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damerell at 03:28am on 17/12/2009
damerell at 03:28am on 17/12/2009If 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.
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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