The Handmaid's Diet: Fertility, Control, and the Supervised Body

What it is

The specific nutritional and dietary regime applied to Handmaids in Gilead — the food they are given, the food they are denied, the food rituals that structure their days, and the shopping trips that constitute their only permitted movements in public space.

The source work

The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood. Food permeates the novel; the food details are concentrated in Offred's account of her daily routine.

How it's described

Offred's diet is controlled to optimize fertility. She is given: - Oranges - Eggs - Fresh vegetables where available - Meat in moderate portions - Milk

She is denied: - Alcohol - Caffeine (presumably — though this is not stated explicitly, the logic of fertility optimization would suggest it) - Processed foods - Anything associated with pleasure rather than reproduction

The daily food ritual is described with Atwood's characteristic precision — the food is good, by the standards of what Offred eats. She is being fed for something. The food is not a gift; it is an investment. A Handmaid who is well-fed has a better chance of successful pregnancy. The wife feeds the Handmaid with the resentment of someone purchasing equipment.

"I sit at my table, eating my breakfast. The breakfast tray was brought to me earlier, by Rita. As a Handmaid, I am not allowed to eat in the kitchen with the others: it might lead to too much conversation. I am to eat alone at my own table, from a tray. Orange juice. Vitamins. Two eggs, boiled, with toast, white, and a glass of milk. The vitamins are fresh, the eggs freshly boiled."

The emphasis on freshness is pointed: this is food of quality, food that signals investment. Offred receives better food than many in Gilead — perhaps better than she ate before the Republic was established. This is deliberate. The body must be maintained in optimal condition for reproduction. The comfort is entirely instrumental.

The shopping trip as surveillance: The monthly shopping trip is one of the novel's most analyzed passages. Handmaids go to market in pairs, carrying tokens rather than cash — a food voucher system that controls what they can purchase, that creates a paper trail of their movements, and that removes any possibility of economic agency. They cannot buy more than the vouchers specify. They cannot buy things not on the approved list. They cannot enter stores other than the approved ones.

"The tokens are metal, different shapes and sizes and colors. We sort them out, count them, arrange them. The tokens are in three groups: for meat, for dairy, for vegetables... I take my tokens and I go."

The food tokens are a surveillance system masquerading as a rationing system. They are not primarily about controlling caloric intake (Handmaids are well-fed). They are about controlling movement, mapping daily activity, and ensuring that Handmaids cannot engage in any economic transaction that is not monitored and authorized. The shopping trip's primary function is surveillance of its secondary function: food acquisition.

Atwood was drawing on historical systems of this kind. Under apartheid in South Africa, the pass book system controlled the movement of Black South Africans through a documentation requirement for all movement in and out of designated areas — a movement control system masquerading as an administrative one. In the Soviet system, internal passports (propiska) controlled residence and movement, with food rationing tied to registration. Food tokens that control movement are not science fiction; they are documented historical practice.

The Martha caste — who cooks: The Marthas are the domestic servant caste of Gilead — women deemed too old or infertile to be Handmaids, assigned to domestic work in the households of Commanders. Rita and Cora are the Marthas of the Commander's household. They cook. They control the kitchen. This is significant.

The kitchen is a space from which Offred is largely excluded. She is not allowed to spend extended time there — "it might lead to too much conversation." The kitchen is community space; community is dangerous. Offred eats alone at her table. The domestically valuable skill of cooking is controlled by the Martha caste, not the Handmaid — a deliberate division that prevents the formation of solidarity through food preparation.

The Marthas' position is ambiguous and interesting. They have a form of power — the power of those who control food — that is not available to Handmaids. Rita's resentment of Offred is tinged with the resentment of one who was not deemed valuable enough for the Handmaid assignment; her control of the kitchen is one of the few forms of agency available to her. The kitchen politics of Gilead encode the power dynamics of the house in miniature.

Real-world basis

Fertility optimization and dietary control: The specific foods given to Offred — eggs, oranges, milk — correspond to actual nutritional recommendations for reproductive health. Eggs provide choline and protein; citrus provides folate; dairy provides calcium and vitamin D. Atwood has researched her reproductive medicine, and the diet she constructs for Handmaids is the diet a fertility specialist would recommend. The horror is that it is correct. The Commanders are not ignorant about nutrition. They are optimizing their investment.

Historical control of women's bodies through food: The specific management of female reproduction through food control has historical precedents. In the antebellum American South, enslaved women who had demonstrated fertility were, in some documented cases, given additional food during pregnancy to protect the investment represented by the coming child. The instrumental "care" — the provision of better nutrition for the sake of the child/property, not the woman — is precisely the logic of Gilead's fertility diet.

Contemporary fertility dietetics: The fertility diet has become a significant commercial and medical category in contemporary life: books, programs, supplements, all organized around the idea that what a woman eats affects her fertility. Atwood's Handmaid diet is a state-enforced version of what is in the 21st century a voluntary commercial market — the state has eliminated the voluntary part.

Why Atwood built the diet this way: The fertility diet is Atwood's demonstration that care and control can be the same act. The Handmaid is fed well; therefore the Handmaid is controlled. The nutrition is genuine; the intent behind it is not to benefit the Handmaid but to produce the Commander's child. This is the structure of much apparent benevolence toward women — the care that is actually investment, the protection that is actually restriction, the special treatment that is actually management.

Atwood is also describing the specific way in which women's bodily functions can be appropriated by political systems. Gilead does not control Handmaids' eating to harm them. It controls their eating to use them. The food is generous precisely because the use is complete.

Cultural legacy

The Handmaid's Tale has had an extraordinary cultural afterlife, amplified enormously by the Hulu television adaptation (beginning 2017). The red cloak and white bonnet of the Handmaid have become a standard protest costume at reproductive rights demonstrations. The food elements of the novel have been less prominent in the popular cultural adaptation but are central to the academic analysis of the work.

Reference notes

→ Fertility nutrition (eggs, citrus, dairy); → Food rationing systems; → Women and food labor history; → Market systems and economic control

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