jbrobin09
Attractive To Bees
@Pulsegleaner it’s impressive but also a little unnerving that you've worked all this out…Yes I have seen the movie once, when it was on TCM.
And I would say the situation in Soylent Green is much. much more dire than it is in No Blade of Grass. Yes, the world there is in deep trouble, and there will undoubtedly be some pretty severe famines and a lot of social upheaval. But, with time, humanity WOULD adapt. Grasses make up the bulk of our starch supply but they don't make up ALL of it. Even in the movie, the goal of their trek is a rumor of a supply of potatoes. With time, that is what would happen in the world; we'd switch over to things like potatoes and quinoa.
Likewise, we very well might be able to adapt to a world without legumes (though it would probably become a major hurdle for many vegetarians and vegans. It'd be a lot harder on the lower classes of the world (since legumes make up an awful lot of the protein of those who are too poor to afford much meat or dairy.) And we might have to work in a world where we HAVE to add nitrogen fertilizer to soil to make it fertile (since no legumes might mean a lot less of a home for nitrogen fixing bacteria to live in) but we'd probably pull through.
Soylent Green, however, is a world that is pretty much circling the drain with no way out. They're not recycling people because they are cruel, they're recycling them because there literally isn't anything else LEFT. That's why the end of the movie is actually a lot bleaker than it even appears. So the hero has told everyone Soylent Green is people. So what do they do now? They can rise up against the rich who still get actual food, but there clearly isn't enough of that to go round. If everything is gone, it's literally keep eating people or starve to death. About the only major change would be that, with it out in the open, there are going to be people who decide that going through the trouble of waiting for people to reach termination age or be processed is not worth it, and will go for the more direct approach. All the protagonist has done in essence is potentially start people actively killing each other to cannibalize them.
And they're STILL all going to starve to death in the end. There are people who worked out the caloric rates of cannibalism, and one average person only had enough meat to provide the bare minimum of protein for sixty people for one DAY. That means that, in a year, a group of people need a little bit more than six times their population to get enough protein to survive. That's why no society has ever tried to rely on cannibalism as their sole source or food, or even of meat. It's always in either extreme survival scenarios (which tend to involve fairly limited numbers of people and for fairly limited amounts of time,) or for ritual reasons. If all you have to eat is each other, then pretty soon you won't have anything to eat AT ALL.