Our Cannibals, Ourselves by Priscilla L. Walton

Author:Priscilla L. Walton [Walton, Priscilla L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780252092787
Google: D4VdxG2-Cy8C
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2010-10-01T05:36:11+00:00

4. Dog Eat Dog: Mad Cow Disease

Although consumers may be attracted to vampiric characteristics, the same cannot be said for cannibalistic products. Indeed, far from dramatizing the seductive lure of the flesh-eater, many popular films flag cultural repugnance for various types of “food,” including the 1973 feature Soylent Green, which focuses on a future wherein population growth exceeds food supply, and humanity must consume itself. Soylent Green follows the investigation of a police officer, named Simonson (played by Charlton Heston), into a widely distributed “miracle food” called “soylent green.” When Simonson breaks into a food plant, he discovers that the source of “soylent green” is dead bodies. In the film’s conclusion, Simonson runs through the streets of New York, screaming, “They’re eating people! They’re eating people.” He is promptly shot for revealing the “secret,” and Simonson’s death throes fill the final frames of the film, leaving viewers with the presumption that his body will become a part of the next batch of soylent green.1

Although the future Soylent Green depicts has not yet come to pass, cannibalism has become indelibly intertwined with the food chain. In 1995, the world watched, aghast, as researchers revealed how the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) had become linked to the consumption of beef. In the United Kingdom, this phenomenon, commonly called mad cow disease, was particularly rampant, forcing the government to destroy the country’s beef herds. CJD had spread through new and improved agricultural measures, measures that included “cost-saving devices” such as feeding beef products to cows and thereby infecting herds with the disease. As Richard Rhodes notes in Deadly Feasts, a future riddled with CJD is a bleak future indeed. Quoting a speculative editorial published in the London Observer in 1996, Deadly Feasts draws a potential scenario for 2016:

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