Dystopian future and borders of humanity

The article explores the artistic means of representation of the degradation of food practices in the post-apocalyptic literary discourse of contemporary writers. The study focuses on the strategies of food culture degradation in the post-humanist discourse of two novels — Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and Taras Antypovych’s “Pomyrana”. Using interpretative and comparative methods, the article aims to concentrate on the existential issues of the novels and compare the artistic means of depicting the moral degradation of humanity and the decline of food culture in “The Road” and “Pomyrana”. The research results affirm that the portrayal of food not only highlights the struggle for survival but also carries symbolic and metaphorical significance. Both authors use the issue of food supply to reflect the collective anxieties of modern society and to link the issue of moral degradation and the survival of human beings. Food imagery is used to describe possible means of survival for the protagonists in the post-apocalyptic world, symbolizes the lost world (“The Road”) and reflects the inner moral state of a community (“Pomyrana”). The expression “you are what you eat” has a special significance in these texts — in Pomyrana the semi-robotized people eat inedible substances to satisfy their animalistic hunger, eventually turning to cannibalism, which reflects their deep moral degradation. In “The Road”, the protagonists continuously choose starvation over cannibalism, spending their time looking for pre-apocalyptic food and for a chance at survival. In this case, cannibalism is presented as a liminal food practice of “bad people”. The novelty of the article lies in the comparative approach to analyzing how food-related discourse is portrayed throughout the novels and what cannibalism reveals about both the characters and society as a whole. Thus, cannibalism serves as a means to construct the boundary between human and inhuman, defines categories of good and evil, and illustrates the moral orientations of the heroes in the analyzed novels.