Eating Your Cat

"It's possible Horton's been killed," Matt said. "For food." (pg. 130)


Environmental catastrophe is inevitable. Their is plenty of evidence to support that this collapse is coming sooner rather than later. I'm sure their are plenty of climate change deniers and "progress" minded people that would disagree with me on this point, but I have no interest in arguing it. It is such an inevitability that I can't see how anyone could deny it.

Therefore, we should all start supplementing our meals with pet food and other less desirable foods so that we are prepared for when that really is all that we have. A little kibble in your brown bag every day might end up saving your life.  Theirs no reason why you shouldn't, cat food is scientifically proven to be healthy and delicious. I'm not ashamed to admit that some of the more upscale all-organic canned dog food brands I have seen look a good deal tastier than many meals I have at one point eaten. Hell, meals I have eaten in the past week probably have less nutritional value than them. And if people think this is gross, then I will rejoice, because that only means more cans of Alpo and chihuahua roasts for me. 

This book never really was an apocalypse novel. The vast majority of it is the main character and her family trying to cope with a drastic change in lifestyle. The difference between the apocalypse and a sudden change in environment and living situation would have caused the same emotional responses from the family members. No element of their post-apocalyptic life is quantitatively worse than what countless of generations have had to face before them. People living in Gdansk or Leningrad during WWII were facing famine and violence far worse than Miranda's family sees. Those people weren't constantly having existential crises, they were too busy trying to survive and even fight back.