NoFood

by Sarah Tolmie

In a world where the most fashionable surgery is the Total Gastric Bypass, food and dining don't necessarily go together. Cooks like Hardwicke Arar and Fats Bester are vestigial organs to the TGB elite, yet food is fetishized as an elusive commodity.

Genres: Science Fiction

83 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Sarah Tolmie is the author of the 120-sonnet sequence Trio, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (release date 1 April 2015) and the chapbook Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems (Baseline Press, 2014). She has also published a novel, The Stone Boatmen, and a short fiction collection, NoFood, with Aqueduct Press (both 2014).

She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went out and got this slender book after reading a positive review at Strange Horizons. It's a gorgeous set of stories in a world where the hippest surgery is the Total Gastric Bypass. You'd think such a surgery would have addressed world hunger, resource consumption, waste management. But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. The world is run by corporate interests, and it burns while the TGB elite play their gastronomic fiddles.

I was not surprised that NoFood was conceived by a medievalist, considering its fast/feast theme; it also feels very relevant to us with our fetishization of cooking shows, gleaming kitchens, exclusive ingredients. It all comes off as damning without feeling heavy-handed. Tolmie is especially good at juxtaposition in language, and it makes for an elegant starkness worthy of the title.

Have I said you need to read this, yet? Read this.