Soylent Green America
What’s On the Menu for America (Hint: It’s not tofu)
This year’s July 4th Roman candle was the Internet meme of Chris Christie lounging on a South Jersey beach transformed by the magic of Photoshop into the final scene of Planet of the Apes. Funny, yes, but a meme signaling that we had moved beyond failed state politics to the end of civilization itself — not outside the realm of the possible, given Trump’s silverback posturing with nuclear-armed North Korea, but hardly cause for celebration, with hotdogs or without.
Don’t get me wrong. Planet of the Apes looms large in my childhood cultural pantheon. But I respectfully suggest that another schlock sci-fi 70s movie is more apropos: Soylent Green. A parable, like so many sci-fi tales, 1973’s Soylent Green made cannibalism the touchstone for society’s ills, and the film lodged in our collective unconscious. As it turns out, Soylent Green was more prescient than any of us realized, rendering a future when we are all food for corporations.
For the longest time, I didn’t know if I had actually seen the movie, or if I merely thought I had seen it because of my younger brother’s blow-by-blow description. Like many adolescent boys, Adam was heavily into comic books and sci-fi. Raised by wolves in Manhattan in the 1970s, we had books, movies, and each other. I’d be lying on my bed reading a novel and Adam would appear in my doorway, intent on telling me about a movie or the latest Robert Heinlein book. Adam was one of those visual processors incapable of narrative. He had to tell me every single thing he remembered about the book or movie, but he rarely delivered these details in order. Since he was, like, thirteen, he remembered a lot. “Oh, yeah, wait a minute…” he would say, ignoring my sighs and eye rolls.
All this is to explain that I first experienced Soylent Green in the Homeric tradition of oral storytelling. Perhaps because of the leisurely pace — I mean, these retellings went on forever — I imprinted on the story. In 2022, Earth is overpopulated and food is scarce, thanks to pollution and the greenhouse effect. (You heard me right: the greenhouse effect.) Charlton Heston is a New York City cop who stumbles onto the suspicious murder of an executive with Soylent Industries, a mega-corporation that supplies the food bars supposedly made from plankton that comprise the diet for the majority of people. Only the rich eat real food, comfortably ensconced in high-rise buildings with hot water and young prostitutes called “furniture” and included in the rent.
You know the rest — everyone does, including the Tucson diner waitress who chimed in when she overheard me talking about the movie with a friend. “Soylent Green is people!” Get the message? It isn’t just Africa, folks, or Papua New Guinea, or Burma. Pretending cannibalism is confined to so-called primitive societies is the West’s most potent form of “othering.” Like the Donner Party, when times are tough, we Americans eat each other, too.
In 1973, it was Soylent Green’s Malthusian warning that people remembered. Now the glaring disparity between rich and poor resonates: those rewarded by the Soylent Corporation and the rest of us. After watching the movie last night, I could not stop thinking about the images of the poor — dirty, sick, dying — in the punishing heat of a New York City overcome by climate change. When Charlton Heston’s cop enters a church to grill the priest about the business executive’s last confession, the priest says, “We don’t see rich people here anymore. There’s not even enough room for the poor.”
The only clean place in this spiritually bankrupt New York is the Soylent Green factory, where Heston’s friend, a Holicaust survivor played by Edward G. Robinson, goes to die. There, a refreshingly wholesome, low-tech version of virtual reality — like a montage of 70s deodorant ads — transfixes Heston, who stares open-mouthed at the Nature he has never experienced: fields of flowers, rivers, mountains.
This was Edward G. Robinson’s last film role. When he made Soylent Green, he reportedly knew he had terminal cancer, and as I watched his death scene, I couldn’t help thinking of the bait and switch known as hospice. Unless their families are prepared to pay $150,000 to $250,000 a year, the American medical system is pushing people with terminal illnesses out of nursing homes, pretending they’ll receive the same quality of care from beleaguered relatives as they would from doctors, nurses, and health care aides. The term hospice, with its connotations of warm blankets and scented candles, sanitizes the ugly reality: nursing homes are run by corporations, even the ones bearing the imprimatur of religious organizations, and if mom or dad doesn’t contribute sufficiently to the bottom line, they’re thrown out to die. We haven’t gotten to the point of eating them, but once the Baby Boomers hit the skids, who knows what the future holds?
Soylent Green lodged itself in my unconscious, and in my brother’s, not only because it presaged the future but because it evoked the deep past. Thinking about this essay, I recalled a black and white film I had seen about inhabitants of a remote island. The film had that grainy anthropological vibe, and the takeaway was that these people used every part of the shark for something — bones to make sewing needles, cartilage for glue.
Plus ça change. A recent fad among chefs is cooking the entire animal. You can find the directions online.
Perhaps the issue is not cannibalism, that cultural shibboleth, but the dreaded phrase market efficiency. In Africa, word eat runs the predatory gamut, from literal eating to any transactional relationship — and aren’t most of our relationships transactional now? It’s Our Turn to Eat is the title of journalist Michela Wrong’s epic takedown of corruption in Kenya, which reads like a playbook for the Trump administration.
Apart from the details, humans are all the same: we are animals, just like the squirrels in Rod Blackburn’s garage. I asked Blackburn, an ethnologist, if he could offer insight into “eating” as a metaphor. Blackburn, who discovered the existence of a hunter gatherer tribe in Kenya, told me the “using all the parts” thing is pretty much de rigeur whether you’re a a hunter-gatherer or a CEO.
“When I hunted with the Okiek, I killed a wildebeest,” Rod said cheerily. “They used everything — except the horns. The horns over my garage now. But they’re being used. The squirrels climb on them to get to the hayloft. They eat everything up there!”
