis.At the same time, the way that people at the back of the train eat, the cannibalism once practised there, the insect-based protein meals served as an alternative, and the complete erosion of food and eating culture that has occurred at the back is a comprehensible image of what life may be like in futures where the climate has been allowed to erode further.

The Road
It can be argued that where Snowpiercer ends, The Road begins.The young woman and the child that exit the crashed train enter a very uncertain future.A polar bear has observed the trainwreck and the exit of the two humans.Does it represent the resilience of the natural world or the end of the human era?Understood as the latter, the choice of a polar bear at the end of the film carries an ironic dimension since the hypercarnivorous bear has been the staple image used to represent the suffering of the natural world.The bear is now truly positing itself not only above the fragile humans at the top of the mountain, but also on the top of the food chain.The mocked rituals of eating and dining in the film's latter sequences are now replaced with feeding proper.Understood as the former, the polar bear sends a comforting signal to the viewers: among the destruction of the world as we know it, biodiversity extends beyond the human species.
The Road is far less ambiguous.In the film, the audience follows a father and son as they track toward a vaguely imagined south, all the time looking for nutrition and shelter.Although not frozen over, this is a world even more wrecked than the one in Snowpiercer.In the words of Terence McSweeney (2013): "the planet's fragile ecosystem has been devastated; ash blocks out the sun, resulting in increasingly cold weather; all plant life is dead and unable to grow again; all animals quickly die out with no sources of food" (45).Since the planet does not have any source of renewable food supply, there is, as McSweeney comments, "little hope left for the human race" (45).Indeed, most other surviving inhabitants in the film are also moving aimlessly in search of something to eat.This is, as Andrew Tate (2017, 90) has observed, a common trope in post-apocalyptic fiction, and as such draws from images of the actual migration of people as a result of conflict, poverty, war, and hunger.In this way, and like Snowpiercer, The Road is a film about food and diaspora in a future ruined by biospheric breakdown.Because The Road takes place in a future where the food system has entirely disappeared, the father and son have to scavenge for what food remains in the crumbling ruins they move through.As we discuss below, the pursuit of food somehow left behind by a previous, functioning society, activates a strongly nostalgic element in the film where memories of a different way of life and eating constantly rise to the surface.The only alternative to this type of food sourcing is cannibalism.The father and son think of themselves as "the good guys" and will not participate in this abject food economy as consumers, but they cannot prevent other people from wanting to eat them.In this way, The Road talks about food, eating and diaspora also through two main characters that not only want food, but that are food.

Food in the past
The Road oscillates between the memory of a past world and the grim presence of the present depleted world.This is the case for the two protagonists of the film (in particular for the father), but it also provides the audience with a reference point for what has been lost.The film opens with a series of colorful images of trees, flowers, a house, the mother of the son, a horse and man, and an electric lamp before this earlier world is closed off from us symbolically by the closing of a door.This montage, boosted by a lethargic piano piece and diegetic sounds from nature and society, turns out to be a dream of the father.Painfully awake, he puts his arm around his son in the postapocalyptic world they now inhabit, gloomily and contrastively (opposite to the colorful dream) rendered in the "wintry palette" created by the underexposed film stock suggesting limited sunlight.The mood of the film, as Alexa Weik von Mossner (2012) articulates it, is of a "visceral" (48) quality and it activates the emotional modality of the film.
Food and the pastness of food and eating as identity-forging items and processes are demonstrated through similar nostalgic montages.One is in the second flashback of the film, which shows the pregnant mother shortly after the unnamed catastrophe.Here we are shown all the excesses of prior civilization, with fully stuffed shelves and proper, warm food to eat.This food nostalgia is taken to a larger extreme when father and son, later on in the movie, discover a hidden cellar: the bunker of a now evacuated prepper family."What is all this stuff?" asks the boy, his eyes triggered by the full shelves along the walls."Food," the father responds.The first evening, the boy wants to make a prayer and thank God for the meal.In doing so, he has to look at the cans and containers to know what he has actually eaten: soup and Cheetos.The second evening dinner scene is a nostalgic simulation of what a nice dinner used to look like.In this case, the edibles served are not simply nutrition, but part of a ritualized Western ceremony through which people in the Global North used to build their own identities and their relationship to other societies and worlds.The non-diegetic dreamy music sequence from the opening montage again fills the audio track, connecting this scene with a lost yet vividly remembered past.The father has a dream in connection with the dinner.It is a slow and sensual dream of the mother and it symbolically connects the food they have been eating with the equally sensorial potential of human intimacy.The third dinner scene adds a cigarette and Jim Beam bourbon to the mix before the sudden and temporary sanctuary is broken up by the fear of discovery.
Recurring nostalgic memories of the rituals that informed past, and now irretrievably lost, food cultures thus help convey the overwhelming sense of loss and planetary-scale grieving that the film in its entirety expresses.These memories of lost food and food identities clash with images of starvation in a gray and dead world, but also, and importantly, with the ruins that capitalism has left behind.These ruins are present in the grocery cart that the father pushes through the dead landscape; a constant reminder of how easy it was to source food in the old world.Indeed, The Road repeatedly focuses on material previously associated with a privileged lifestyle, creating a connection between the ruination of this world and the ruins of the consumer society that the father and son walk through in the film (gasoline pumps, plastic bags, advertisement signs, Coca Cola cans).Since food, in general, is not only for survival but also one of the most sensorial and intimate end products of capitalism, its function in this film is strongly emphasized.When the father and son find a can of Coke, the sound it makes when it is opened is an embodied experience for the film audience.At the same time, the choice of Coca-Cola as an iconic capitalist brand ties the darkness of the scene to our present consumer society."Really good," says the boy after a burp.In this way, The Road uses nostalgia to recall a lost world, in the process making the suffering and environmental devastation felt keenly.At the same time, nostalgia becomes a way for the film to critique the affluence that characterized this lost world.In Reclaiming Nostalgia (Ladino 2012), Jennifer Ladino does not define nostalgia as a historical, regressive and degrading force, but as the driver of a counter-discourse.Thus, she sees nostalgia as fostering a potential for political, social, and environmental change (8).Nostalgia can thus accomplish a "tactical reappropriation" of the past that encourages us to revise "dominant histories and [think] critically of the present" ( 16).The food scenes in The Road, we argue, contain this exact radicality in how they call the dominant, capitalist system into question, but at the same time, they offer an emotional understanding of what kind of losses are at stake in a deteriorated environmental agency.

"We would never eat anybody, would we?"
In the post-apocalyptic world of The Road, food is by far the most central driving force for survival, and almost all interactions and transactions with other humans commence with questions of food.Running into a group of hardened survivors early in the film, the father asks a member separated from the rest of the group what they are eating.
"Whatever we can find," the rugged Southerner replies."The boy is hungry," he continues, looking at the son, "why do you not come along to the truck . . .get something to eat." From this hesitant phrasing, which the father picks up on, it is unclear who will be eating as a result of this visit.Is the boy invited to dinner, or as dinner?Later on in the film, the father and son arrive at a stately manor building where they stumble upon a cellar where humans have been locked up as animals awaiting slaughter.They plead for help but also attack the father, thinking perhaps that he is one of their captors.As the father and son escape the room, the cannibals arrive, three men and a woman.They are armed and look rough, but what strikes the viewer is the causal nature of their conversation.They have drinks and the woman declares that she will go upstairs to change.The father and son, who have taken refuge in a bloodied bathroom where the slaughter of humans must be taking place, know that they, if discovered, will also be inserted into this cellar, awaiting certain death.In The Road, food is everything and everyone is food.
From a posthuman perspective, the centrality of cannibalism in The Road has been read as a dissolution of the human/nature border.Sarah E. McFarland (2021) argues that the scenes of cannibalism "incorporates epistemological ruptures that break down notions of good/bad, civilized/barbaric, culture/nature, and human/animal, placing humans firmly within the biological sphere rather than elevated above it in an artificial hierarchy of human exceptionalism" (55-56).Thus, the encounter between the father and humans as livestock represents both the critical oscillation between human and nonhuman, and the moment when the father is fully forced to understand himself and his son as folded into nature, as flesh, as food.This, in turn, can be read as a critique of current species relations.
Weik von Mossner also frames the scene as a reversal of human and nonhuman hierarchies where the actual horror viewers experience from the scene can be seen as the kind of horror involved in similar scenes for animals (53).Indeed, the chains in the cellar binding humans and the bathroom abattoir recall the slaughterhouse.Similarly sounds from the confined humans blur into the scherzo of cattle noise before extermination, and the whole situation echoes the animal factory farms that make possible the meat-heavy diet that is helping to erode the biosphere.This line of discussion also recalls Donna Haraway's observation that "it is a misstep to separate the world's beings into those who may be killed and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to live outside killing" (2008,79).As McFarland argues: "It is because readers privilege and identify with humans that the scenario is appalling" ( 73), yet, in the eyes of "cannibal captors" humans as food are rationalized "in exactly the same way humans make invisible the suffering of animals on their own plates."(74) From this perspective, the film argues that, in a future severely altered by biospheric breakdown, culture, and thus food culture, ceases to have meaning.At this point, it becomes impossible to maintain the illusion that humans are a privileged and exceptional species.While cannibalism remains an abject type of food to the father and the boy who, as the father insists, "carry the fire," it has become, to other people, simply another way to eat.In this way, the raiders and the cannibals in The Road can be said to represent a new and communal social order untethered not just from previous food cultures, but from culture altogether.In the diasporic and post-apocalyptic world they traverse, such transformation is, it seems, necessary.That said, the post-capitalist, post-apocalypse through which the father and the son travel is so utterly dark and devoid of hope that it is difficult to imagine this new ecological and social order as a beginning of anything.In addition to this, while the posthumanist reading of The Road is ultimately geared toward dismantling what McFarland calls "human exceptionalism" (3), it risks universalizing a diversity of people into "humanity."In other words, the film's important critique of capitalism is elided by the transformation of its predominantly white and Englishspeaking survivors into "humanity." This changes the focus away from the universalizing, posthuman perspective, toward the film's clearly discernable engagement with specifically Western modes of eating and being in the world.While the inclusion of organized forms of cannibalism suggests that humans are also animals, also nature, a more precise reading proposes that what we see in the film is Western (food) culture eating itself.Much of the scholarship that has engaged with the original novel highlights this perspective.Cannibalism is even more central in McCarthy's novel where the father and son often come across the remains of slaughtered humans and, in what is perhaps the most terrible sequence of the novel, a beheaded and gutted infant roasting on a spit.To Jordan Dominy (2015) the novel uses cannibalism to launch a fierce critique of Western colonialism, capitalism and consumerism.More specifically, as Marie Liénard-Yeterian (2016) has argued, cannibalism in the novel is a damning appraisal of the violent global (food) order established by the US.
While the film contains fewer and less graphic scenes of cannibal slaughter, it encourages the same type of reading.In the novel, the grand mansion that contains the cellar where living humans are confined before they are eaten is, as Liénard-Yeterian has noted, notably Southern in its architecture.In the film, this comes across even more clearly.As a "Southern mansion," it is most likely a house once built on the lives of enslaved people.Now, at the end of the world, it has retained its role as the center of a fundamentally violent and extractive economy.Read alongside novels such as Blood Meridian, McCarthy's anti-western indictment of US colonialism in Mexico, this reading is more convincing.This, in turn, suggests that cannibalism is not so much an attempt to shake the audience out of their anthropocentric belief in human exceptionalism, as an effort to name the extractive, capitalist and colonial system that has made America possible, and that, in the film, has also brought on the biospheric collapse that the father and son move through.

Future food fiction, diaspora and climate agency
In the future, people across the planet will eat differently and practice and perform new food cultures.This will be either because too little is done to alleviate global warming and other types of erosive impact on the Earth System, or it will be due to a concerted and successful effort capable of actually deaccelerating the climate emergency so that the planet can recuperate.If the first (and disturbingly likely) scenario occurs, the current food system will collapse along with many other globalized systems.If the second scenario becomes true, it will be because humans (in the Global North) have changed the way that food is produced, transported and consumed.For this to happen, these humans must have adopted a new food culture that is fundamentally differentfrom the one existing today.
Snowpiercer and The Road participate in the making of the food narratives that will guide this transformation.Both films play out in depleted worlds where people on the road are deprived not just of nutrition, but of food and eating as material and performative rituals central to the creation of social and cultural identities.To be in a future where the climate has collapsed is, for the protagonists of these films, to have lost access to one of the most crucial practices through which people in their (Western/capitalist) societies made themselves into individuals.In both films, protagonists stumble into spaces where eating is suddenly possible.The insurgents on the Snowpiercer are given elegant sushi.The father and son feast on clearly product-placed preserves, soft drinks and snacks.This is not truly a return to eating for these people, the world is too far gone for this, but it is, for the audience, an opportunity to consider their own privileges, affluence and opportunities for food-identity construction.It is also, of course, a warning of sorts to the audience: this is what eating will be like in a future where the climate has been allowed to continue to erode.Because both films center on capitalism, and the meat-heavy diets that capitalism makes possible, they can also potentially help audiences comprehend the root causes behind the climate upheaval in which these films take place.
In this way, the films' depiction of how people are forced onto the road by biospheric breakdown, hunger and loss of shelter may inspire audiences to rethink their privileges and, possibly, even the way that they eat.As Weik von Mossner (2017) has argued, climate fiction is often understood as providing dramatic images "of climate change's external effects through the minds and bodies of its protagonists, thus allowing readers to imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world" (174).This is certainly a possible outcome, but as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson's (2018) empirical ecocritical work has demonstrated, the evocation of fundamentally dystopian climate futures does not necessarily inspire readers to change their ways.Presented with futures so dark that you sometimes need to avert your eyes, the lasting sense is that the future holds no promise.Thus, it may be more useful to think about these particular films as food narratives that do the important work of probing the connection between food, eating and the capitalist world-system at a time of biospheric breakdown, but that do not provide audiences with the models for action that may actually prevent such breakdown from occurring.