In 1973, Hollywood imagined just such an environmental disaster scenario in Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston. His character, Frank Thorn, is a policeman in the hyper-crowded city of New York, circa 2022. Real food is now an extremely rare extravagance and most of the population subsists on nutrition wafers—including everybody’s new favorite, Soylent Green. With the aid of his old friend Sol (the incomparable Edward G. Robinson, in his last role), Thorn is working on the murder of a rich Soylent Corporation executive.
During his examination of the crime scene, Thorn removes some “evidence” from the executive’s apartment. This includes real food, a bottle of bourbon, and a classified oceanographic survey, dated 2016. Sol and his cronies (a group of like researchers referred to as “Books”) learn that the oceans are dead and therefore unable to produce the algal protein from which Soylent Green is reputedly made. They speculate on the real ingredients and the news is not good. Heartbroken, Sol shuffles off to a government euthanasia center, downs a lethal cocktail, and dies, but not before he whispers his secret into Thorn’s ear. Outside the building, the cop sneaks into the back of a truck supposedly transporting the bodies of the euthanized to a crematorium, but instead it heads straight to the Soylent manufacturing facility where Sol’s dying words are confirmed.
“They’re making our food out of people!” Thorn tells a fellow cop (after the requisite gun battle). “Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle.” Seriously wounded, Thorn is carried away on a stretcher, screaming what would become the American Film Institute’s 77th most famous quote in movie history.
“Soylent Green is people!”
Though the special effects are dated and the action is reduced to the standard cop chases the bad guys, Soylent Green remains a scary 1970s take on an Earth ravaged by climate change, pollution, and overpopulation. It is a nightmare vision that comes complete with government-sanctioned cannibalism—embraced and efficiently carried out by Big Business.
And now for a bit of 21st-century speculation, which might sound hypocritical coming from someone who’s been trying to avoid cannibal-related sensationalism for the past 19 chapters.
Since cannibalism is a completely normal response to severe stress, especially during times of famine and warfare, how much of a surprise would it be if the butchery of humans for food becomes commonplace in drought-ridden and overpopulated regions of the near-future Earth? According to sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, famine-related cannibalism occurred 11 times in Europe between 793 CE and 1317 CE, as well as in “ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, Persia, India, China and Japan.”
In a world where global climate change is taking place before our very eyes, there may be little to prevent famine-related cannibalism from happening again, especially in the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. Even scarier, knowing what we know about spongiform encephalopathies like kuru, as well as what we don’t know, the consequences of widespread cannibalism would likely extend beyond the horrific images that would find their way onto the nightly news and social media. Could something like kuru become an epidemic on an even wider scale than it did in New Guinea? According to biological anthropologist Simon Underdown, it might have happened already.
Underdown thinks that it is possible that not all of the victims of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) were burger-chomping Brits or New Guineans whose Stone Age lifestyles lasted well into the 20th century. He suggests that some of those victims may actually have lived in the Stone Age, and that their disappearance some 30,000 years ago may have been hastened by the widespread practice of cannibalism and a kurulike epidemic that resulted from the behavior.
Underdown summarized his hypothesis by first reminding me that “most of us have shifted to the idea that there were a number of Neanderthal extinctions, taking place at different times and at different locations.” There is also evidence, he said, that Neanderthals “engaged in cannibalism to some degree.” Having established a potential route for the contraction of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, Underdown suggested that, in addition to the actual consumption of diseased individuals, disease transmission might have occurred through the use of stone tools contaminated by the blood and tissue of infected individuals. Like Shirley Lindenbaum’s explanation for how kuru was spread along trade routes and through the movement of individuals between groups, Underdown hypothesized that similar actions could have introduced “new clusters of TSE infection” into the small, spread-out groups of Neanderthals.