The 10 most important questions about the Soylent Corporation (including what Soylent Green is)
Yes, the 1973 movie Soylent Green has a deeper mythology than the famous ending quote (obviously, spoilers lie beyond this point). We’ve got answers to the most common questions about the company that made Soylent Green, based on the movie’s world.
The Basics
Soylent Green
Q: What is Soylent Green made of?
Just in case you still didn’t know, Soylent Green is made of people.
Q: Is Soylent Green the only type of Soylent? Are there other types?
Soylent Green is advertised as “the miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world.” It’s the newest product. Because of its extraordinary popularity (and possibly a shortage of bodies), Soylent Green is in short supply.
It joins Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow. Both wafers are marketed as “high energy vegetable concentrates.”
Q: How is Soylent Green actually made?
Soylent Green
Bodies from suicide parlors (and presumably other sources) are wrapped in a white cloth-like material and sent to a heavily guarded processing facility. From there, the bodies are dumped into a liquid conveyance system. Then they are processed and repackaged into Soylent Green wafers.
Soylent Green
The Soylent Corporation
Q: What else does the Soylent Corporation do?
Soylent Green
In addition to producing Soylent food, they are heavily invested in research. They produce an oceanographic survey report (exceedingly rare because hardly any books are published any more).
Q: Why do the characters agree to eat Soylent wafers?
The Soylent wafers are relatively tasteless, but real food is too expensive. Characters smuggle bourbon and beef, but most real food is available only to the wealthy. Strawberry jam is $150 a jar, and tobacco is very expensive.
Q: How do people get Soylent?
Soylent Green
They receive Soylent Red, Yellow, and Green through ration cards or by buying it. Ration centers distribute new supplies of Soylent Green on Tuesdays, and there are riots when it runs out.
Soylent Green
There are hints of a corporatist arrangement between the government and Soylent. Even Soylent isn’t free. People sell Soylent crumbs and Soylent buns at a discount.
The World of Soylent Green
Q: When and where does all this happen?
The movie is set in 2022 in New York City. The population is 40,000,000, and a man named Henry C. Santini is governor.
Q: Is the whole world that bad?
Probably. One character says that every city is overpopulated like New York. The country is guarded by fortresses (presumably inhabited only by the wealthy).
Q: Where did the idea come from?
In the movie, it’s a response to greenhouse gasses and climate change (the characters explicitly complain about “a heat wave all year long” and “a greenhouse effect [where] everything is burning up”). New York has a single tree sanctuary where Central Park used to be.
One character notes that “scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, [and] decimated plant and animal life.” Presumably, Soylent Corporation’s success is a result of environmental ruin. Late in the film, one character assumes the ocean and plankton are also dying (possibly thanks to a peek at Soylent’s oceanographic research).
In the real world, Soylent Green came from author Harry Harrison’s book Make Room! Make Room!. Harrison claimed the idea for Soylent Green’s cannibalism was invented by studio executives. The so-called “cannibal crackers” weren’t in the book.
Q: Does society try to control the population in other ways?
Soylent Green
Suicide parlors are available to alleviate the population problem (they don’t appear in Harrison’s book either). The parlor includes a theater that plays beautiful imagery of Earth as it once was.
