The thesis aims to examine the references to food in J.M. Coetzee’s late-apartheid works as a fertile ground for arriving at and theorizing a ‘material’ understanding of the productive functions of colonial governance and its resultant representations of identities. The question of food under colonial governance is inseparable from the dispossession of the indigenous population from their own land and possibilities of self-determination, as a result of their incorporation into a system of labour that facilitated the industrial modernisation of South Africa. The thesis explores how Coetzee’s writing attempts to contest such forced labour in the project of modernity and expansion of empire with articulations of leisure that contest the singular narrative of modernisation and progress. Additionally, the thesis investigates the question of waste, contrasting European notions of utility and resource utilisation with alternate models of embodied experience.