Interplay of Food with Gene-Modification: A Post Humanistic Study of Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake presents an unsettling and bioengineered vision of the world. The man-made hemorrhagic virus made every human extinct except for the Snowman. With the inception of the novel there was one constant chatter about the availability of food in the compounds and the artificial production of meat. The dystopian vision of the novel reveals a grim and impoverished food reality of the third world countries. In an essay by Atwood, Writing Oryx and Crake she reveals, ‘The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law.’ (Atwood 285) In the world of modifying beings the modification of food is just a drop in the ocean of hybridyzation. Scientists playing the role of Gods according to Jayne Glover have “been blamed for the objectification of nature” (Glover 52). Where theorists like Chung-Hao Ku sees this alteration of food as breaching the “fine line between humanity and monstrosity”(Ku 109) there are others who see the visible dichotomy between science and reason. The posthumanistic vision tries to keep balance between the human and the natural world