Entry 4

The modernist film Soylent Green is about how society has become overcrowded and the people barely have any resources to survive, most don’t have a home, electricity, or running water, and because of food shortages, the poor must eat the chemically processed “soylent”.  However, the rich get portions of real food that they purchase from food stores called “food inventories”. The twist of the movie is that the Soylent Green being sold to the masses is actually made from dead people. Most of the population is unknowingly cannibalistic as they can’t afford to eat real food. In this film the deeper meaning of food is to show how striving towards modernity isn’t necessarily a good thing because it can be at the cost of the planet, and the people. Food has always been a way to express ourselves, and the loss of food in Soylent Green shows how the people have loss themselves in a race towards modernity. This is best said in Laurel Foster’s Futuristic Foodways she says Soylent Green “serves as a warning against the negative outcomes of the mass production of modernity, to a point where overconsumption has led to self-consumption”. This overconsumption to self-consumption can be seen as the beginning of the movie starts with a montage of technology thriving and then cutting to a futuristic New York that has depleted so many of the Earth’s resources there is no longer anything for people to eat but other people.  

If I were in a situation such as the one in Soylent Green, I would most likely be like some of the working people who are shown in the film because I am not rich and if the world were to devolve into a dystopia right now, it is likely I would only get poorer. On the other hand, I am a woman and I could be “furniture” like many of the women who live in the apartments with rich men and eat real food. Thinking optimistically however, if I were in the exact situation as the main character, I would have delivered concrete evidence of what I’ve seen. I would gather things like the records stolen from the apartment or a recording if possible, to show the people. If revealing the truth didn’t work, I’d follow in the footsteps of Sol and end it.