Eat the poor: The dystopian world of cannibalism and capitalism

Book Review: Tender is the Flesh - Augustina Baztericca

Needed a book for a four hour train ride so picked this up after seeing it on here a few times. And boy was it weird.

Tender is the flesh is about a world in which animal meat is no longer edible due to a virus and so the consumption of human meat becomes the standard practice. The book imagines what the commodification of human meat would like, describing the rearing process, the slaughter process (almost like any other mundane procedure of day to day life) all the way to the euphemistic name it is referred to by consumers; “special meat”.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating in saying that this book made me feel a little ill. Not only because of the detail in which the process of human meat becoming a source of consumption is described, but by the fact that none of it felt so implausible. The way in which capitalism attaches monetary value to human beings and everything attached to life, the book and its hellish, dystopian setting felt so realistic in its imaginings of what such a world would look like for a society so gluttonous and so detached from the earth. The silent but unnerving theme throughout the book is the way that there is collective consent from society that eating humans, particularly the most marginalised in society, is…