Ashley Chang
This is what animal farming looks like in faraway worlds—and what it says about them.
For writers of science fiction and fantasy, anything is possible.
Their worlds range from the desert planet of Arrakis to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis to the misty island of Avalon. Their heroes traverse post-apocalyptic landscapes, off-world colonies, places called Demonland or Witchland or Elfland.
And in these strange—and strangely familiar—worlds, we encounter imaginary people whose lives are organized in ways that are often wildly different from our own. They attend wizarding schools, enroll at colleges for dragon riders, and train on swamp-covered planets. They fight gods and empires and evil. They are dwarves and cyborgs and alien life-forms.
The possibilities are unlimited—which is why science fiction and fantasy has long been home to utopian ideas. These kinds of stories are places for us to imagine how the world could be—or what could go terribly, terribly wrong. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood imagines a world held captive by extreme religious fundamentalism. In Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu explores the things that make us uniquely human—like our ability to lie—as an alien civilization invades earth. In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien gives us a world on the brink of doom, in which the forces of evil are fueled by the forest-razing fires of industry and the will to dominate all life.
But when it comes to animals—especially animals raised for food—science fiction and fantasy haven’t offered many radical visions of a world without the exploitation of animals. One science fiction and fantasy magazine—Metamorphosis—publishes vegan stories: “If your characters eat meat, wear leather, or ride horses, they’re not vegan.” But, by and large, most fiction seems to take it for granted that animals are there to be eaten.
Fantastic animals as food
Across science fiction and fantasy, characters usually eat the same animals that get eaten in real life, or an imaginary version of those animals:
Aurochs. In A Game of Thrones, aurochs are a kind of cow. Six aurochs are roasted with leeks and venison pies on the occasion of the Hand’s tourney, held in King's Landing to mark the ascendance of Eddard Stark as Hand of the King.
Banthas. In Star Wars, banthas travel in herds on the desert planet Tatooine. Famously domesticated by the Tusken Raiders as steeds, banthas are also farmed throughout the galaxies for blue milk, meat, and hide.
Chickens. From The Wheel of Time to Mistborn, chickens are so widely farmed that people can take it for granted in everyday conversation. In The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, when the Trollocs attacked the village, it was chaos: “We just ran like chickens with a fox in the henyard.”
Dragons. In Harry Potter, dragon tartare is served at Professor Slughorn’s “Slug Club” Christmas party.
Fish. Whether it’s Gollum eating fish raw, or Mr. Beaver serving fresh-caught fish in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, fish are a staple across imaginary worlds.
Goats. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged comes from a village of goatherds on the remote island of Gont.
Groosling. In The Hunger Games, Katniss and Rue kill and eat a bird, “some wild thing they call a groosling.” While the bird isn’t farmed in their districts, Rue reminisces about her life before the Games: “Sometimes a flock will wander into the orchard and they get a decent lunch that day.”
Horses. Also in the world of A Game of Thrones, the mounted Dothraki—often called horselords—believed “the stars were horses made of fire, a great herd that galloped across the sky by night.” But when Daenerys asks to eat any food that isn’t horse, Jorah hands her horsemeat and says: “The Dothraki have two things in abundance, grass and horses; people can’t live on grass.”
Moofs. Also from Star Wars, moofs are farmed for their milk. In Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Han Solo invokes them as an insult: “Hey! Some moof-milker installed a compressor on the ignition line!”
Nerfs. Another Star Wars animal, nerfs are—like banthas—raised for milk, meat, and hide. In Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia says to Han Solo: “Why, you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder!”
Pigs. Like other conventionally farmed animals, pigs appear throughout science fiction and fantasy as food. “Serve the boar at my funeral feast,” Robert tells Ned in A Game of Thrones. “Apple in its mouth, skin seared crisp. Eat the bastard. Don’t care if you choke on him.”
Reindeer. In His Dark Materials, the Gyptians rely on reindeer for clothing and food: “Farder Coram took Lyra to the best outfitter's in town and bought her some proper cold-weather clothing. They bought a parka made of reindeer skin, because reindeer hair is hollow and insulates well; and the hood was lined with wolverine fur, because that sheds the ice that forms when you breathe. They bought underclothing and boot liners of reindeer calf skin, and silk gloves to go inside big fur mittens. The boots and mittens were made of skin from the reindeer's forelegs, because that is extra tough, and the boots were soled with the skin of the bearded seal, which is as tough as walrus hide, but lighter. Finally they bought a waterproof cape that enveloped her completely, made of semitransparent seal intestine.”
Sandworms. In Dune, the massive sandworms aren’t farmed for food themselves, but they are crucial to the production of spice, a highly valuable substance used for space travel.
Sheep. In The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug takes the halflings’ sheep.
Building worlds where animals don’t get eaten
When it comes to building imaginary worlds, writers make tons of choices. In her advice on how to approach world-building, N.K. Jemisin asks writers to consider everything from the world’s weather patterns to its natural resources to its attitudes towards gender. What her approach makes clear is that the most convincing stories are grounded in coherent physical and social realities. Some elements might be truly out-of-this-world: floating cities, sentient robots, people—like the orogenes in Jemisin’s Broken Earth series—with the power to control energy.
But these fantastic ideas usually play out in worlds we can roughly make sense of, if not intimately recognize. That’s often because they’re based on patterns similar to those that show up in our own world: things like social units (families, gangs, armies), or institutions (governments, religions, schools), or economics (money, trade, work). The most believable worlds are often those that have more in common with our actual world than it seems at first glance. Talking animals… who take afternoon tea. Intergalactic bounty hunters… who have to get their ships repaired without getting ripped off. There are so many wild ideas in science fiction and fantasy, and at the same time there’s so much that carries over from the real world.
The idea that animals are food is one of those things that tends to get taken for granted as a normal part of life, whether we’re talking about our lives here on planet earth, or the lives of some other fantastical species on some faraway planet, like the Na’vi on Pandora. Because most people around the world do eat animals, maybe it’s not surprising that what shows up in our fiction is a worldview and lifestyle that normalizes the eating of animals. And in storytelling, where every detail matters—and where readers are eagerly poring over every difference from our real world—authors might strategically decide against drawing attention to the way people eat. If a writer’s goal is to showcase a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, mainstream readers might find it distracting to learn, or difficult to comprehend, that no one in this particular world eats animals. In other words, the question of what people eat might feel too noteworthy, or too revolutionary, to raise.
But aren’t challenging ideas the stuff of great science fiction and fantasy?
As our moral paradigms evolve, and as we search for alternatives to animal agriculture, our storytellers stand at the brink of uncharted territory. What can they illuminate about landscapes abundant with fungi that sustain the terrestrials who live there, or about dystopias where humanoids are selectively bred to grow as fast as factory-farmed chickens, or about futures where battery cages and gestation crates and CAFOs are a relic of a bygone age?
