Recent Reading: The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter

Stories that deal with our evolving and often dysfunctional relationship with food have been a running thread through science fiction for decades. Isaac Asimov's "Good Taste" imagines a society in which eating natural-grown food is considered grotesque and disgusting. Adam Roberts's By Light Alone invents a technology that allows people to photosynthesize nutrients from the sun, which immediately turns the consumption of food into an elite status marker. In contrast, the elites in Sarah Tolmie's NoFood have undergone a surgical procedure to remove their GI tracts, which makes visiting a restaurant an experience not unlike immersive theater. More recently, Meg Elison's Hugo-nominated story "The Pill" imagines a society which invents a no-fuss cure for fatness, and then insists that everyone should take it.

With her second novel, Chana Porter adds to this tradition, but complicates it with a core SFnal setting. The Thick and the Lean is set on an alien planet, colonized centuries ago by humans, whose native inhabitants have been steadily pushed off their lands and towards regions endangered by rising sea levels. The ideological framework justifying this dispossession is bound up in the religion of the human colonists, and in a foundational myth about a pious human queen who deposed the godless native ruler and his evil concubine. And that religion centers around the renunciation of food.

Our first point of view character is Beatrice, a teenager growing up in a strict religious enclave. As we learn through Beatrice's eyes, the planet's church is permissive and even encouraging when it comes to sex—nuns are essentially temple prostitutes, and a key part of religious instruction is teaching young people to pleasure themselves and each other—while harshly taboo-izing eating. Food in the novel's world is uniformly bland and flavorless, overeating and fatness carry severe social consequences, and eating in public, or in company other than one's immediate family, is considered prurient and immoral. (In other words, everyone expects you to have sex before marriage, but sharing a sandwich with your boyfriend makes you a harlot or a pervert.) While starving oneself isn't officially sanctioned, neither is it discouraged—as a young girl Beatrice is taught to admire the Flesh Martyrs who choose to renounce food entirely as a means of growing closer to god, and eventually we learn that there is a fashion among the world's rich families of designating a younger child for this fate.

For Beatrice, who longs for more, and more flavorful, food, the effect is—quite deliberately, one assumes—like being a queer teen who has been raised evangelical. Desperate to understand her urges, she discovers a head shop where she can purchase recipes and illicit ingredients like salt and spices, learns how to forage for fruits and vegetables, and in general sets herself against her community's core values while still insisting that she is abiding by the letter of the law. Eventually, things come to a head—in an example of how effectively Porter has twisted the familiar form of this story, the trigger for the crisis is Beatrice falling in love with another girl, who tries, with Beatrice's family's support, to "cure" her of her love of cooking. Beatrice escapes for a haven among like-minded individuals, in one of the nearby city's few, and only semi-legal, restaurants.

Despite the associations raised by this premise, The Thick and the Lean isn't The Handmaid's Tale, and its society isn't Gilead. As in our world, people in the novel regard and observe religious strictures in a variety of different ways. When she's still trying to be a member of the church in good standing, Beatrice complains that people in the city mouth platitudes about following its teachings, but gorge themselves on food in secret. In the native settlements, restaurants and communal eating remain commonplace, and human visitors often venture there to burnish their free-thinking, bohemian credentials. But as the novel quickly makes clear, it doesn't take repressive state control for prevailing norms to affect behavior. All you really need is to limit people's idea of what's possible. The restaurant Beatrice works at isn't breaking any laws, but its neighbors routinely leave threatening messages decrying its immorality. And Beatrice's mentor there complains that some customers visit more for the transgressive thrill rather than any real appreciation of fine dining, and often end up having orgies on top of the food rather than eating it.

Our second protagonist is Reiko, a young native woman who receives a scholarship to a prestigious university, only to discover that this is a financial trap—not only will she be expected to work an unpaid internship after graduating, but her scholarship is withdrawn halfway through her degree, after which she's strongly encouraged to take out loans to pay for the rest of her studies. Outraged, Reiko uses a technology she's been developing to steal money from a wealthy friend, and embarks on a career as a grifter, eventually landing in the upper echelons of human society. There she witnesses the cold-blooded way in which corporate elites carve up the planet among themselves, moving native communities away from their lands and into company towns, and locking as many people as possible into exploitative, impossible to escape contracts. 

It's a stark but effective contrast—a society that prides itself on abstemiousness while celebrating rapacious capitalist consumption. Nor is this the only place where the novel draws connections between capitalistic excess and moralistic religious strictures. Beatrice's religious enclave, we learn, is a socialist paradise in a society where most citizens are mired in debt and yoked to their employers. Members are guaranteed housing, education, and other amenities, so long as they sign over their wealth and property to the community, and agree to abide by its religious rules. If they fall short of the latter, they can be thrown out with nothing—a threat that inevitably promotes religious adherence. And, as we learn later in the novel, the chief export of this community is marketing and PR for the corporations, shilling both the anti-food religion, and the new policies that are bringing more and more people under the corporations' control.

As effectively as she constructs her world, however, Porter struggles when it comes to the novel's plot. Beatrice's story loses most of its urgency after she arrives in the city. Having found a supportive community where she can hone her cooking skills, she seems to feel no need to engage with wider society and its still-powerful taboos, which leaves her storyline feeling like your average episode of The Bear. By the novel's final third, her role has receded almost to nothingness, which undercuts the uniqueness of Porter's premise. With Reiko—who is now the kept girlfriend of a high-ranking corporate honcho—as our sole point of view character, The Thick and the Lean becomes indistinguishable from any other science fiction story about the excesses of capitalism. And though the novel's title, and some of its early chapters, suggest that it will have something to say about fatphobia, this is a thread that is very quickly dropped.

A third storyline presents readers with excerpts from The Kitchen Girl, a suppressed work of literature which both Beatrice and Reiko discover and come to cherish. It's the memoir of a young native woman around the time of humanity's first arrival on the planet. It eventually becomes clear that this is an alternate version of the founding myth we've encountered several times throughout the novel, one that paints humans in a less straightforwardly saintly light, while acknowledging the social complexity of the society their arrival disrupted. But while Porter and her two heroines treat this text as something earth-shattering—perhaps with the potential to upend their exploitative, extractive social order—this is something that readers will be less likely to accept. The story told in The Kitchen Girl is too mild, and the financial and social interests that undergird the novel's present-day society are too entrenched, to convincingly argue that the revelations offered by the text will have any meaningful effect.

Ultimately, The Thick and the Lean feels like a novel whose parts are greater than its whole. It has an intriguing world, compelling characters, and an original premise, but it doesn't quite manage to weave them all together into a story that feels coherent and of a piece. There's quite a bit here that's worth reading for, but when I turned the final page, it was with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. All these excellent ingredients hadn't quite managed to come together into a satisfying meal.