If you don't know anything about the movie Soylent Green, it's likely for the last line. "Soylent Green is people," lead actor Charlton Heston bellows as he is carried away on a stretcher, simultaneously becoming a meme and summing up the plot so thoroughly that there's little need to watch the rest of the film. Heston's detective character discovers that Soylent Green is not made from plankton as the manufacturer claims.
The year Soylent Green is set in is not well known. When Hollywood told us that millions of New Yorkers would be fighting each other over bars made from the finest processed human, we reached the point. The movie's main premise has been successfully avoided by humanity, as evidenced by the next NYC fashion week. The Omicron variant sounds like a movie by Heston.
Does this mean that Soylent Green has no idea about the 21st century world? Not so fast. The Los Angeles of 2019: the movie's setting is a mixed bag. Let's open it and sniff it.
Wrong, Soylent Green. Right: Soylent.
It turns out that soylent green is mint chocolate. Credit: soylent
Let's get this out of the way, we know there's a meal replacement shake called Soylent. Rob Rhinehart, a busy software engineer who wanted to eat healthy without consuming regular food, created Soylent, which is bland, powdery mush with a variety of masking flavors. Many users complained of gastrointestinal issues, which led to multiple Soylent product recalls. The company blamed the ingredient close to the plankton that the movie's food product was supposed to contain.
There is a key difference here. Rhinehart took the name from Make Room. Soylent Green is not based on Make Room!, a 1968 novel by sci-fi author Harry Harrison. There is no corporate cannibalism in the book. Soylent steaks are a meat substitute made from soy and lentils. Sound familiar? It should. The main ingredient in theImpossible burger is soy. Mung beans are similar to lentils. There are no reports of riots when supermarkets run out of Impossible beef bricks.
The future of eating was not predicted in the movie. In New York, Heston is able to smuggle one black market apple, a slim steak and a single strawberry to his elderly roommate Sol, who barely remembers the taste from his youth. There are plenty of food deserts in the U.S., and that the lack of produce is disproportionately felt by people of color. Nobody would have predicted the boom in organic food, now worth $61 billion a year, or the coming age of vertical farms and high-tech at- home vegetable gardens.
Correct: Starvation. Right: Ocean acidification.
Food insufficiency is a real problem in the U.S. and the world at large. The number of people suffering from both food and extreme poverty has fallen over time. Our food problem isn't about a lack of supply caused by overpopulation, as it is in both Soylent Green and Make Room! Even as the number of mouths on Earth is set to double this decade, on its way to a likely high of 10 billion later this century, our industries keep pace. In New York in 2022, obese people are more likely to be sick than not.
The movie got very accurate about one supply problem. There isn't enough plankton to make Soylent Green the way the recipe intended because Heston uncovered a secret report that says the oceans are dying. plankton is in danger from ocean acidification in the real world. The entire marine food chain could go with it if the population crashes. Future generations might spend their golden years complaining about the lost taste of real fish.
Wrong, dump trucks for protesters. The right is about global warming.
Police brutality, particularly towards activists, is one of the most serious issues. There are many reasons to fear the militarization of law enforcement. No police department has followed the authorities in Soylent Green and simply arrested protesters. Yet.
The image of dump trucks for protesters made it onto the movie posters. This was one of the first major movies to mention the threat of "the greenhouse effect", which started burning the world up in 2022. The streets of Soylent Green were filled with particulate-filled clouds from the fires and dust bowls. San Francisco and Sydney know what's going on, but New York hasn't experienced it yet.
Wrong, mass euthanasia. The right is numb.
The most affecting scene in Soylent Green is easy to pick out. Sol goes to a facility run by a government that wants to reduce overpopulation in any way it can, because he decided the world sucks so much. Edward G. Robinson died days after the end of filming, of bladder cancer, at the age of 79. Few countries provide end-of-life assisted suicide for terminal patients who desperately request it. Canada and parts of Australia and the U.S. are some of the countries where Euthanasia is legal.
The scene should give us pause. Sol decided to end it all because of the facility's high-tech vision. He gets to lie in a wraparound cinema filled with beautiful images of the planet as it was before we ruined it, and variations on a theme of his favorite color. We love our screens and our pretty colors, and they help numb us to the precarious state the planet finds itself in.
