Soylent Green is People!

The current world food price turns out to be serious enough to warrant a statement from the IMF. Thankfully, we do not have riots on the streets of KL yet, thanks to both the government’s price controls as well as our relative prosperity. While talking with my parents over my late afternoon “breakfast”, my father joked that with more and more of the world’s food production diverted towards producing biofuel, we may soon end up having to survive on nutrient pills. That comment reminded my mother about a movie they watched years ago.

My parents have already told me about the movie so many times before that I knew what my mother was talking about even before she was halfway through her sentence. It is a 1973 movie called Soylent Green (for a moment I thought it was really cool that one of the movies my parents remember most vividly is a science fiction cult classic).

Starring the recently departed Charlton Heston, the movie is set in New York City in the year 2022, when overpopulation and pollution leads to, among other things, severe food shortage. While the rich and powerful can still afford fresh food, the rest of the population only survive on processed food rations; the most popular of which is Soylent Green, square green wafers supposedly made from plankton. Heston plays an NYPD detective, who while investigating a murder discovers that Soylent Green is in fact made from – wait for it – recycled human beings.

I’d say, now is about the perfect time they show the movie again, don’t you think?