Are we on our way to Soylent Green?

In 1973, the American film director Richard Fleischer released the film Soylent Green, based on the 1966 science-fiction novel Make room! Make room! written by Harry Harrison, although there are quite a few differences between the book and its film adaptation. This dystopian film describes a future society (it’s supposed to happen in the year 2022, i.e. just now) where there is a very serious problem of overpopulation (New York alone is inhabited by 40 million people), which leads to a huge food shortage.

The Soylent Company, which appears in the film's title, centralizes the production of food obtained from concentrated vegetables, and markets them under names that depend on their color: Soylent yellow, Soylent red and Soylent green. Every time this last product is put up for sale, there is an avalanche of buyers, many of whom cannot acquire it, because stocks are quickly depleted.

The protagonist of the film (represented by Charlton Heston) is a New York City policeman who lives with his assistant, an older ex-professor (Edward G. Robinson), who investigates the murder of one of the top managers of the Soylent Company and discovers that the Soylent green product is made by recycling meat from human corpses. To prove to his friend that what he says is true, he submits to voluntary euthanasia and orders him to follow his corpse. Thus the protagonist discovers that all the corpses are transferred to the Soylent company facilities, where they are converted into Soylent Green. But when Heston tries to make public his macabre discovery, he is attacked and badly wounded, while the public ignores his warnings.

Charlton Heston

It is obvious that the screenwriter of the film, who introduced the topic of cannibalism, considers this situation inconceivable, but wishes us to avoid excessive population growth and destruction of the environment, because otherwise we could fall into similar atrocities. It’s true that things are not as serious as were expected half a century ago: neither the population has increased so much, nor we suffer from food shortages: the number of hungry people seems to be decreasing, rather than increasing: in 2009 it was calculated at 1 billion, and in 2018 at 820 million, despite the increase in world population during those years.

Are we far from Soylent Green? Perhaps not as much as we'd like to think. In a recent news item, the use of human corpses to make compost is proposed. In defense of this procedure, it is argued that it’s more environmentally friendly than burial or cremation. And they add that almost 2 cubic meters of fertilizer can be obtained from each corpse. Even more could be obtained (for instance, by using also the bones) if advanced industrial methods are employed. The bacteria that decompose the corpses raise the temperature to such an extent that pathogenic germs in the corpse cannot survive, with one exception: prions do maintain their pathogenic state, so all those who have died as a result of a prion disease should be excluded from this procedure: scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).

As our society evolves at a rate unprecedented in human history (although we should take care where we go, for we could end up in the abyss), the use of corpses as compost was approved during 2019 in the state of Washington, where there is already a company (Recompose) based in Seattle, which hopes to start soon to process human corpses for use as compost.

Perhaps before long we’ll run the risk of ending in Soylent Green.

The same post in Spanish
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Manuel Alfonseca