, there is a pill that rids you of your desire to eat. It was developed by a cult devoted to “flesh martyrdom,” the idea that hunger is merely an animal instinct to be overcome, and that by surpassing it one becomes closer to God. Members of the cult, Seagate, are just the most extreme practitioners of this ideology in Porter’s universe: Across the planet, eating, and bodies that look like they have been eating, are taboo.
But I just read some of the New Testament, and one of the first things that Jesus’s disciples ask Jesus is “What should we eat?” This idea of knowing that our bodies are part of our connection to God, and then wanting to support that, I think it’s a very, very old question. I knew that I wanted to find a way to explore the upper part of society. And I just thought about this character who was kind of a grifter, and it made sense to me that she would be outside the ruling class as a member of an oppressed Indigenous population.
I just thought that that would be so fun. I’m someone who likes to read recipes from the Renaissance and stuff, so that was really fun for me to research. One of the menus that’s in there is from a Chinese banquet from a thousand years ago. The larger themes of the book — agriculture practices and who controls the land — these things are very much driven by money and power. The company that is being looked at in the book is an amalgam of Monsanto and Amazon. The plot point about how farmers are being targeted for reusing seeds rather than purchasing them annually — that’s something that.