I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat 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 C. Pam Zhang'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 Nerdette.

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

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