This document summarizes a paper presented at a sustainability conference that analyzes the ethics of food in Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake. The paper argues that Atwood uses transgenic creatures like the headless ChickieNob chicken and human-organ bearing pigoon to challenge ideas of human exceptionalism and critique modern industrial agriculture. It shows how the main character Snowman comes to embody human vulnerability and consumption in the novel's post-apocalyptic world without technological infrastructure or survival skills. The paper examines how Atwood's fictional world comments on real issues of sustainability and ethics in contemporary food production.

1. A Consuming Read: the Ethics of Food in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Marcy Galbreath
Presented at: Florida Gulf Coast University’s 2nd International Humanities and Sustainability
Conference, Fort Myers, Florida, October 7-9, 2010
Introduction
Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake portrays a dystopic near-future world altered by
climate change and devastated by a man-made hemorrhagic virus, a world that borrows from
contemporary transgenic research and agricultural practices to extrapolate a logical and
disturbing set of probabilities. Oryx and Crake’s complex timeline is narrated from the point of
view of the sole human survivor, Jimmy (who calls himself Snowman), whose memories of the
pre-epidemic past expose the technological and scientific hubris leading to humanity’s
extinction. Atwood’s text reminds us that control of nature—the paradigm residing at the center
of human progress—is most often enacted on an expectation of immediate advantage, and that
short-term planning only takes into consideration available resources. The crumbling natural
infrastructure accompanying climate change in Oryx and Crake only triggers a search for new
food sources, not an amendment of destructive activities. This aspect of human behavior
highlights the utilitarian value we attach to nature: the world, viewed as humanity’s inheritance,
exists solely for human consumption.
Oryx and Crake’s pre-plague future features a society divided by wealth and scientific
knowledge. The wealthy intellectual elites live in gated corporate Compounds, while the
mathematically-deficit “dull-normal[s]” inhabit urban wildernesses called Pleeblands (Atwood,
Oryx and Crake 50, 25). The scientists of Oryx and Crake, by deliberately manipulating
organisms and natural systems, follow a tradition that views humans as separate from nature. As
Patrick Murphy observes, the western paradigm of human exceptionalism sustains a belief in
human independence from natural processes, including evolution and extinction. (144). Human
exceptionalism provides justification for humanity’s consumptive habits through self-separation
from, and dominance over, other life forms.
Oryx and Crake’s products of human invention and intervention, the transgenic hybrids, have
elicited various critical interpretations. Danette Dimarco points to Atwood’s genetically modified
creatures as examples of natural instrumentality in the hands of scientists such as Jimmy’s friend
Crake (181-82), and Jayne Glover notes that scientists playing God have “been blamed for the
objectification of nature” (52). J. Brooks Bouson sees the hybrids as a mockery of the
contemporary debate over the ethics and ownership of genetic potential (140), while Grayson
Cooke perceives “rhetorical glee” in the inventive names Atwood assigns in the novel’s “fully
alterable world” (109). The novel’s bioengineered pigoons trouble what Chung-Hao Ku
describes as “the fine line between humanity and monstrosity” (109), and Kiyomi Sasame
recognizes the genetically altered organisms as emblematic of the “abundance of artificial foods

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and the concomitant shortage of real/natural foods,” a contrast reflecting the dichotomy between
“science and reason” and “language and art” (102, 106).
I propose that, in employing the topic of transgenics, Atwood’s text not only contrasts artificial
and natural foods, but also uses the idea of food to challenge the idea of natural hierarchical
order and human exceptionalism. By focusing on the very basic need of sustenance, Atwood
reveals the human animal as subject to the same biological imperatives affecting other animals;
in the novel as in reality, humans shape the environment in their quest for food, and the
environment, in turn, shapes humanity. Oryx and Crake thus operates as a cautionary tale,
generating an ethical awareness of current agricultural practices from a long-range perspective.
As a fictional world struggling with climate change and overpopulation, Oryx and Crake‘s pre-
plague food production systems foreshadow impending sustainability issues for contemporary
genetically-altered, monoculture-dependent agriculture, and its post-plague wilderness
challenges the absolute status of the human. In this paper, I will explore Atwood’s critique of
food production ethics in the figures of the ChickieNob and pigoon, and the ensuing moves she
makes that position the human as a consumable organism.
Contemporary Industrial Farming & Atwood’s Science
In her essay “Writing Oryx and Crake,” Atwood observes that “The rules of biology are as
inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its
resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law” (285). The
dystopic future of the novel reveals hard-hit impoverished multitudes in third-world countries,
but also anticipates food shortages affecting the elites. Maintaining the illusion of an open
cornucopia of good health, bountiful food, and creature comfort becomes increasingly difficult,
and is exposed in the artifice and prosthesis of available foodstuffs: “soy-sausage dogs and
coconut-style layer cake” (72), “SoyOBoyburgers” (74), “ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins”
(242), and pharmaceutical organ-bank pigoons (30). The genetically modified plants and animals
served up as medical and victual fodder for near-future humanity may be bizarre in appearance,
but not in genesis: they flow seamlessly as a logical telos from the industrialized agri-businesses
of contemporary America. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOS, are a part of our current
news cycle, from the “frankenfish” salmon currently awaiting expected approval by the FDA, to
the transgenic canola which has escaped the confines of the farm to grow wild in the fields of
North Dakota. In fact, two of the creatures Atwood features in Oryx and Crake are already with
us: the neon green rabbits and the goat that produces spider silk in her milk (Gould; Kac).
For thousands of years humans have selected and bred plants and animals for desired features,
enacting genetic modifications over multiple generations, but now we have the keys to the farm.
Oryx and Crake‘s technology-centered Compounds echo modern biotech labs where the pace has
accelerated and computers enable gene-splice manipulation inconceivable before the digital age.
Contemporary concerns over GMOs are magnified through Atwood’s descriptions of mutated
species, with the timeline for hybridization processes shrinking to just a few years, or even a few

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months. “Hybrid” assumes an alien provenance when the resultant organism can be traced to not
just varied ancestors, but varied species of ancestors. Transgenic manipulation, as Regine Kollek
explains, makes it “possible to overcome the barriers which normally limit the arbitrary cross-
breeding of organisms of different species” (97). For example, Alba, the phosphorescent rabbit,
owes her glow not to some über rabbit ancestor, but to the survival tactics of a glowing jellyfish.
ChickieNobs
The troubling potential of boundless human creativity emerges in the pre-plague Compounds,
where gene-splicing scientists produce chimeric creatures, and express an amusement in creation
that “ma[kes] you feel like God” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 51). This god-like power is imbued
with the myth that human ingenuity can produce a technological solution for anything, even
animals that humans regard as imperfect in their natural form. Resulting organisms, such as the
ChickieNob, present a logical but unnatural extension of where research could lead. The idea of
a chicken without a head, wings, or feathers is a disquieting notion, but from a production
standpoint of bird-as-food, an assembly-line, all breast-meat chicken makes perfect sense.
Feathers and wings, after all, are an evolutionary adaptation of benefit to bird-as-bird; bird-as-
food has neither need nor option to leave the flightless, lightless barns of contemporary industrial
food production. As Donna Haraway notes, chickens have been “[m]anipulated genetically since
the 1950s to rapidly grow megabreasts,” a condition that leads to “young birds who are often
enough unable to walk, flap their wings, or even stand up” (When Species 267). Is it then such a
stretch to imagine further “improvements” upon fowl construction that reduce the animal to just
the muscle tissue humans find tasty?
At the Watson-Crick Institute, Jimmy witnesses his first ChickienNob, “a large bulblike object . . .
covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes,” with
“another bulb” growing “at the end of each tube” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 203). Jimmy,
calling it “a nightmare,” is repulsed (202), but would he have been any less horrified at practices
in a contemporary industrialized meat-production facility? The commodity animal has already
been reduced to a manipulated object. Industrial farming, as Wendell Berry points out,
challenges ethical understandings of human relationships with domestic animals by using
“animals as machines” (62). Michael Pollan notes that “animals are treated as ‘production
units’—incapable of feeling pain” (317), a machinic reference echoed in the ChickieNob
researcher’s assertion that “this thing feels no pain” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 203).
In addition to a corporate critique, the ChickieNob is also a critique of consumer habits, and
serves as an example of removing the “animalness” from the animal in order to address any
compunction humans may have about eating other creatures. The removal of the eyes, beak, and
most brain functions simultaneously allays concerns over suffering and reduces the creature to
“an animal-protein tuber” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 202). ChickieNobs are thus an outgrowth of
modern supermarket meat presentation, in which all traces of the living creature have been
minimized to increase the separation between humans and their once-alive food. Meat, in the

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supermarket form, is sanitized, with no trace of feather or fur and little blood; carefully and
antiseptically wrapped in layers of plastic and cellophane, the territory of the modern hunting
and gathering space is as much removed from a natural context as possible. Death is sterilized
and codified as grocery; we do not have to recognize the essential partnership and necessary
sacrifice between humans and their domestic animals as part and parcel of a co-evolutionary
relationship. As Pollan observes, “domestication took place when a handful of especially
opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to
survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own” (320). Practices which treat
animals as machines or components ignore this relationship, to the detriment of animal and
human alike. Animals lead artificially accelerated and sustained lives, and humans chance food-
born pathogens which are potential by-products of large-scale food production.
Atwood’s text opens up multiple questions of ethical animal treatment, including our knowledge
of what we eat and how it is produced. Like Jimmy, who eventually develops a fondness for
ChickieNob Gourmet Dinners, our consumption is made easier by hiding and forgetting the
source of our foodstuffs (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 242). The brainless, sightless ChickieNob can
serve as metaphor for a humanity separated from natural vision and natural connections—a
humanity that only takes in nutrients and expels waste in a blind, sensory-deprived fashion.
Pigoons
Like the ChickieNob, the pigoon is a human creation, a perversion of natural selection. The
pigoon,though, is not created to provide food nourishment, but to sustain life in another way:
pigoons host “an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs” for transplantation purposes
(Atwood, Oryx and Crake 22). With the pigoon, Atwood introduces the idea of cannibalism:
young Jimmy thinks “of the pigoons as creatures much like himself,” understanding that “no
one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their
own” (24). Nonetheless, suspicions exist because of the first generation’s single-use nature,
since organ harvesting coincides with a plethora of pork items on the menu in the staff
cafeteria. When Compound employees joke about “Pigoon pie again,” Jimmy is disturbed; his
intuitive kinship with the pigoons renders their consumption problematic (24). Later, as he
slowly starves, Snowman envisions “a pigoon feast,” accepting the taboo of potential
cannibalism as a means of “Bring[ing] home the bacon” (150-51).
Lacking tongues and opposable thumbs, pigoons cannot produce words or even gestures;
nonetheless, it’s not only possible, but probable that they share human intelligence because of the
human brain tissue mixed into their genetic design. Snowman is witness to the pigoons’
capacity to plan and organize, but the relationship is complicated by the overturned
predator/prey relationship: as Ku notes, pigoons have “reverse[d] the original food chain”
(115). Snowman is no longer at the top of the chain, but finds himself where primitive man
found himself, somewhere in the middle, and at times, close to the bottom. The “brainy and
omnivorous” pigoons interest in Snowman has little to do with curiosity; rather, he imagines

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they see him as “a delicious meat pie just waiting to be opened up.” Their self-directed
behavior, indicative of agency, challenges an anthropocentric reading. Pigoons, as “Team
players,” refute the Cartesian machine animal (234, 268).
Consumable Organisms
The cannibalistic potential associated with the pigoons also emerges in the figure of Jimmy’s
namesake, the Abominable Snowman. In taking the name “Snowman,” Jimmy recognizes the
inherent vulnerability of a creature rumored to have been “chased . . . down and killed,”
“boiled,” “roasted,” and consumed (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 8). Like the forlorn pet dogs who
succumb to the wolvog’s aggression (108), Snowman is a lost domesticated creature. Unlike the
Crakers, the genetically-enhanced humans custom-designed by Crake, he is ill-suited for the
post-apocalyptic world of resurgent nature. He is vulnerable to the heat, the insects, and the
predacious animals inhabiting the jungle, and his tree residence is a response to the biting ants,
curious pigoons, hungry wolvogs, and crawling “Beetles, flies,” and “bees” that regard him as
“dead meat” (38-39). In his new status as prey animal, Snowman is acutely aware of the dangers
in the wild which “lie in wait . . . slaver” and “pounce” (42). In his vulnerability to predation,
Snowman troubles the notion of human exceptionalism.
Perhaps Snowman’s passivity is not an allusion to a feminine nature as some critics have
suggested, but rather an indication of Homo sapiens’ vulnerability once the shell of civilization
has been peeled from his back and he has been shorn of his tribe. His helplessness can be seen as
the post-modern human’s total reliance on a technological infrastructure, including dependency
on institutionalized food production. Snowman’s fixation on food is predicated on his starving
condition and his inability to provision himself. Lost without a kiosk, microwave, or refrigerator,
he lacks even such basic survival skills as identifying edible plants, fungi, or invertebrates. Every
morning Snowman urinates on the “grasshoppers that whir away at the impact,” not realizing
they could provide a source of protein (4), and he remains oblivious to the shoreline resources of
shellfish and crustaceans surrounding him. Instead, his “gathering” is in fact scavenging through
the leftovers of human habitation, and the food in his “stash,” apart from some mangoes, consists
of remnants of the processed food industry: “Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages” and a
precious “chocolate-flavored energy bar” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 4). Even Snowman’s
journey to the RejoovenEsense compound is a quest driven, as DiMarco notes, by hunger, not
heroics or glory. The treasures Snowman dreams of finding are “Cherries preserved in brandy;
dry-roasted peanuts” or “a precious can of imitation Spam” (152).
Through Snowman, Atwood examines the role of humans as consumable organisms; his
alienated relationship from nature mirrors the contemporary disjunction embedded in human
exceptionalism. Oryx and Crake reaffirms the web of interdependencies in life systems which
have coevolved over millions of years, and illuminates the dangers in imagining humans as
separate from those systems. In speaking about the health of natural systems, Wendell Berry
informs us that “a healthy soil . . . is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed

6. Galbreath 6
through other bodies” (86). Oryx and Crake reintroduces the human body to this web through the
Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary, or JUVE, and the ensuing mass die-off. The bodies of the
dead are left in the open, unembalmed, to return to the earth as “gnawed carrion” (Atwood, Oryx
and Crake 351). The efficacy of the JUVE echoes contemporary fears of bioterrorism; it is
modern man’s cave bear, sabertooth tiger, or dire wolf, an antagonist that eats its victims from
the inside out. The JUVE is an efficient hunter once turned loose by its human creator, Crake,
and acts as a form of cannibalism by proxy. Even though he is no longer around to witness,
Crake consumes the human race through the predacious viral vector. The JUVE can easily be
seen as a metaphor for the consuming nature of biotechnology itself, reminding us of the inherent
dangers in altering parts of the web we do not completely understand.
Conclusion
It can be argued that contemporary industrial farming sustains the masses of humans on earth
through advances in science and technology such as the green revolution, without which we
would face starvation. The chief problem in our own world and in the pre-JUVE world of Oryx
and Crake is that genetic manipulation and much other research is many times judged through
the lens of market worth, and ethics are subject to the rules of productivity. Those who question
or reject this paradigm are considered traitors “to the general good” (Atwood, Oryx and Crake
212, 258). Our progress is predicated on the notion of the greatest good, but, as Atwood
suggests, the greatest good for certain humans is many times in conflict with the greatest good
for other organisms, and may in fact turn out to be detrimental to humanity as a whole.
In Oryx and Crake, humanity’s reconnection to the web of life through humbling sacrifice is as
dramatic as it is irreversible, and exposes the double edge of the technological tools we wield.
The novel thus serves as a direct rebuttal to the pervasive Enlightenment notion that human
ingenuity can solve any problem, given enough time. What Donald N. Michael describes as the
myth of the technological “fix” (467) is peeled away in Atwood’s text, revealing a humanity that
is vulnerable to its own guile and seduced by its own cunning. As Jared Diamond notes, faith in
technology rests on “an assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function
primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems” (Collapse 504).
Atwood likens Oryx and Crake to Charles Dicken’s Christmas Carol as a nightmarish attempt to
alert us to our current path. She notes in a 2004 MIT presentation that Oryx and Crake is “a
cheering sort of book” because “we do still have time and we’ve got a second chance.” It would
seem that finding the map to a new path depends, at least in part, upon developing a clearer
understanding of what is involved in our food production, and in how we fit into the picture as
consuming, and consumable, organisms.

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