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From W be easy Chicago I'm Greta Johnson and this is the Nurdat Book Club. It's just like a regular book club except

sometimes the author stops by. It is the month of November and our selection is see Pam

Jean's second novel, Land of Milk and Honey.

It takes place in an alarmingly conceivable future

where the world is on the brink of ecological collapse.

There's a smog that's enveloping the earth which means hardly any

crops can grow and our narrator is a chef whose name we never learn. Straddled with

inherited debt and locked out of the United States she takes a mysterious job as a chef for an elite research community

in the Italian Alps that is able to grow the food she loves in labs. That's all I'm going to say about the

plot for now since this is a spoiler-free conversation, but this is a book about hunger and survival and sex and strawberries.

Pam, welcome to Nurdett.

Thank you, I'm so happy to be here.

So I, even in my own past as a reporter,

I've done stories about how difficult it is

for people to wrap our heads around climate change and you've taken a really

simple approach here that has a lot of nuance at the same time. You're writing from the point of view of like a

super fancy elite chef who does not have stuff like strawberries and at first you're kind of like well who cares this is like super you know this is you're talking about

Meals at restaurants that most people could have never afforded anyway.

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