Land of Milk and Honey

“One day, after my life is already over, a girl comes up to me at the back of the auditorium and says, Are you the famous chef from Miele?”

The first line of the Prologue introduces the main setting of the novel. The Italian word miele means “honey” and refers to the titular land of milk and honey—a biblical image of the plenty promised by God to the Israelites during Exodus. The novel’s version of the land of milk and honey is an Italian mountain near the French border that is above the smog and thus immune to the smog’s ecological impact.

“I fled to that country because I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for one last taste of green sharp enough to pierce the caul of my life.”

The narrator’s main motivation to work on the mountain is her sense of taste; here, the color green represents the flourishing crops that no longer grow in the smog. To taste these foods, she ends up in the extreme situation of impersonating her employer’s wife, whom he killed.

“For years I’d fed, survived, swallowed my portions of gray—but had I hungered for pleasure?”

Here, the narrator distinguishes between gray, a symbol of grim but efficient survival, and the enjoyment that gray food doesn’t provide. Before coming to the mountain, she had been in survival mode after the gray smog blotted out the sun, living without access to many pleasurable things because of her socioeconomic class.