In my early twenties, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, her most famous book. Later, I read one of her a lesser known novels, The Edible Woman, about Marian McAlprin, a young woman engaged to be married who finds herself suddenly at war with food. For good reason. Food becomes the metaphor for Marian’s realization how she is being consumed, piece by piece, as she moves closer to her marriage.
“What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!” ~ from The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood
I can’t remember every detail about this book, but the impression it left on me has never waned. I closed that cover after the last page and looked at the world in a different way–more awake and perhaps a little more suspicious. You might question the benefit of suspicion, but you can never question the power of a story that keeps you thinking, for years after.
Food plays a role in many stories and novels. Food is a comfort, a necessity, sometimes a source of power. Which is what Octavia Cade writes about today, as she introduces us to a new anthology of short stories on food (and horror) that she has edited, Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2019).
Photo credit: ollycoffey on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC
May is Short Story Month. In honor of short stories and Octavia’s post, I’m hosting a giveaway of Sharp & Sugar Tooth (courtesy of her and Upper Rubber Boot Books). ENTER the GIVEAWAY by Sunday, May 26th, for a change to win an ebook version. Now, welcome Octavia Cade!
OCTAVIA CADE: The Sharp and Sugar Tooth is an anthology of feminist food and horror stories from Upper Rubber Boot Books, published earlier this year.
There’s something intrinsically horrifying about food. Something wonderful, too, but the horror’s there still, bubbling away underneath. I’ve been thinking about food and horror for several years now, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that the horror results from a relationship that, at bottom, is basically about power.
We need food to live. Oh, we can survive without it for a little, and there’s plenty of horror in starvation narratives – what we’ll eat when there’s no other choice, trapped by winter like the Donner party, trapped by glaciers or shipwreck – but for the most part, it’s eat or die. And we skim over the surface of this, pushing our abattoirs out of sight, packaging our food so that by the time it gets to the supermarket there’s little visible reminder of where it came from. It’s just groceries, and any idea that killing’s been done to get it is swept away. It’s someone else’s responsibility. Someone else bulldozed the rainforest to make way for farm, someone else dumped dolphin overboard with the rest of the bycatch, someone else heard those animals screaming in their slaughter pens.
It was never us.
Except it was, and that exertion of power over the natural environment becomes social exertion when that food comes into the home. Who cooks it, who serves it, who cleans up afterwards? It’s a subtler exploitation than slaughterhouses, but it’s there nonetheless, embedded in the history of housework, the weight of expectation. When it comes to food, let’s face it: most of the responsibility has fallen on women. Whether they’re out in the fields, or circling between stove and sink, theirs is the business of consumption. Of providing that which is meant to be consumed.
It’s not as if this is a new (or even an isolated) phenomenon. There’s a long and unpretty relationship between women and consumption, where the one is packaged up for the other and that, too, has expectation and exploitation wound all through it. Consumption is, after all, a catch-all phrase, a metaphor that can be used for any number of things. It’s the places of overlap I find most interesting, though, and the subversions that overlap can bring. Because food is so much about power, you’d think more of it would rest with those who provided it. I mean, if you’re the one stuck in the kitchen making sandwiches, because no-one else will do it, who’s to say what those sandwiches will look like? What power they’ll have, what consequences they’ll bring.
This is a fertile ground for a horror anthology. I’m not the only one to think so. When Joanne from Upper Rubber Boot Books took this project on I expected, in the submissions period, to get a lot of stories that bubbled up with resentment and revenge, with the retaking of power. Cannibalism was a popular theme. At least half of the stories submitted involved eating a husband or boyfriend, with the clear implication that they deserved it – that they, too, were objects to be consumed, the feeding point of power. Clearly I’d hit a nerve. And yet the stories I ended up taking explored that intersection between food and women and power in often subtler ways.
A surprising amount were genuinely hopeful, compassionate pieces of writing. Hope and compassion isn’t something that turns up a lot in horror writing. I mean, I like gore as much as the next girl, but when I go looking for feminist horror stories, I think I want more range than just last-girl-standing, more than women-can-be-terrible-consumers-too although these are attractive narratives and there’s some wonderful, deeply creepy examples of them in The Sharp and Sugar Tooth. But I want as well women who recognise horror for what it is and help each other navigate it, who can be their own heroes, who find in their fields and kitchens and friendships a way to use the power of that necessity-relationship to benefit both themselves and others. In “Strong Meat”, by A.R. Henle, for example, food is the fulcrum for choice, for helping another person to get the confidence to speak out and advocate for themselves. In Erin Horáková’s “A Year Without the Taste of Meat”, human body parts are used in a grief ritual that draws mourners together, even when they otherwise might be at odds. And in “I Eat” by H. Pueyo, the aftermath of apocalypse forces the characters to make choices in their consumption that will benefit, rather than harm, the struggling ecosystem around them.
There’s range in the horror here, is what I’m saying. Diverse viewpoints, diverse experiences of consumption. Survival and subversion and some black humour, even; explorations of ecosystems and social networks, expectation and exploitation. I’m biased, of course, but even so I’m sure you’ll find some tasty things here.
Octavia Cade is the author of the award-winning non-fiction essay collection Food and Horror, and is the editor of the food horror anthology The Sharp and Sugar Tooth from Upper Rubber Boot Books. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Shimmer, and Strange Horizons, amongst others, and she has a poetry collection coming soon from Aqueduct Press. She attended Clarion West 2016, and will be the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University in New Zealand.
