Tender Is the Flesh does not call humans special meat

The icky euphemism is “special meat.” No one says “human meat,” as the bodies being eaten are not considered human.

“Special meat” fulfils hygiene regulations and comes with a high price tag; “easy meat” is “meat with a first and last name”. Cremations have replaced funerals, for fear of bodies being snatched from hearses; starving, flesh-maddened ...

In this world, human beings are bred for slaughter to produce what the government calls “special meat.” Bazterrica’s novel is a fierce but disturbing reflection of how capitalism naturalizes cruelty, and how societies can easily step beyond ...

Marcos Tejo: Right-hand man to ... called "special meat"). Jasmine: A human bred for consumption and given to Marcos. She is the mother of Marcos's second son. Don Armando: Marcos's father. He has dementia and lives in a nursing home. Cecilia: Marcos's estranged wife. She and Marcos communicate mostly over the phone. Marisa: Marcos's sister. Obsessed with status and climbing social ladders, Marisa uses her dead father's wake to show off her human meat accessories. Tender Is the Flesh was a winner ...

The Speechless: The "heads" have their vocal cords removed so they can't scream. Unusual Euphemism: Humans bred and raised as livestock are called "heads" and their flesh is called "special meat."

At the story’s beginning, the ... doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product.” · Immediately we are shown how terminology ...

This doesn’t necessarily make Tender is the Flesh vegan propaganda. Rather, it highlights the contradictions we live with: we love animals, yet own them or eat them. We love our fellow humans … yet we can stomach their torture. We turn our recognition of humanity in others on and off as convenient. Sometimes this is writ large in colonialist attitudes, but eating “special meat” is also metaphor for exploitation of human capital, and of those who have less.

Tender Is the Flesh’s depiction of an ostensibly global movement toward state-sanctioned, industrialised cannibalism risks feeling jarring or unlikely; within the diegesis there is no direct indication that other sources of food are in short supply, and Marcos himself, who has stopped eating meat following the death of his son, is able to obtain adequate nutrition. Yet, ‘special meat’ appears to have been quickly adopted by the majority of society, and Marcos makes reference to acts of cannibalism that took place prior to The Transition as a means to satisfy the ‘massive demand for meat’ (15).

This is, to some extent, what the government in Tender Is The Flesh was doing: by changing the language around… “special meat” and their livestock of… “heads” (not “humans”, remember!) they were minimising the reputational implications of what they had just legalised.