In his popular science fiction serial Black Empire, published pseudonymously in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938, the satirist George Schuyler associates the light-skinned love interest with hydroponic produce and science kitchens. The tragic mulatta, an icon of nineteenth-century fiction, becomes in twentieth-century fiction a racial representative pointing the way to a hybrid future. However, the raw foods diet also generates a paradox: the modern mulatta is both pure and primitive, abnegating and appetitive; Schuyler’s fiction and his mixed-race daughter Philippa’s childhood celebrity both reveal a discomfort with women’s bodies and desires that might exceed the bounds of rational control.