Bitter Harvest: An Eco-critical Study of Food and Environmental Devastation in The Land of Milk and Honey

Abstract

This research expounds the representation of food and environmental factors in contemporary fiction like Zhang’s The Land of Milk and Honey. It utilizes Morton’s ‘Cultures of Taste/ Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism’ as a theoretical basis. The study explores protagonist’s relationship with food and how food is centralized to depict degeneration of ecosystem and scarcity of resources. How the ethics of handling the environmental resources criticize the routinized real world capitalist practices and the representation of nature as an all-encompassing metaphor throughout the text. This study contributes to the present body of knowledge by engaging the ecological consciousness in the literary corpora and using an innovative framework for the research. The study elucidates how man as an extension of nature himself destroys it and as a result faces the music himself. Therefore, this study is a thought liberating endeavour to highlight the role of literature in environmental safeguard and preservation.