Eating Well in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013): Biotech Farmed Animals and a Hopeful Model of Multispecies Futurity

This chapter dives into a widely read literary thought experiment that proves essential for the study of “livestock” in literature: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003; 2009; 2013) develops a narrative proposal for a hopeful model of multispecies living on a speculative future version of planet Earth. Concurrently with this thematic suggestion, Atwood experiments with the narrative procedures appropriate to imagining a design of this sort—particularly through presenting unconventional narrators, focalizers, and postanimal narrative agents. In contrast to a comprehensive, existing body of scholarship on Atwood’s work, I unravel the trilogy from its end, starting from the concluding, postanimalist “dining table” that unites biotech-pigs, posthuman figures, and two groups of humans in a multispecies collective. By asking the readers to not only reflect critically on what or whom to eat or not, but also with whom to negotiate the terms of living and eating together, Atwood’s narrative explores and expands upon Jacque Derrida’s theory on eating well (1991) and Donna Haraway’s companion species conception (2003, 2007). Even though the suggested model of multispecies futurity is far from perfect, it charts a course for learning with and from one another that renders the trilogy a valuable resource in deindustrializing the imagination.