Dystopia Meets Dystopia, Carmit Delman

In Fall 2019, I celebrated the release of my new dystopian novel, Consider the Feast. Set in a near-future New York City that’s obsessed with food, the characters are bloated from privilege and always seeking out the next decadent gourmet experience. Eventually in the story, the broken food system and the rift between the haves and have-nots collide in explosion. 

When I wrote the thing, I meant it to be a thoughtful, satirical read but also a pleasurable escape.

In Spring 2020, the pandemic hit the New York area. As many sickened and died, thousands became unemployed, the city’s glorious restaurants shuttered, plentiful grocery store shelves emptied, farm food was wasted, school children had to scramble for regular meals. Those who could stayed safe indoors, while those who had no choice delivered food to their doorstep, and people hunkered down hoping “normal” would return. And yet… the broken food system and the rift between the haves and have-nots collided in explosion. 

Throughout these months, I have felt sickening waves of déjà vu now and then. Was this experience from me or from my character? Was that new wrinkle real or imagined? Some peace of mind has come from being able to point to even small details in real life and say, “Well, at least, we did this better than the story.” And little has comforted me more than our steadfast garbage workers. 

In my novel, when garbage collection stops, society has reached the absolute bottom. Government and community organization have faltered, there is a sense of chaos on the streets, and instead of being able to have their messes neatly hauled away, people must stew in them, repurpose trash, accept the stink and live with it. When the streets are littered and left to themselves, that is permission for the animals, and the animals in us, to take over.

The steadfast collection of garbage during these trying times has been a blessing. The rhythmic regularity of trash pick-up Monday and Thursday, recycling Wednesday, is one of the few things that remained the same from before. It has been humbling to know that even as I mask against and scrub away every real or imagined germ, those garbage collectors barrel through and do their work, perhaps for lack of choice, but bravely, like hospital workers, exposing themselves to germs from hundreds of other homes, taking on this risk unflinchingly with no nonsense.

And in the quiet of isolation, the sorting of plastic and cardboard and food scraps has become almost an introspective meditation. Was it really necessary to throw out these leftovers? Had I wasted too much of the tomato, the bananas, the lettuce? How many other people, down the road and around the world, needed these now empty canned goods far more that we did? And god, how had we produced so much plastic in just one week? In the garbage itself, there was so much injustice to be read.

The details in letting the garbage pile up in the streets of my novel were shaped by photos of war zones where for average folks there is no start and end, no strategy, only survival. Garbage and good things are one and the same. A blown up house may have things to salvage. A pile of trash might hide the makings of some meal. 

As much as there has been a kind of war zone here in New York, we have still been able to delineate the garbage from the substance. In one of the worst times in history, many though not all of us we were graced with being able to keep our civility and our humanity, even to be able to think about it it more fully, and understand the inner working of what has sustained it. 

And now, it is on us to use that knowledge.

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Carmit Delman is the author of Consider the Feast: A novel, and Burnt Bread and Chutney: A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl. Her short work has been anthologized by W.W. Norton and published in Moment magazine, Kveller, the Nosher, and more. She can be found at:

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Category: On Writing