Palate Pleasers

For a novel that’s set after the collapse of Earth’s nation-states, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Interstellar MegaChef (the first in a proposed duology called ‘Flavour Hacker’) is a remarkably upbeat book. The narrative is centred around Saras and Ko two rivals-turned-allies in the titular cooking contest; think MasterChef if it were compulsorily beamed to every sentient being in the universe. Saras (whose name is actually Saraswati) is a plucky young woman from the ‘old’ Earth, somebody who remembers how things used to be. She sees the intergalactic action around her as a shiny illusion she doesn’t always understand. Ko, on the other hand, builds cutting-edge simulations for a not-always-impressed customer base — she isn’t in thrall to illusions, she makes them.

I enjoyed the way the author engages with the novel’s central concern: what governs our tastes, the interlocking set of cultural-material conditions that inform our palates. Saras represents the ‘old’ ideas about food in more ways than one. She is an instinctive, talented cook, the kind whose cookbooks would leave broad, widely applicable instructions rather than micro-portions of ingredients measured with the kitchen equivalents of verniers callipers. Ko represents the technological or sci-fi edge introduced to our ideas of taste. The two of them want to combine their powers — the old-school culinary chops and the cutting-edge sensory packages created by technology — to create a new, hybrid way of experiencing food.

All of this means that we are treated to some fizzy, energetic passages about space-age food and its assorted eccentricities. Note the cheekiness of the “indescribable terrine” below, as also the pointed reference to “vat-grown fowl” (in the real world, “shmeat” or meat grown from tissue culture can indeed be described this way).

“I tried to help out in the kitchen to stay in touch with my knife skills, but I was still being bio-scanned, and the chefs insisted I wouldn’t know how to cook what they were serving. And they were right. A sodden mass of gloopy, berry-flavoured spheres and some kind of vat-grown fowl turned up on my plate on good days. On bad days, it was an indescribable terrine or a pâté, marbled in Primian fashion.”

Lakshminarayan strikes the right balance between the nuts and bolts of her fictional world — what is often referred to as ‘world-building’ these days — and developing the inner lives of her twin protagonists. The ‘buddy movie’ energy leaps out of the Saras-Ko scenes, especially when the two disagree on something fundamental. However, when the opportunity to dish out Cool New Things presents itself, Interstellar MegaChef rarely misses out. Like this nifty little passage about ‘flowmetal’, which also ends with a well-executed allusion about contemporary governmental lethargy.

“Flowmetal is a bit of a misnomer; everyone knows this. It’s a bio-tech compound that integrates with its natural surroundings, using bio-circuitry and quantum computing to take intelligent, sustainable, eco-conscious decisions, while leaving the lightest footprint possible on the world. Traditionalist lobbies on Earth had ensured it was never produced or adopted there, despite my failing home planet’s desperate need for sustainable city solutions.”

That passage also shows how the book uses contemporary frustrations — like the one expressed by that last line — as more of a narrative scalpel than a hammer. There is very little preachiness here, just playful, pointed jokes and wry paragraph-enders that, I would argue, are far more effective at communicating the book’s politics. An academic called Dr Ally Louks became the centre of a storm-in-a-teacup on Twitter recently, when she shared her recently defended doctoral dissertation on ‘Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose’. Basically, the idea that our sense of smell — and how we apply it — is political and cultural. And as we know, there is no taste without smell, so the argument can indeed be extended to the culinary realms. I think Dr Louks would find Interstellar MegaChef and its many rapid-fire riffs interrogating taste, very interesting indeed.

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