War Rations and Food in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead
War Rations and Food in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead

Summary/Abstract: Margaret Atwood uses food and eating imagery to further immerse readers in her dystopian society of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments. The repressive patriarchal dictatorship maintains power by imposing dietary restrictions and other power politics. Consequently, pictures of dystopian cuisine depict these restrictions, ongoing control, and human rights violations in the Republic of Gilead while illuminating the everyday lives of Atwood's protagonists in their terrifying theocracy. In her literary works, Margaret Atwood dramatizes the effects of particular violent acts like wars, murders, and other apocalyptic events by challenging the anthropologies and cultural landscapes that support them. In connection to Margaret Atwood's fiction, the current paper will also examine the conceptual interaction between worldwide scarcity and American overproduction, as presented in Allison Carruth's War Rations and the Food Politics of Late Modernism.

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