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Robert Frost gave us so little choice when he wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.��

What about plague, flood, zombies, killer robots, ocean acidification, nuclear accident and alien invasion? Fortunately, in these latter days before climate collapse, our apocalyptic literature comes in a grim smorgasbord of flavors.

And now we have an apocalyptic novel that is all about flavors. “Land of Milk and Honey,�� by C Pam Zhang, is the haunting story of an ambitious chef desperate to keep cooking even as 98 percent of the commercial crops fail and the world’s store of food dwindles to gruel.

The narrator, unnamed, is in her 20s when a mysterious smog arises from Iowa and blocks out the sun around the world. “Biodiversity fell. Wildlife and livestock perished for lack of feed,�� she remembers. “What it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind �� no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.�� On and on rolls this inventory of culinary devastation, a vast catalogue that invokes delicacies only by noting their absence. For a chef, such bare cupboards portend a tasteless existence sustained only by mung-protein flour.

Zhang is such a cool writer that salmon steaks could stay fresh in her prose for weeks. But there’s something absurd about this narrator’s single-minded obsession with haute cuisine during what sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.�� As the restaurant where she works in England runs out of supplies, she makes a bold choice: “I quit that job to pursue recklessly, immorally, desperately, the only one that gave me hope of lettuce.��

The endive is near!

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post: