Never in Your Favour: Precarity, Trust, and Consumption in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy

Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy depicts a world of precarity. Through her construct of the authoritarian Capitol, Collins outlines a particular brand of totalitarian rule that operates not predominantly through fear, as might typically be expected within dystopian fiction, but through denying its citizens the opportunity to form trust bonds. Key to this strategy is the Capitol’s manipulation of foodways: both actual foodstuffs, and the cultural and political systems surrounding their acquisition and consumption. Reading the trilogy and its foodways through the lens of trust theory, this article argues for a new interpretation of Collins’s dystopia. Exploring the shifting control of food in The Hunger Games enables us to witness the micro-negotiations and transitions of trust that take place within the trilogy, which are closely linked to its emphasis on embodiment, community, and self-knowledge. The close connection between such negotiations and the figure of the child or adolescent, and the cultural work he or she is invoked to perform, suggests the significant value of trust as a critical tool through which we might nuance the operations of dystopian and utopian modes within the young adult novel.