Land of Milk and Honey is out now. | Riverhead Books/Clayton Cubitt C Pam Zhang’s new dystopian novel “Land of Milk and Honey” imagines how fine dining might persist after food systems collapse In C Pam Zhang’s new novel, Land of Milk and Honey , out September 26 from Riverhead, a mysterious smog starts in Iowa and settles globally, ending the world as we know it. Fruit, vegetables, and crops like wheat and rice die from the lack of sun. Fish, livestock, and wildlife starve, and all of this pushes humans into famine. The little luxuries of pesto, meat, and mangoes are replaced with bags of gray, government-issued mung-protein flour. In this dismal new world, Zhang’s unnamed narrator, a chef, struggles to see the reason for her survival. “ Chef had lost its meaning, like lucky , like fresh , like soon ,” Zhang writes. Longing for olives and the ephemeral taste of green, she lies on her resume to gain entry to a secretive facility in the mountains of Italy. In isolation, its ...