A future where humans are a commodity food product 🍖
A well-timed set text as we enter into Halloween weekend! 🎃 Tender is the Flesh was written by Agustina Bazterrica and translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses. Not for the first time I have wondered how much richer the reader experience would be if you could read the original.
The premise for this novel is simple enough; a dystopian future where a global pandemic has rendered all animal products inedible. World governments have declared that veganism is not healthy enough to replace a meat-based diet and deployed their scientific communities to argue that meat-protein is essential for life and there is no alternative other than to consume human flesh. To serve this purpose, those governments have moved to legalise cannibalism which comes with the added ‘value’ of reducing overpopulation. The factory farms, abattoirs and food-processing plants are reopened for purpose of breeding, slaughter, and ‘processing’ of humans for meat. Some believe that the pandemic was a conspiracy, that the global elite fabricated the virus story to pave the way for depopulation. Most simply accept the narrative.
Of course, nobody wants to consider the reality of eating a fellow member of their species so a new terminology is deployed: this product is called ‘special meat’ and nobody refers to breeding and raising ‘humans’, they are referred to simply as ‘heads’. It is illegal and punishable by death (then subsequently consumed as special meat) to have ‘relations’ with the heads as this will ‘contaminate’ the product. This is also to reinforce the understanding that these ‘heads’ are not ‘humans’ they are ‘food’. After the transition, the newly bread ‘heads’ are referred to as ‘First Generation Pure’ or FGPs.
A way to read this book is signposted at the beginning of the book with a quote from Giles Deleuze:
What we see never lies in what we say
This serves two purposes: it articulates neatly the cognitive dissonance displayed in the book which reflected in our existing daily reality. Human body parts sold for food are not labelled as ‘legs’ or ‘buttocks’ but as ‘lower extremeties’ and processed food is simply ‘special meat’. Today, we apply that same approach to the way we stipulate that some animals are categorised as ‘wild’, some are ‘pets’ and some are ‘food’. Despite pigs being of a similar nature, intelligence and sentiment as dogs, we have become conditioned to consider them as ‘food’. To increase the cognitive dissonance we don’t buy ‘pig’ we buy ‘pork’ and we don’t eat ‘cow’ but instead consume ‘beef’. Lamb seemed to be an exception until I considered we don’t sit down at Easter to eat ‘the leg of a baby sheep’.
Like much of dystopian and science fiction, the text does not so much describe a fictional future but rather reflects back an already dystopian present.
Additionally, the Deleuze quote reminds us that we have invented a language that masks reality. We use language to justify why and how we categorise fellow creatures as worth more or less than each other or us. This reminded me of the very beginning of Nayar’s Posthumanism:
When humans are speciesist and treat non-human life forms as expendable, then some species of humans are also – as history shows in the form of genocides, racism and slavery – excluded from the category of the human to be then expendable. Cary Wolfe makes the comparison of forms of speciesism that is so central to critical posthumanism’s multispecies citizenship:
As long as this bumanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans aginst other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. (2003: 8)
The Deleuze quote is also actualised in the way the main character, Marcos, experiences language being used. This is neatly summarised by Lillie Gardener:
Marcos is more interested in the saying than the seeing; he parses through words to divide them into those that reveal reality and those that cover it up. He experiences people more through their language than through their appearances or roles. Marcos’s sister’s words “accumulate, one on top of the other, like folders piled on folders inside folders.” A stunner at the processing plant has “words that don’t have sharp edges.” The butcher uses “frigid, stabbing words.” After their baby died, Marcos’s wife’s “words became black holes, they began to disappear into themselves.”
And that’s just the fun part of the story. Marcos hates his work which involves the supply of Heads but needs the money to pay for the care of his father. As in today’s reality, many of us are chained by capital to jobs we despise for their capitalistic nature yet remain slaves to the wage (or dependent on people who themselves dependent the wage). The book also provides sequences of organised hunts where game parks have been reopened for the legalised hunting of humans. Humans agreed to be hunted to escape debt. If they escape, they are freed from their debts, if they are caught they are killed and (illegally) eaten then displayed as trophies. Like much of the book this seems farcical until you reflect on the grotesque reality our non-human animal fellow species are subjected to. There is also some dark misogyny and predatory behaviour that I don’t have words to describe or mask. A clever, grim but funny, thought provoking read. All the stars for this one.
