Blasted Landscapes: Rethinking Food Security in Contemporary Speculative Fiction

This interdisciplinary project explores how speculative fiction (SF) intervenes in contemporary debates linking food
security and ecological collapse. SF writers (Agustina Bazterrica, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ned
Beauman, Jeff VanderMeer, Sue Burke, Elizabeth Dougherty, and N.K. Jemisin) are increasingly drawn to food
futures that serve as a baseline for analyzing critical alimentary issues and dietary habits hidden beneath
overarching narratives of ecological collapse and invasive bioscientific practices. This project questions the future
of food when consumed under radically altered ecological and technological circumstances. In so doing, it
evaluates the viability of food security as an objective in relation to issues such as human overpopulation, species
extinction, and the food production techniques required to feed populations surviving in increasingly "blasted
landscapes" (Kirksey 2014; Castle 2022; Ehrlich 1968).