Will Reading This Book Make You Vegan?

Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender is the Flesh might make you go vegan with its premise. The dystopian novel is set in a world where human cannibalism is normalised. Because of a virus that rendered animals inedible, people turned to eating human meat. Yikes. The Argentinian author describes its meat production line with extreme detail that makes it so disturbing, as BBC details:

It centres on Marco, who is employed in a slaughterhouse, “only no one calls them that,” as he points out. He works there, helping turn humans into food, to pay for his father’s medical treatment. He recalls the mass hysteria during the animal pandemic – the articles which confirmed there wasn’t yet a cure. He is haunted by traumatic memories of “the groups in yellow protective suits that scoured the neighbourhoods at night, killing and burning every animal that crossed their paths”. This is a world where animals are a rarity – and where humans are exploited like animals instead, from being tested on without anaesthetic in laboratories to being hunted and killed for sport.

It is a provocative premise, and yet having grown up as a vegetarian in a carnivorous world, I found Bazterrica’s dystopian world utterly horrifying, but not quite as shocking as some might. After all, the way in which her imagined society blinds itself to human suffering reflects the way ours can be blind to the realities of animal killing. There’s the same normalisation of eating flesh; the same euphemisms around what is being consumed (to the consumer, they’re always sausages and burgers, not chunks of dead pig and cow); the same exploiting of each other, whatever the species involved.