Land of Milk and Honey

The narrative flashes back to when the narrator is 29 years old.

That March, the narrator works in England, unable to return to her hometown in California. The border to the United States is closed now that severe smog blocks the sun. The smog has made it impossible to grow most types of food and feed livestock. While in England, the narrator receives a letter that her late mother’s apartment has burned down in Los Angeles; she is liable for expenses from the fire. The restaurant she works at only serves fish and “mung-protein-soy-algal flour” provided by the government (5). She misses the other foods that are no longer available.

The narrator applies for a job as a chef at a research facility in northern Italy on a mountain. Its elevation gives the facility access to sunlight, which no longer reaches most places, and they experiment with growing a variety of foods. She lies on her application by saying that she will take on any assignment with dignity. While waiting for an answer, she dreams of lettuce. Her unnamed employer hires her for a temporary position that could lead to longer-term work. He writes that he also acts with dignity and sends instructions for taking his private jet to the mountain. The place is called “terra di latte e miele” (8), which is Italian for “the land of milk and honey.”

The narrator passes through Italian immigration and then is detained by private security. After taking a variety of measurements and confiscating her passport and phone, they allow her to pass. In the very early morning, she arrives on the mountain and sees the sun rise in the restaurant’s two-way glass. She finds chef’s coats and a white silk dress in the closet of her room. A note reads, “Impress me” (10). The narrator contemplates the ingredients for her audition. The strawberries remind her of a male pastry chef she once had sex with and who taught her to make pastry. The narrator makes shortcakes and eats a few strawberries. She falls asleep while waiting for her compote to cook.

After sunset, she wakes up to a burnt compote and the stove turned off. Then, she sees a car pulling out of the driveway and runs after it, asking what to do. Her unnamed employer tosses the shortcakes out of the car window and drives away. Her contract states that she can’t leave the grounds. Back in the kitchen, she remembers her mother working in the California fields, picking strawberries and eating the extras. The narrator vomits up the strawberries she ate. She finds another note from her employer, asking her to make eight courses for two people on Sunday and to not burn down the restaurant.

The note also has a secret message. When she looks at it in her bathroom mirror, the mirror opens into a hidden room with a glass floor. Inside is a giant glass eye; below the floor is a long drop.

During her first week, the narrator sneaks cigarettes in the mornings. She thinks about the discrimination she’s faced as a small woman working in kitchens. Then, she walks down 156 steps to the storeroom, where she revels in the variety of foods. She never sees any other people, except for a glimpse of a cleaner leaving the kitchen quickly. The sunlight is unfamiliar, and the items on the menu seem selected at random from a French cookbook.

Whenever the narrator eats the food she prepares, she vomits. She can only manage to keep down bread, rice, and black coffee. She realizes that she craves the mung-protein flour. Her cat is also a picky eater. She got the cat after leaving her mother’s home, but he has always tried to escape wherever they are. Now, the narrator tries to get him to eat, but he seems happiest sleeping in an unused part of the storeroom.

On Sunday, a woman arrives in a red convertible. She is the narrator’s employer’s daughter, Aida. Aida explains that her father has no taste and is busy, so the narrator should serve Aida, who will evaluate the food. Aida eats slovenly but with enjoyment. At the end of the meal, she complains about her father’s menu choices. Aida tests the narrator’s knowledge, confirming that the narrator lied on her job application about going to famed cooking school Le Cordon Bleu.

However, Aida doesn’t immediately bring up this lie. Instead, she explains that her father made his fortune as a “prophet of doom” (25): predicting disasters and investing in the right things before they hit. He bought the mountain property 10 years before the smog. The other residents of the mountain are his investors. When the narrator asks about Aida’s mother, Aida becomes angry—her mother has left the mountain. Then, Aida reveals that she knows the narrator lied and that she was hired based on her looks. After the narrator apologizes, the two women discuss the menu for an upcoming dinner party. Aida’s anger subsides.

The cat comes in as Aida leaves, and the narrator tries to get the cat to eat paté. She then calls her employer and asks if she is being fired because she lied on her resume. Her employer admits that he is paying her less money because of the lies. She offers to take classes, but he rejects this idea since Aida approves of her cooking. He also mentions her note about being willing to take on any reasonable task with dignity as a reason for keeping her on. She learns that his wife’s name is Eun-Young.

The narrator dreams about her employer’s harsh words regarding her inexperience. Aida and the narrator experiment with recipes. When the narrator balks at wasting expensive ingredients, Aida tells her that her employer has bought the entire breed of Bresse chickens. Aida and her father like traditional French dishes. The narrator recalls the pastry chef she slept with; to her, cooking taxes the body like sex. She has no appetite and tailors her cooking to Aida’s tastes.

The narrator burns her left arm in the same place that she burnt her right arm when she was 22. When she was younger, she was ruled by her “tongue” and cooked rich foods for herself (32). She also learned from as many chefs as she could, traveled around Europe, and tasted potentially deadly foods like fugu. A week after her mother died, the narrator accidentally left pin bones in sardines, and a customer choked on one but lived. The narrator was fired and lost her nerve. Shortly thereafter, the smog spread. The narrator abused drugs, considered suicide, and lost friends.

In the present, Aida arrives with burritos from Milan. When the narrator takes a bite, her appetite starts to come back but quickly dissipates. She claims to have already eaten. Aida talks about the party preparations, catering to the needs of various guests who her father is hoping to persuade into investing. The narrator is to remain out of sight, underground, during the event. Her employer wants the dessert to include dates, so the narrator makes a dish with them.

As Aida prepares to serve, the narrator goes to the storeroom. There, she sits with her cat, watching the security cameras and reading a book on Bengali immigrants. She remembers staging a meal in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris five years earlier. She was 24, and it was before the smog. She served whole songbirds. The narrator’s reverie is interrupted by crashing sounds from upstairs. Aida reports that the dinner was a success; diners from Iran and South Africa have agreed to donate more funds. A Korean show is on the TV, and Aida admits that she only knows insults in Korean, such as “Jugeullae” (38), which means “Do you want to die?”

The narrator learns that the dates she cooked were from the last date tree owned by the family of the mountain’s meteorologist. After she tries futilely to vomit up her dessert to get the seeds to replant the tree, the narrator’s employer tells the meteorologist that there are more dates in the research facility. The meteorologist is an expert on cloud seeding; the employer lured him away from a successful university career.

Later that night, Aida shows the narrator the room behind the bathroom mirror. Aida takes out a telescope, and they look up through the glass eye at Jupiter and Saturn. Then, Aida turns out all the bathroom lights, and they lie down on the glass. In the darkness, the narrator feels like she is floating in an embryo. Aida talks about running away from home when she was a little girl. She was gone for six hours, but it seemed like less than an hour. She couldn’t account for her missing time. The narrator falls asleep and wakes up when she hears Aida’s dogs crying outside.

In the early morning, the narrator throws the leftovers into the dump, thinking about starving children and food waste. She can still see a planet in the sky. She’s been on the mountain for three weeks. She sees the dazzling light of spring as the sun rises.