.jpg)
A nightmarish futuristic fantasy about the controlling power of big corporations.
In 2022, Earth is overpopulated and totally polluted; the natural resources have been exhausted, and the nourishment of the population is provided by Soylent Industries, a company that makes a food consisting of plankton from the oceans.
Most of the World's population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation, including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as "high-energy vegetable concentrates". The newest product is Soylent Green: small green wafers which are advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton". It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties but, like most other foods, in short supply which often leads to weekly food riots.
In the end it's discovered that a bizarre, disturbing secret of the ingredient used to manufacture Soylent Green.
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!
Here's what we might expect soon in the New World Order diet.
Comparison to Pre-Collapse Times
In wealthy countries, in pre-Collapse times, it was customary for people to buy most of their food at large, corporate warehouse-stores called 'supermarkets'. Often, when people see pictures of these facilities, their reaction is that the photo must be a fake. The vast size, the piles of fresh-looking and exotic vegetables, the shelves and shelves of varied boxed and bottled and immaculately wrapped products, the neatly plastic-wrapped, perfect-looking meat, it seems impossible. It's all historically accurate, though. Those images are nothing like the modern reality of going to market, and it's hard for us today to imagine how this magical fantasy land of food that our ancestors took for granted was even physically possible.
The answer to that is simple - energy. That society in a century or two burned through millions of years accumulation of fossil fuels to use machines and chemicals to rapidly grow, harvest, process and transport food, and to maintain constant refrigeration until perishable items were sold, and even then, they were also prepared to actually waste mind-boggling quantities of food. This is especially egregious when you consider that even in that privileged age, there were still people who didn't have enough to eat.
The collapse of this highly globalized and interdependent system and its replacement with an ill-prepared system of local food production and delivery, combined with the creeping stresses and increased frequency of adverse weather, the cooling of northern Europe later in the century, and, of course, the nuclear winter after the Middle East War, explains the century of famine that followed.
The New World Order has not come close to restoring the pre-Collapse global food system, but with decades to reshape the ruined global systems of the early 21st century, a global trade and transportation network, and access to the entire world, they have been able to shape a new global food system which by and large is fairly enviable relative to a purely local food system.
New World Order Food Systems Or Choices
Bugs, Bugs, And More Bugs!
Insect farming will be a more sustainable solution to help meet the world’s growing nutritional needs.
There are huge environmental benefits when compared to other animal protein sources. Farmed insects "emit less greenhouse gases, they need less land, and they need less water."
So, insects will be well-positioned to help feed the world, while having a smaller impact on the planet. And, the best part - they’re tasty!
Food, security, and diet in the New World Order will depend heavily on income and social class. We can speak in generalities before getting into those differences, but suffice it to say the types of foods that people have access to and the reliability of that access varies very markedly across income levels and geography.
Post-Collapse, food systems became very local, and especially with the various climate-related disruptions, this local supply became very vulnerable to local famines. The states that came out of the Global Collapse, and the New World Order that absorbed most of them, viewed reglobalizing the food supply as one of their single most urgent concerns, so that a crop failure in one locality would not automatically equate to a famine.
The Order partially succeeded. Pre-Collapse, a food item might travel around the world three times before ending up on a 'supermarket' shelf, and that is certainly no longer the case. The Order avoids relying on refrigeration and extremely rapid transport, but durable foodstuffs might travel over very long distances by train and by wind-electric ocean liner to get to market. In any given locality, the food available in the market will still be heavily dominated by local production. But in recent years, famine has become unheard of, at least in urban centers and areas of strong NWO control, and that is in no small part due to the reglobalization of some staple food supplies.
Foods that are available in the market will be foods that can keep a long time at room temperature, such as dried flours and beans, bottled and canned preserves, and cured and fermented products. Fresh foods like fresh vegetables will be available when in season, or else vegetables like potatoes, onions and carrots that can be stored for longer periods of time under cool but not reliably refrigerated conditions will sometimes be stockpiled.
It is very common for people to buy or grow fresh food and then do their own preserves, which if not done correctly can lead to problems like botulism. There is always a little element of fear with home preserves, but they're an important part of most families' diets.
People except for the very wealthy generally don't have electric refrigerators, because they are out of most people's economic means, and because frequent power outages make them less useful, anyway. Freezers can actually hold 0 ºC for a long time until everything thaws and are slightly more popular and useful. Iceboxes and ice delivery services have made a major comeback, and a sort of hybrid electric refrigerator/icebox is popular with the professional class. Anyone who can manage it has a cold cellar, but this doesn't work in many geographic locations. Communal electric coldrooms with locked cages that charge a monthly rent are popular in some communities.
People typically go to a neighborhood market for food that will often have some kind of backup power to enable it to keep food cold more reliably. Fresh, perishable food is purchased somewhat rarely, either in season or for special occasions, and it will usually be eaten right away. In Europe, it's normal to go to the market for small purchases relatively frequently as opposed to buying a lot of food all at once. In some centers, markets may be larger, like a small version of the old supermarket, and in other cases, they are a laborious matter of going from stall to stall buying what you need from different merchants.
Meat eating is much reduced from pre-Collapse levels, where in the wealthier countries, a meal just wasn't considered complete without meat. There are some ideological reasons for this, as many today are vegetarian. Also there are some who are concerned about animal cruelty, although, in general, the early 21st century represented a high water mark for concern for animals, and this sort of reasoning isn't as popular today. Largely, though, it's due to the cost of meat, and a concerted state-sponsored campaign to get people to eat less meat to reduce their environmental impact.
With the exception of those who object for moral or philosophical reasons, though, meat eating, as well as dairy and eggs, is a status symbol for the elite class, and they consume a lot of meat (although not to the levels of pre-Collapse diets), which in turn tends to make the lower classes desire it as well, particularly the professional classes, who will tend to eat dried or salted meat, and fresh meat on special occasions. In many areas, dairy and eggs may be more available to the lower classes than other forms of animal products, and products like dried bouillon for flavor.
Generally speaking, the Order doesn't license or allow very much fishing at all, and fish farming is incredibly tightly regulated. It took the Order years to dismantle the global fishing industry - they practically had to patrol the seas and sink fishing boats on sight to make a dent in it. However, the damage to global fisheries is done, and global marine ecosystems are still absolutely decimated. Only the very richest people typically get to eat fish and other seafoods, at least legally, because the prices are astronomical. Most people would be disgusted by the idea anyway, because they are no longer used to thinking of fish as food.
One food item that never went away in much of the world and has made a big debut in the former West is insects, for example, crickets, they are an important source of protein in many people's diets.
Agricultural Production
Family-scale farms, subsistence farming and gardening still have a large presence in much of the world, especially in the backwaters where NWO control is weak, but in much of the world, agriculture is substantially large-scale and corporatised. It is a heavily regulated industry, and because the New World Order bases much of its legitimacy on its ability to impose long-term sustainability, massive monocultures are generally not permitted.
The NWO simply doesn't have the energy reserves or economy to sustain mechanized agriculture at the pre-Collapse scale. Instead, it solves the problem of mass food production by throwing massive amounts of manual labor at it, as was still common in lower-wage pre-Collapse societies. In the Order, it is common for many of these people to be stuck in an extremely restrictive labor contracts that make them virtual slaves, and they do not have a good life. An enormous amount of the food security of the Order as a whole depends on this form of slave labor. Even those who are not held in virtual slavery are still heavily exploited.
Similarly, chemical fertilizers and pesticides are problematic for the Order to use on a large scale. Instead, the Order relies on crop rotation and mixing, on planting many varieties as in the theory the pests won't be able to go after them all equally, and on the extensive use of both old-fashioned selective breeding and highly sophisticated genetic engineering. There is hardly a plant-based food item that humans eat in the Order that hasn't been adulterated with human gene manipulation in some way.
Cuisine
The Global Collapse and the rise of the New World Order led to huge population movements and things being mixed up in general, and cuisine is no exception. Ethnically homogeneous societies are practically unheard of today, and while there has been some efforts to maintain recognizable styles of cuisine, there has been an awesome amount of culinary syncretism, and even food that is advertised as belonging to a particular tradition typically has some element of culinary fusion to it.
Spices are typically a food item that can be effectively stored and transported long distances, and the Order is generally quite successful at making a wide variety of spices available at fairly affordable prices worldwide, especially in cities. The exact availability may vary, though, which tends to encourage experimentation to find a way to work with whatever is available at any given time. Any spices grown and produced locally will be more available and more heavily used in any given locale.
For these reasons, as a generality, food in the Order is really good compared to what it could be. People may have had to get used to making do without fresh, perishable ingredients a lot of the time, but they have learnt to do some pretty amazing things with preserves and other durable foodstuffs, and the combination of the greater variety of food available and the historic cuisines of the world coming together and mingling has led to some pretty impressive results.
There is still a huge amount of regional variation in NWO cuisine, often depending on what preserved foods are most available in that area and what fresh food is grown locally, and also just depending on the history and mix of cultures in the area. If anything, food is much less homogenized in the Order than it was in pre-Collapse times, as the Order has no equivalent of the 'fast food' of earlier times, that has died out, and it actually lacks a global cuisine to replace the starchy, fatty, salty and meaty American cuisine of the previous era.
Street food is everywhere in the towns and cities, and it is delicious, but be careful, it's not always safe to eat, and you are taking your chances until your body acclimates to the local pathogens. With that caveat, it is still highly recommended. The locals typically don't have any problems eating it and once you get past an often difficult phase of getting used to it, you will probably like it, too.
If you are vegetarian, or just squeamish about common food items like bugs, you can say 'we se uzreslek', 'I am a vegetarian'. Vegetarianism is common in the Order and if people know you're vegetarian they can and will normally easily accommodate you. If you want vegan food, though, make sure to specify 'we se zra uzreslek', otherwise, people will tend to assume certain animal byproducts are fine.
Also:
Soylent Green Synopsis - The Movie
.jpg)
In the year 2022, the population has grown to 40 million people in New York City alone. Most housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and the homeless fill the streets and line the fire escapes, stairways of buildings, abandoned cars, subway platforms, etc. Unemployment is at around 50%. Summers are oppressively hot and humid with temperatures over 90F degrees during the day and night due to Earth's recent climate change resulting from the Greenhouse Effect. Food, as we know it in this present time, is a rare and expensive commodity. Technology is at a standstill as most of planet Earth's natural resources are gone including most trees. Most of the World's population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation, including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as "high-energy vegetable concentrates". The newest product is Soylent Green: small green wafers which are advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton". It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties but, like most other foods, in short supply which often leads to weekly food riots.
Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a New York City Police Department detective from the 14th Precinct who lives in a dilapidated, cramped one-room apartment with his aged friend and roommate, Solomon "Sol" Roth (Edward G. Robinson). Roth is a former college professor whose job is to sort through the now-disordered remnants of written records and books to help Thorn's investigations. Roth and his like are known as "books." He tells Thorn about the time before the ecological disaster and population crisis of the early 2000s, when real food was plentiful, although Thorn is generally not interested in the stories, finding most of them too hard to believe.
Thorn is assigned to investigate the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a 68-year-old wealthy lawyer living in a luxury high-rise apartment building called Chelsea Towers West. At the crime scene, Thorn first talks with the building superintendent Charles (Philip Stone) about discovering the body. Charles leads Thorn to the 22nd floor and to Simonson's apartment which is 22A. Thorn finds Simonson lying in a pool of blood after having been struck multiple times in the back of the head with a sharp object which is speculated to be a meat hook or an ax. Instead of looking for clues, the poorly paid detective helps himself to the wealthy man's food, liquor and books and even enjoys taking a shower (with real hot water and soap). He questions Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), an attractive 23-year-old "concubine" (euphemistically known as "furniture") who comes with the apartment, and Simonson's bodyguard, Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), who claims that he was told to escort Shirl on a shopping trip when the attack took place. The sanitation crew led by Wagner arrives to take Simonson's dead body away, as Thorn leaves after collecting a written statement from Fielding.
Returning to his apartment, Thorn gives Roth the Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019, a two-volume work which he took from Simonson's apartment. Thorn returns to work at the 14th Precinct during that evening where they're hundreds of people lining up to collect death benefit money from recently diseased friends and family members. Thorn talks to his superior officer, Lieutenant Hatcher (Brock Peters), telling him that he suspects the Simonson homicide may have been an assassination, since nothing was stolen from the apartment and the murder seemed professional. Thorn also finds it odd that the luxury apartment's sophisticated alarm and monitoring electronics, including the building's security cameras, happened to be inoperative on the night of the murder, and Simonson's bodyguard just happened to be out of the apartment at the time. Thorn confides in Lt. Hatcher that he suspects that Fielding might have had something to do with Simonson's murder.
The next day, Thorn stakes out Fielding's apartment building and sees him leave. Thorn lets himself into Fielding's apartment where he questions Fielding's live-in "furniture", Martha (Paula Kelly), about his work for Simonson. Thorn returns to his own apartment to eat an evening meal of the purloined food taken from Simonson's apartment that Roth prepares for them. Afterwards, Roth tells Thorn about the research he did on the murder victim and that Simonson was a member of the board of directors of the Soylent Corporation. When he presents Roth with a spoon of strawberry jam surreptitiously palmed from Fielding's apartment, Roth tastes it and declares that Fielding's "furniture" is eating some "$150-a-jar" strawberry jam, which is an out-of-place luxury for the mistress of a bodyguard.
That evening, Thorn returns to the Chelsea Towers West to question Shirl, who tells him that Simonson became deeply troubled in the days before his death, even taking her to a local Catholic church. Shirl is throwing a party in Simonson's vacant apartment for the other "furniture" girls of the building. Just then, Charles arrives and begins yelling and hitting the women for slacking off until Thorn arrives back in the living room to stop Charles from hurting the girls anymore. After sending Charles and the rest of the furniture girls away, Thorn returns to Shirl and they make love.
A little later that same evening, Thorn goes to a local Catholic Church (teeming with hundreds of homeless people) and attempts to question the priest (Lincoln Kirkpatrick) about Simonson's confession, but the priest is almost catatonic with exhaustion and has a hard time remembering Simonson, even though Simonson, as a rich man, would have stood out among the impoverished people who normally frequent the church. When the priest remembers Simonson, he tells Thorn the memory of what Simonson told him during confession which is haunting him, and he is unable to describe what Simonson said to him because it was "too horrible". The next day, Fielding goes to the church and murders the priest in the confessional booth to ensure he never talks again.
The next morning, as Thorn begins uncovering more evidence as to why Simonson was murdered, New York State's Governor, Joseph Santini (Whit Bissell), who was once Simonson's partner in a high-profile law firm and who is running for re-election (as shown in the campaign posters on such walls as that of Hatcher's office), instructs Hatcher to close the investigation. However, Thorn continues his investigation into the murder. When Governor Santini learns that Thorn refuses to close the case of the Simonson murder, he orders his chief of security, Donovan (Roy Jensen), to have Thorn murdered.
When Thorn is on riot duty during the Tuesday distribution of Soylent Green rations, Simonson's murderer, Gilbert (Stephen Young), a local assassin-for-hire whom was the one that Donovan contracted to murder Simonson, attacks Thorn and fires several shots at him with a silenced pistol as a food riot begins. Thorn chases his attacker into the thick crowd as large dump trucks called "scoops" designed by the NYC Riot Police, arrive to pick up closely packed rioters and "scoop" them into the trucks. But before Thorn can capture Gilbert, who manages to wound Thorn by shooting him in his right calf, the assassin is crushed to death under the "scoop" of one of the riot control vehicles.
Thorn goes back to Fielding's apartment and beats him and his mistress Martha for the attempt on his life. Thorn then goes back to Shirl at Simonson's apartment where she removes the bullet and stitches his wound. Shirl tells Thorn that a new tenant will be arriving soon at the apartment and is hoping to move in, but she has romantic feelings for Thorn. Thorn tells Shirl that he will let her know if she wants to stay with him or the new tenant of Simonson's apartment. After resting for about an hour, Thorn leaves the apartment into the evening as sirens for the nightly curfew begin sounding. Sometime later a new potential tenant, a brash high-class businessman, arrives at the apartment and questions Shirl about herself and describes his daily details should he decide move in and want to keep her as "furniture".
Meanwhile, Roth examines Soylent's oceanographic reports at the Supreme Exchange, a library and gathering place for fellow "books." The "books" and Roth finally realize that the reports indicate a "horrible" truth which, despite reading it for themselves, they find nearly impossible to believe; Soylent Green isn't made from plankton, it's made from human bodies. Unable to live with what he has uncovered, Roth opts for assisted suicide at a government clinic (in the former Madison Square Garden, which had been converted to a clinic for mass euthanasia), a process referred to as "going home". As Roth is dying, he watches video clips of Earth long ago when animal (sheep, deer, and horses) and plant life was thriving and there was no pollution, while listening to light classical music.
Thorn returns to his apartment and finds a note from Roth that he is "going home". Thorn races to the clinic and forces one staff attendant (Dick Van Patten) to allow him to see and talk to Roth. During Roth's final moments, he tells Thorn the secret of Soylent Green, and begs him to follow his body to the processing center and report back to the Supreme Exchange so they can take the information to the Council of Nations to take action.
Thorn sneaks into the basement of the assisted suicide facility, where he sees corpses being loaded onto waste disposal trucks. He secretly hitches a ride on one, which is driven to a heavily guarded waste disposal plant just outside the city. The black-clad sanitation drivers are escorted at gunpoint out of the truck where a white-clad plant worker takes over driving. The sanitation worker is escorted to another truck leaving the fortress-like facility to drive back to the city. Once inside the plant, Thorn sees how the corpses are processed into Soylent Green wafers. They are loaded onto a conveyor belt and driven through a large machine about several hundred yards long, and the Soylent Green wafers come out on the other end. But Thorn is spotted by two plant workers and is chased. Thorn kills one and subdues another before he escapes from the plant just when the alarm is sounded.
Thorn returns to the teeming city and heads for the Supreme Exchange to report what he found, but is ambushed by Fielding and three other gunmen (all of whom presumably work for the government and are also aware and are trying to conceal the secret about Soylent Green). Thorn manage to get to a police payphone and call Shirl to tell her that he loves her and to stay with the new tenant whom wants to rent Simonson's vacant apartment. Thorn also manages to place a second call to Lt. Hatcher at the 14th Precinct to tell him where he is and that he is being attacked, but then gets cut off when the assassins close in.
During a chase through the deserted streets and alleys (cleared of people because of the government-imposed dusk to dawn curfew), Thorn manages to kill all the gunmen chasing him except for Fielding who shoots Thorn in the back. He retreats into a cathedral filled with homeless people and Fielding follows him. After a desperate fight through throngs of sleeping homeless, Thorn kills Fielding by stabbing him with a rusted kitchen knife.
When police backup arrives at the church, the seriously wounded and nearly hysterical Thorn confides to Lt. Hatcher the horrible secret behind Soylent Green, while Hatcher looks on with disbelief. As Thorn is being carried away by the police on a stretcher to a local hospital, he urges to Hatcher to spread the word and shouts out to the spectators: "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!! We've got to stop them... SOMEHOW!!!"
