Make Room! Make Room! [damerell]

If Soylent Green is made from people, how often can you eat it?

In a world where the average person is short of food (but not actively dying of starvation), there won't be much meat on corpses. Conversely, I imagine that every speck of semi-edible material on a corpse is mechanically recovered. So let's say that 50kg of edible meat is obtained from the average corpse, leaving only the skeleton, which (wikipedia sa) is 14% of the body weight. Our people weighed 58 kg alive, just over 9 stone.

Life expectancy is going to be relatively short - it is a dystopia - but it's clearly not massively so from the scenes depicted. If the average life expectancy is 55, well, a bit under comes out to 20,000 days.

Wikipedia is a bit short on information on the calorific content of long pig, but various bits of pork seem to weigh in at about 350 calories per 100g.

Let us suppose that a day's Soylent Green provides 2100 calories. This is about the level provided by the WW2 rationed diet in Britain, and we know that Soylent Green is popular not least because it is more nutritious than other Soylent foodstuffs. That's 600 grams, or just over 1/80th of a person.

That suggests that on average you can expect to eat Soylent Green every 20,000 (50kg / 600g) days - every 240 days. However, it seems it is on the menu much more often.

It is possible, of course, that corpses from a wide area are shipped to New York and that Soylent Green is not available elsewhere. However, given the uncorpselike appearance of Soylent Green, I hypothesise that it is rather like a potato-heavy fishcake, containing only enough people to give it its unique flavour. Most of the wafer is clearly the usual bland soylent product.

Another explanation that suggests itself to us is that a mistake has been made. Soylent Green is made in a large factory which may carry out many kinds of food processing. It is entirely possible that the packet carries this legend:

"WARNING: made in a factory which also handles corpses. While every effort is made to avoid contamination with corpses, traces of corpse may be present."

The corpses are made into Corpse McNuggets and Corpse Kievs on the next line.

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Imagine me giving you that look and backing away slightly.

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Ooh that look, I think I'll join you!

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I didn't MAKE the movie about organised cannibalism!

Soylent Green is specifically in short supply, so there isn't enough for a standard ration per person. Also, Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow are still in circulation, so we can assume at best that SG isn't necessarily intended for more than a third of the diet at most.

Given the overpopulation problem, I think it's safe to assume that population is in decline, so the death rate is higher than the birth rate, so a long-term assumption based on life expectancy isn't the right calculation to make. Soylent Green isn't a sustainable product, it's a luxury product predicated on the use of a non-renewable resource pool while still available in large numbers.

I'm assuming a declining population as well. Of course, in society with tight population control, it's clear that soylent green is mostly made of aborted babies. (Bet you wish I hadn't mentioned that...)

I think Swift pipped Harrison to the post on that one...

I don't believe the population is declining, as discussed below.

I don't agree with your conclusion because aborted foetuses are tiny things, but let's think about the worst-case scenario:

It's clearly unproductive to actively farm babies, given the mothers' extra nutritional needs, but let us assume that we are dealing only with women who are getting pregnant anyway.

In the best case all fertile women of childbearing age (say, 1/3 of the population) are constantly pregnant. Given the exponential growth in foetal weight, it will be most productive to process them at birth, when they might weigh an average of 3kg, and perhaps each woman will produce once such baby per year (especially since she has to produce some living offspring who don't enter into this analysis). That represents, then, about 800g of meat per person per year. In my analysis above you can also expect to eat 800g of corpse per year.

Manifestly, of course, not all women we see in Soylent Green are pregnant, nor anything like it, and if babies are routinely taken away at birth there is no mention of it.

Hence I'm glad to observe that no, Soylent Green is not mostly made of aborted babies. Phew.

If I put this in a fanzine will anyone ever speak to me again? :-)

Everything's in short supply; I don't remember Green being in unusually short supply (on the days when it is available at all), and Wikipedia sa "It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties". But my analysis suggests it forms only 1/240 of the diet - far less then your 1/3.

Also, I don't believe their population is declining. Part of the point, surely, is that things just keep getting worse - that they have got to the situation depicted because their population keeps growing.

Furthermore you would need a massive excess of death over birth to get Soylent Green available one day in 5, or one day in 3. For each person who lives 1/4 on Soylent Green, say, one other person has to die every 960 days. Their population problem would be rapidly resolving itself if that was the case.

Are we told that SG is made *entirely* from people? I'd assumed its superior nutritional value was because corspe-bits were being used to make up the deficiencies (possibly minerals or amino acid balance) of the basic foodstuff, rather than being the staple. This could allow for rather greater supply than if the entire calorific requirements were coming from corpses.

Indeed, this is my contention - that only a small fraction of Solyent Green is people - so small a fraction, in fact, that people are providing only seasoning, like soy sauce. However it does also make sense that they might be introduced to prevent deficiency diseases.

"WARNING: made in a factory which also handles corpses. While every effort is made to avoid contamination with corpses, traces of corpse may be present."

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS!

The talk in the movie about the seas being dead and the later images of corpses floating face down in big tanks, not being chopped up into rashers or ground into sausage but apparently being allowed to decompose always gave me the impression that Soylent green really is made of plankton just like the company claims - corpse-fed plankton.

Assuming they have a whole food chain set up, with corpses at the bottom and plankton at the top, could the corpses be going to fertilize photosynthesising plants such as algae instead of being consumed directly? What effect would that have upon the caloric value of the result?

And what kind of filling does one put in a corpse kiev?

Also, I stumbled across this post looking for a copy of the parody fansub Boku no Sucky Sucky, which you were apparently seeding once upon a time. At a New Year's party the other day a friend was expounding upon its virtues having seen it at a convention many years ago and I told him I'd find a copy using my great ingenuity. Since it has proven a bit too obscure for my ingenuity to produce, I shall instead resort to begging.

Would you be able to furnish us with a copy by any chance?

Corpse kievs contain garlic and butter, just like a chicken kiev, only corpsier.

The fertilisation theory is a good one, but then it doesn't really explain why Green is more tasty and nutritious.

http://bt.elite.uk.com/anime/scandalous_video/boku_no_sucky_sucky_trilogy_-_23_Aug_2004.torrent should still work. If it doesn't, drop me a line. I am usually seeding it, being entirely at ease with shameless self-promotion.

I assumed they were scraping the bottom of the barrel with Red and Yellow as far as trying to extract energy from a closed system. Which is also why the fears about them 'raising people like cattle' are silly - the only reason they'd use people in the first place is because they've run out of the resources they'd need to raise *anything* like cattle.

Thermodynamics spoils this movie in much the same way Thomas Paine spoils The Return of the King.

I have had that torrent running, and uTorrent 'suspects' there is one seeder, presumably you, but it's not actually connecting to you or downloading.

OK, leave it running. I bet I've inadvertently firewalled out outside connections.

Thanks! It started working after you did that, although now it's got up to 60% and has been sitting there for a couple of days.

I fixed another problem and another half-gig or so squeezed up. Any joy, or was that someone else?

That's great, I have the whole thing now, thank you. I noticed someone else was downloading it earlier, so I'll leave it seeding for now.

"but then it doesn't really explain why Green is more tasty and nutritious"

That's just marketing.

... did you really say that in 2013?

I think you must have pointed someone at it and prompted me to re-read it.

damerell

Make Room! Make Room!

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