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

Abstract

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.