The last meal before the apocalypse. A feast that binds a civilisation. A hunger that no world — real or imagined — can ever fully satisfy.
What we eat tells us who we are. What we can’t eat tells us who we’ve become. Hunger is the oldest story, and in these pages it takes new and unsettling forms: the politics of plenty, the violence of scarcity, the strange intimacy of sharing a meal across the boundaries of species, class, and world.
From alien banquets to dystopian rationing, from sacred harvests to desperate scavenging, these stories of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror use food to lay bare what we crave most — connection, survival, meaning.
Genre-spanning and uncompromising, this anthology explores the full, ravenous spectrum of humanity’s relationship with food: the nourishment of the body and the soul, the ecstasy of abundance, the despair of going without.
Each story comes with a related recipe (readers are warned that some ingredients are not available on all planets or timelines).
Pull up a chair. The table is set.
With original stories by:
- Amber Parkes
- Andy Zach
- Assaph Mehr
- B.E. Zemlá
- C. W. Stevenson
- Charles Walter
- Christine Emmert
- Christine Wolfram
- Daniel Lukes
- Darren Todd
- Emily D Edwards
- Emily Grigsby
- Eric Klein
- Gareth D Jones
- Harley Carnell
- Jennifer McArdle
- John-Paul Coté
- Joyce C Mandrake
- Laura J. Campbell
- Margret Treiber
- Reut Barak
- Ross Baxter
- Scott Branchfield
- Spencer Keene
- Ulff Lehman
- Virgo Kevonté
The stories include:
- Soup to nuts
- Dead things (eating and being eaten)
- Fairytale foods
- Aliens’ culinary visits
- Sweet things ad nauseam
- History and mystery dishes
- Liquid lunches
- A post-apocalyptic hot dog stand
- Food that nourishes, food that doesn’t
- Real, scientific, fantastical, and alien recipes – kids, don’t try them at home.
Purple Toga Publications 