BlyssPluss, SoyOBoy, and the MaddAddam Food World
What it is
The broader food technology landscape of the MaddAddam trilogy — the corporate-engineered food and drug products of a world in which biotech companies have replaced governments as the primary regulatory power, and the specific foods and supplements that sustain and control the population.
The source work
Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), Margaret Atwood.
How it's described
The MaddAddam food world includes:
SoyOBoy: One of several reference to soy-based meat substitutes in the Pleeblands. Food for those who cannot afford real protein. The name's satirical punnery (Boy? Buy? Soy-o-Boy as in "oh boy, soy") captures the marketing language of processed food products that perform enjoyment rather than delivering it.
BlyssPluss: A pharmaceutical product marketed as a libido enhancer and general happiness pill — what was actually a lethal virus delivery system used by Crake to depopulate humanity. BlyssPluss is soma taken to its logical endpoint: not just a happiness drug, but a drug that uses the desire for happiness as the delivery mechanism for extinction. The pill promises bliss; it delivers death.
HelthWyzer vitamin supplements: The HelthWyzer corporation sells supplements that, it is revealed, contain pathogens — the company has engineered diseases into its products to maintain demand for its pharmaceuticals. This is the capitalist food-drug loop at its most crystallized: the product that makes you sick sustains demand for the product that makes you better.
The God's Gardeners' food: The Year of the Flood follows the God's Gardeners, an eco-religious community that rejects corporate food technology and practices urban permaculture — growing food in rooftop gardens, foraging, preserving, fermenting. Their food ethic is the counter-economy of the novel: a living food culture against the commodity food system.
The BlyssPluss/soma comparison: BlyssPluss is a deliberate inversion of soma. Where soma genuinely provides happiness (while also controlling the population), BlyssPluss provides the promise of happiness while secretly destroying the population. Huxley's totalitarians control through genuine chemical happiness. Atwood's corporate-totalitarians control through the marketing of happiness while delivering something entirely different. This is a 21st-century update: not the state that engineers your happiness, but the corporation that sells you the appearance of happiness.
The God's Gardeners as alternative: Atwood's counter to the MaddAddam food world is the God's Gardeners, and specifically their food ethic. They are earnest, sometimes absurd, often deeply practical. They preserve seeds. They keep bees. They make bread. They ferment vegetables. They are the community of people who have maintained a relationship with actual food production in a world where that relationship has been eliminated by corporate food technology.
The God's Gardeners' food practices — urban rooftop gardening, fermentation, preserving, communal cooking and eating — are not presented by Atwood as purely idealistic. They are survival technology. When Crake's BlyssPluss virus depopulates civilization, it is the God's Gardeners' food skills that make it possible for survivors to continue.
This is Atwood's most direct political statement in the MaddAddam books: food production knowledge is a form of political insurance. Communities that have maintained genuine food skills survive the collapse of corporate food systems. Communities that have been entirely dependent on corporate food supply — the compound workers, who had everything delivered to them — are helpless.
Why Atwood built this food world: The MaddAddam trilogy was written across a decade (2003–2013) during which several real food-and-biotech developments accelerated: GMO crop adoption, the development of lab-grown meat, the growth of the organic and local food movement as an explicit counterculture to industrial food. Atwood watched these developments and extrapolated the corporate food trajectory to its endpoint.
Her specific targets are visible in the narrative: - Monsanto and seed patents: The MaddAddam corporations' ownership of engineered seed varieties echoes the real controversy over patented seed and corporate control of agricultural genetics. - Pharmaceutical industry disease-creation logic: The HelthWyzer vitamin-with-pathogen scheme is a satirical extension of real pharmaceutical industry incentives, in which the most profitable chronic diseases are those that require long-term pharmaceutical management. - Corporate compound culture: The gated compound communities of the MaddAddam world are a direct extrapolation of the corporate campus culture already visible in Silicon Valley in the 2000s — communities that provide everything (food, housing, entertainment, social life) in exchange for total corporate loyalty.
Cultural legacy
The MaddAddam trilogy anticipated several specific food technology developments that subsequently occurred: cultivated meat approval, vertical farming operations, corporate food monopoly concerns, the locavore and permaculture movements as explicit responses to industrial food. Atwood's specific insight — that the alternative food movement is not merely a lifestyle choice but a survival strategy — has been taken seriously in food systems literature.
Reference notes
→ Soy and soy products; → Fermentation and preservation; → Seed saving and heirloom varieties; → Permaculture and urban gardening; → Lab-grown meat and alternative proteins
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