“Kitchens That Were Mine”:

Food Production in The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood is well known to scholars from the relatively new field of literary food studies, which applies a critical lens to food’s role in literature. While scholars have discussed the politics of eating and the role of women in Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, and her later novel, The Handmaid’s Tale– and especially the ways in which patriarchal structures confer upon women the status of consumable objects–the politics of food production (how food is grown and prepared and by whom) has not been treated at length. This means overlooking much of the work food accomplishes in Atwood’s works. Through examining food production in The Handmaid’s Tale, this paper explores the way that concepts of sexual reproduction and food production parallel each other, and the way that both forms of state-regulated production exploit existing racial and gender hierarchies in an attempt to prevent the destabilizing potential of desire. In this paper, I track the novel’s references to food production across three sections: The Earth, The Kitchen, and The Table. In these sections, I interrogate how agricultural labor, domestic labor, and the regulation of consumption operate within the structure of Gilead. By examining how the state succeeds (and fails) to regulate production, I advocate for an approach to literary food studies that questions not what lies on the table, but how it got there.