Some Knowledge

Soylent Green, dystopian fantasy or grim vision of the future?  Made in 1973 and starring Charleton Heston and Edward G Robinson, Soylent Green is one of the classic movies of all time.  The film depicts an overpopulated world filled with pollution, where food is not generally available.  The vast majority of people exist on a diet of processed food products made by the multinational Soylent corporation.

Even though this movie is a darkly-themed piece of cinema, I still like it.  I think the concept is pretty funny actually.  The idea that you could feed people the processed bodies of the dead is pretty ridiculous.  How exactly do you turn meat into a cracker?  They must mix the dead bodies with a lot of filler like corn or soybeans, or as the company claims, plankton.  This kind of recycling just would not work in principle.  A person eats far more than their own weight in a year.  Sure, it might improve the flavor of soybeans, but still, the human flesh in the cracker is not going to be a big proportion of the caloric content.

Perhaps the funniest element in this movie is the way people riot for this great-tasting food product.  They actually used some kind of bucket loader to scoop up rioters looking to get more Soylent Green.  Sure, it’s pretty macabre to think of people fighting over human flesh for food, but at the same time it’s ridiculous and absurd.  If food were really so rare and expensive, people would dig up their lawns and plant potatoes.

The theme of this movie is anything but funny.  What would the world be like if there were ten times as many people as today?  What would everybody eat?  How would a government control crowds of rioting and starving persons?  Reality is different than movies.  There is no physical way for the world to become overpopulated.  The amount of available food limits population.  If there is not enough food to feed people, they die.  This limits population to a sustainable level.  Disease and crime also increase in crowded conditions, further reducing the number of people.  Then there are always the wars various governments foist off on people.

Soylent Green could have been a better movie.  Instead of turning it into a detective story, they could have done the movie from the point of view of the Soylent Corporation.  It might have been funnier to watch busy executives arguing over the laws of supply and demand as they go about grinding up bodies for food.  At the same time, it might have been worse that way.  Money should not grant one person privilege over another person’s life.  But that’s the way the world operates.

I don’t think the world will ever degenerate to the point where we have to recycle dead people into food.  Most people would be revolted by the very idea.  In a world where so many people are without food, what is needed is better management of the resources that we have.  If some company actually started making food products out of algae, we might have an alternative to land-based agriculture.  If I made crackers out of algae, I know what I would want to call them.  If I get anything out of this movie in the way of an idea, it’s that there is always some way to supply what people need.  If people ever want to eat tasty green crackers, or are forced to eat these things by necessity, some company will appear to manufacture the product.