Whenever Ghosh reveals the contents of Kanai’s tiffin carrier such as “rice, dal, fish curry, chorchori, begun bhaja” (Ghosh 164), it becomes very difficult to read on without the colors of Bengali cuisine plaguing my mind. However, when Atwood even mentions pigoon pie or ChickieNobs, my thoughts of lunch immediately disappear. In essence, food plays a critical role in the communities central to The Hungry Tide and Oryx and Crake by displaying their interactions with the nature they inhabit. The food Kanai eats is Bengali (Ghosh 119), the feast at Morichjhãpi featured many varieties of fish sourced from the Sundarbans itself (Ghosh 159), and Fokir eats crabs that he catches himself (Ghosh 80). On the other hand, the climate crisis that makes “real” meat a rarity in Jimmy’s world encourages the creation of lab-grown meats such as ChickieNobs. It may be quite obvious that the food these characters eat is a consequence of the environment in which they live, so instead this post will assess how Snowman and Piya’s diet signifies their status as outsiders in The Hungry Tide and Oryx and Crake. 

    Between him and the Crakers, Snowman is the only one who eats meat, specifically fish, which the Crakers hunt and cook for him because “Crake decreed it” (Atwood 101). The Crakers themselves are vegetarian because Crake wanted to eliminate “human predation” and instead, they like to watch Snowman eat the fish in a “spectacle of depravity” (Atwood 101). This meal is a very clear distinction between the Crakers, who live on berries and roots and represent the post-Anthropocene world, and the sole human Snowman, who is easy to discern by his propensity for fish, Svetlana canned sausages, and his “beastly appetites” (Atwood 101) and who represents the indulgence of humanity pre-Crakers. Although Jimmy feels an aversion to ChickieNobs when he first witnesses their lab source, eventually, he develops a taste for them that causes his girlfriend’s roommates to develop an aversion to him. Instead, they eat spaghetti and sneer at microwaves (Atwood 242). In this circle of people, Jimmy is an outsider not only due to his ChickieNobs diet, but also due to his upbringing in the Compounds, which they look down on and where ChickieNobs was developed. And even in the very last scene when Snowman finally encounters a group of humans, despite hunger creeping up on him because he “hasn’t smelled roast meat in so long” (Atwood 373), his thoughts about the roasting rakunk were of pity, maybe because he had a pet rakunk in his youth. But, even in his youth, Jimmy detested the idea of pigoon pie because he “thought of pigoons as creatures much like himself” (Atwood 24) and was even concerned about what the chicken-part plant was thinking or rather how it was thinking when he first saw them in the lab at the Watson Crick Institute (Atwood 202). Jimmy/Snowman has always demonstrated sympathy for the animal hybrids developed by the Compounds and that turned him into an outcast within that community and when his world changes such that he survives only accompanied by fruit-eating humanoids, eating natural sea-grown fish that is hunted rather than created also brands him as an obvious nonmember of the Crakers. 

    Like Jimmy/Snowman, Piya’s diet also differs vastly from the others around her mainly because her stomach simply cannot handle local food. When Fokir offers her rice and crab, she “[fends] him off with her protein bars and her bottled water” (Ghosh 81) and interestingly, she worries for both Fokir and Tutul and their low supplies despite their food source being the river, through which they were rowing. She offers them her nutrition bars, in turn, of which she had great abundance and which Fokir declined and Tutul loved (Ghosh 115). And when she finally makes it to Lusibari and receives her very own tiffin, all she could eat was the few spoonfuls of rice Kanai puts on her plate (Ghosh 164). And Moyna is accommodating to Piya’s diet that she brings her “plain mashed potatoes and two bananas” (Ghosh 187), an acknowledgment that Piya does not eat the same food that they do, an acknowledgement that she is not local. But ironically, alongside her nutrition bars, Piya consumes Ovaltine, a taste of India she developed from her parents. Despite having only nutrition bars and Ovaltine, Piya doesn’t really have to worry about food because she has learned to live on these two provisions because of the life she leads as a scientist. Her food is bought and processed, an indicator of her city/international background where these foods are more likely to be cheap, in contrast to the natural, homemade foods in the tiffins likely sourced directly from the rivers (Kusum does note that in the feast at Morichjhãpi, everything but the rice was caught locally). Unlike the other characters, specifically Kanai, Nilima, and the villagers fending off the tiger, Piya supports the preservation of wildlife and is willing to die “if [she] thought it necessary” (Ghosh 249). This is not to say that Piya doesn’t eat local food because she cares for tigers, but rather that this avoidance of the local food indicates that she had an upbringing away from the Sundarbans where she was able to develop a perspective that inclines her towards wildlife preservation as opposed to developing a view like the tide country’s shared fear of tigers. 

    Jimmy/Snowman’s empathy for the hybrids is not nearly so strong as to warrant the stance Piya takes on wildlife preservation–he does not want to preserve the pigoons, he later on fears them. Afterall, he still eats fish and lets the Crakers do the killing for him. But, his acknowledgement of these animals as creatures like himself sets him apart from those who thoughtlessly experiment on and cage them in labs. One can also question whether Piya would feel the same about tigers if was right in front of one, but it is significant that she gives voice to a species whose arguments for trying to survive are otherwise drowned out by the coherent, more understandable voices of humans also trying to survive. Both practice exactly what LeMenager suggests relationships between humans and nature should be in the Anthropocene where relationships to other life forms are “enacted through local conservation and appreciation” and that both humans and nonhumans are “deserving of empathy and care” (LeMenager 235). Jimmy is not the one who frees all the animal hybrids nor does Piya argue for the tigers in front of a wildlife preservation commission, but this nonconformity to the idea that animals are just animals, but also a life form is already a step towards protecting life as a collective and Haraway’s idea of making kin. 

   India is a nation characterized by deep divisions stemming from its history and culture like its years of colonial rule under Great Britain (a British-Indian divide), to Partition in 1947 (Indian-Pakistani, Hindu-Muslim identities), its many languages and cultures (for example, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi amongst others), and its rigid social stratification through the caste system. There are borders all around its populations, both man-made and natural, which Ghosh identifies and dismantles by introducing it to the liminality of the Sundarbans. 

   Generational divide is evident in both Piya and Kanai’s understanding of themselves. For Piya, it exists in the form of her parents who only ever spoke of “history, family, duty, language” rather than anything that would interest her about her Indian “heritage” (79). And yet, when she sees on Fokir’s boat, the same towel her father tied to his wardrobe, there is a realization that an object as mundane as a towel could hold ties to a country thousands of miles away and she expresses interest by wondering what this towel is called (73). For Kanai, generational divide appears through his perspective of Nilima who represents “an earlier era when people of means and education were less narrow, less selfish” (18) and who speaks English in such a manner that Kanai views it as “listening to a lost language…of a vanished colonial upper middle class” (109). It’s during these thoughts of Nilima, that Kanai doesn’t sound like an arrogant Casanova who speaks six other languages, but someone who can express astonishment at someone wiser, more experienced than himself. 

   Another division identified by Ghosh is the linguistic division between different people and the urge to overcome that divide, which is most evident in the relationship between Piya and Fokir. Piya visits India with the same attitude with which she approaches her work in other countries: by winging it (10). We get an insight on her thought process behind how she would communicate what she needed to Fokir such as rubbing her belly to gesture that the food he was going to give her is unlikely to sit well in her stomach (81) or when she draws stick figures on paper to explain to him that GPS identifies their location. But, she finds that despite being unable to share words with each other (except, perhaps, Lusibari), both were amazed at the “seamless intertwining of their pleasures and purposes” (118). And, although they couldn’t share images in each other’s heads like dolphins do with echolocation, to have worked together to view these dolphins up close despite being unable to communicate with words is a testament to her idea that “to exist was to communicate” (132). 

   Perhaps the most evident borders in The Hungry Tide are the ones within the environment whether it is between the ocean, the Sundarbans, and the hinterlands or between the nature of the Sundarbans and the humans living there. Outside of the Sundarbans, Piya shares the migratory practices of the coastal Orcaella’s that occurred throughout the year, but in the Sundarbans these practices occurred in a day (104). Within the Sundarbans, but not in other coastal Orcaellas or the river dolphins, these dolphins were acting weird and challenging previously established scientific research about them. And Piya attributes this to the uneven mixing of fresh (rivers and hinterlands) and salt water (ocean) that enables the proliferation of life (104) and from which there are no “divisions”, just life. And we see it again when Nilima finds a snake in her bedroom.  And again when both fishermen and dolphins benefit from a catch of fish which Piya describes as a symbiosis of human and animal (140). And the environmental borders within the Sundarbands are already symbolically overcome in the very first chapter and in the very first of Nirmal’s essays: “This is a land half submerged at high tide: it is only in the falling that the water gives birth to the forest.” (7) This amalgamation of human and nature in the Sundarbans is especially important when environmentalist efforts displace local populations for wildlife conservation projects. This is one of the instances when division and borders are created within the Sundarbans (another in the myth of Bon Bibi and Dokkhin Rai). At what point do humans become apart from nature rather than a part of it? 

   There are many other examples of amalgamation within the Sundarbans that are usually divided outside of it. For example, a sort of religious syncretism is common. The population of Lusibari holds a puja of Ser Daniel Hamilton and Nirmal briefly mentions that there are shrines of Bon Bibi across the islands. We see Fokir praying to one of these shrines before seeing the dolphins, which puzzles Piya. From a quick research, Bon Bibi seems to be a deity worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims specifically in the Sundarbans. The residents of the Sundarbans also identify themselves as people of the tide country and not with India or Bangladesh. Interestingly, another division that occurs within the Sundarbans other than the ones previously mentioned are the breaking down of the marriages of Fokir and Moyna (Moyna does not want Tutul to follow down his father’s line of work because it will soon become unprofitable) and of Nirmal and Nilima (Nirmal did not support Nilima’s social service). But, it also seems that these divisions drove them to other romances (Fokir to Piya and Moyna to Kanai). But, ultimately, Ghosh sets up the Sundarbans as a place where borders are overcome and a place of transformation. 

Religion started in order to help ourselves understand the natural world around us, allowing ourselves a certain degree of control over what we cannot understand. Why did the rivers flood and swallow the crops? The people must have angered their pantheon of gods. But, when science arose to contest the explanations previously established by old belief systems, one sees themselves as knowing more and knowing better such as Crake who maintained that “God is just a cluster of neurons” (157). For at least chapters one through eight of Oryx and Crake, there is a perception of control held by the humans and most evident within the scientists in the Compounds. Jimmy’s dad simplifies human life as merely “cells and tissue” (57) showing his desensitization to the vulnerability of life and illustrating the illusion of control he has over biology solely because he can so easily alter it. On the other hand, his wife deems it immoral and sacrilegious (57) and the very reason she sees it this way is demonstrated by the effects that these experiments and research have on the customers of NooSkins and OrganInc. When experiments failed, volunteers reappeared in unnatural colors and “peeling in ragged strips” (55) because they hoped to have a degree of control over their aging, a natural condition of living. As extreme is the work of Jimmy’s dad, perhaps more radical is the work of Crake who accepts that things are the way they are in order to fulfill their biological purpose (167), but he doesn’t seek to “fix” the effects of aging, he intends to harness only the strengths of living things such as purring or smelling like citrus to fend off predators and insects in order to create a new humanoid species altogether, the Crakers. He’s a mad scientist of sorts or maybe even god-like in creating the Crakers, but all developed with a dangerous eugenics-like intent using advanced genetic engineering. Crake, himself, didn’t believe in God, but to Snowman’s content the Crakers revered Oryx and Crake (157), even when they did not know, themselves, that all the stories that Snowman shared were just that, stories. And this shows, too, the control that Snowman perceives himself to have over the Crakers. He refers to himself as Crake’s prophet (104), but also recognizes that the Craker’s only believe him because they already developed trust in him (96), but what happens when the Crakers exhaust their curiosity. Will Snowman lose his control too? Will they stop providing him with fish? Will it be reminiscent of the creation of the bobkittens meant to keep the green rabbit population under control, but instead began to snatch babies out of their prams?

A scene more reminiscent of the ancient sacrificial rituals existing to appease the gods is the day Oryx is sold to the man. This transaction is described as being needed “more and more often, because the weather had been so strange and could no longer be predicted” (118). It is similar to making ritual sacrifices in exchange for a good harvest. But, in Oryx’s village it is meant to keep the rest of the family alive in exchange for the life of a child and their childhoods. The man recognized he had control over the village because they were poor and suffering and even attempted to sound generous by “taking the boy off [Oryx’s mother’s] hands” (121). Some mothers shun their choices, feeling as if “this act, done freely by themselves… had not been performed willingly” (121) which further demonstrates the level of influence the man has over the village, that he is the only hope left for their families. Deep in his power, he is killed and dumped in a river, a loss of control. Similarly, in Snowman’s present, he is the only human left, the mad scientists are gone and left behind is a city of which humans have lost control.

In the Anthropocene, mankind exerts a force equal to that of natural phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, or even an asteroid that wipes out life on Earth. A force so large that it becomes difficult to translate it into novelistic practice because the temporal and spatial scales which it inhabits are simply too vast for the few hundred pages of a novel. In critiques of the shortfalls of the novelistic representation of the climate crisis by Astrid Bracke, novels lean on anthropocentric perspectives to tell stories whereas an effective climate fiction novel requires “a decentring and defavouring of the human perspective” (Bracke 89). However, this may also be the novel’s strongest outlet in translating the Anthropocene by transporting readers to a familiar, but dying world. In the flood fiction novels that Bracke discusses, the plot does not only take place in the future, but possibly our future. This depiction of the future consequences of the present climate crisis makes an impression on readers who must recognize that they are making history as much as they are a product of it. In Stephanie LeMenager’s words, we are “matter overwritten and writing history” (LeMenager 229) who must “[attend] vigilantly to the world that enters and impinges on us” (LeMenager 224). 

Both Bracke and LeMenager also agree that an effective cli-fi novel depicts climate change as a dangerous phenomena through normalization. Counterintuitively, normalization of climate events such as floods makes it clear that the impact of climate change is so extreme that it is “no longer exceptional but part of everyday life” (Bracke 91). Rather, it is everyday life. In discussing the Parable novels by Octavia Butler, LeMenager defines the “everyday” in Anthropocene novels as “reconciling the crises of dystopian story structures with the habits of living on” (LeMenager 224). 

Additionally, the novels Bracke discusses are set in constricted spaces juxtaposed against the globality of the climate crisis which is what makes flood fictions effective in representing the Anthropocene. A single character, a human, is, in fact, not just a single human, but a component of mankind, a global biological entity that “[exercises] brute force on the planet” (LeMenager 230). And such a force constricts our livable spaces through natural disasters brought on by ourselves. Bracke also reasons that these constricted spaces are a safe haven to a novel’s characters and the external world contains humans that are a danger to these safe havens (Bracke 96). The outside world has descended into a State of Nature of sorts and pushes humanity back to a state of having to fight to survive. Similarly, LeMenager argues for love that “inheres in attachment to other life… that can be enacted through local conservation and appreciation” (LeMenager 235). Both illustrate an incentive to survive for characters hoping for the continuity of humankind and in turn, for readers, who could hope and work for a different future for humanity.