Biblioholic Review: The Blind Pig

When it comes to food, we Boston Book Bums have a mantra- the more butter the better. Accordingly we would be outlaws in a future like that captured by Massachusetts  resident Elizabeth Dougherty in her debut novel, The Blind Pig.

The Blind Pig is the future story of food writer Angela Anselm, booster of the government run Nutritional Architecture System (NArc) and anti-gastronome. With spiraling health care costs, decimation of a petroleum-based economy and resulting flight to mega-cities, Dougherty’s The Blind Pig is a society in collapse. And the only way it’s citizens can be saved is via a U.S. government program that monitors and directly provides all nutritional requirements via engineered near-foods. In The Blind Pig this means that anything not from the government or its officially sanctioned food labs is illegal.

Anselm is confronted at the story’s start by a woman who reads the journalist’s work and has a story that needs to be told. The woman claims that she occasionally cheats on the NArc program, but instead of the government run system bolstering her health, its making her sick. Soon after Anselm learns the woman was found dead, attributed by the Food Police to her mingling with underground chow-hounds who believe the old ways of eating are still the right ways.

Not a suffocating police state, Dougherty instead creates a strict central government bureaucracy  that guards NArc tightly. Cops are looking for the people producing/using the junkiest of edibles smuggled into the mega-cities; while the Foodies (gastronome guerrillas) and their baguettes and smelly cheese are considered relatively minor players in the illegal food world.

Through Dougherty’s Anselm we examine who are the true villains in a genetically engineered, hygienic and manufactured world. Are these Foodies the bad-guys or the maligned prophets of a food movement crushed by dodgy data, profit driven corporate malfeasance, chronic disease, sloth and food-borne illness?

Anselm then begins to explore the underground food movement,  learns of a bootleg world of beverage, veggies and meats, of organic farms secreted in the hollows of the nation of Vermont. And as Anselm probes deeper, the more questions are raised. Her slow revelations come as she experiences slow food in shady back rooms or revelatory dinner parties. Doughterty also writes an absolutely charming scene where a Julia Child book becomes like the long lost Epic of Gilgamesh, serving to ignite a child like ardor for all things food.

The Blind Pig is authentic near future fiction. Just distant enough to transport you to someplace familiarly off, but not so far off that it requires its own distracting lexicon (outside of NArc and some slang.) Dougherty’s inaugural novel works because it flows smoothly and without hiccups in plotting and players. Character development is just deep enough to invest in them emotionally, without being heavy handed and taking the story arc too seriously. Dougherty asks some serious questions about government, health and one’s personal liberties.

Dougherty brushes on the political/social/environmental changes outside the mega-cities, but doesn’t devote too much in science fiction detail. In part, like old fashioned science fiction, Dougherty uses cultural perception or trending social observations to fill in the blanks. No need to go line by line of ecological disaster or human pandemic, that is for another writer and another book. Dougherty lets you know that the worse case scenarios some scientist today warn us about, have come true. But technology was there to save us. Yet in The Blind Pig Dougherty asks, is it better to be unwillingly saved.

And like science fiction of the late 50s and early 60s, The Blind Pig provokes questions about personal liberty. Can liberty be defined solely by freedom of speech and religion? When ones choice in how, when and what to eat is taken away, can that be considered an equally intrusive assault on freedom? But, if its for the ‘common good’ then if you buck the trend, are you in league with the forces seeking to undermine society?

The Blind Pig could have been self righteous and preachy, but it absolutely wasn’t. Instead, Dougherty created a marvelously fun, fast paced and entertaining culinary thriller that makes you both think and hungry at the same time.

The Blind Pig by Elizabeth Dougherty was received as a free review copy by Boston Book Bums