[ExI] Have a Soylent Green Xmas!

[Darren Greer]

*Make Room, Make Room* was the first science fiction novel I read. I was in
elementary school, and prior to that I only read Jack London novels. I
remember the cover perfectly thirty five years later: a man standing in the
middle of a crowd in downtown New York with a look of sheer claustrophobic
panic on his face. Re-reading it years later I was surprised to discover
that the Soylent Green as humans aspect doesn't appear in the novel and only
in the movie, and I had somehow conflated the two. We used to make jokes in
college about a cafeteria pasta-cheese-crouton dish billed as "bubbly-bake"
that no-one could readily identify. We called it Soylent Green. The line
staff got used to it. They knew what we meant when he asked for it, though
I'm not sure they grasped the specific allusion.

Darren

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:46 AM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I never ate soy substitute food products during their earlier days.
> But over the past ten years I've eaten some that I thought were very
> good, and they did not in the least bit make me nauseous.
>
> Oh, what became of the study that said eating lots of soy over the
> years would lead to brain damage?
>
> John
>
> On 12/9/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> > John Grigg wrote:
> >
> >>> On Behalf Of spike
> > ...
> >
> >>>There is a bit of context that is missing for many of you, who were not
> > regularly going to movies in 1973 and who missed the original Soylent
> > Green...
> >
> >>I saw Soylent Green years later on television.  The film is regularly
> > spoken of in the media...  I miss the smart kind of science fiction films
> > they made  back in the seventies.
> >
> > There was another notable one right about that same time, West World.  In
> > retrospect, I realize that one had emergent AI, with apparent outloading.
> > The robots become self-aware and attack.
> >
> >>...  Right around that time, food companies were experimenting with
> soybean
> > meat substitutes.  The early ones tasted terrible.  But at least they
> were
> > expensive and unhealthy...spike
> >
> > Funny story that has nothing to do with anything, but I still laugh when
> I
> > think about it.  A long time ago, I was camping with my wife's family at
> > Mount Rainier.  My then 19 yr old brother-in-law and I went hiking all
> over
> > the place, and we came back to camp crazy hungry.  We had soy
> veggie-dogs,
> > since he is a strict vegetarian.  Even tho I was half starved, I only ate
> > two; I detest the wretched things.  But he devoured eight of them,
> scarfed
> > them like a pack of rabid wolves.  About three hours later, we were
> sitting
> > around the camp fire on a beautiful sparkly cold evening, as I waxed on
> > about how good it all was.  Then I noticed he was hunched over, not
> moving
> > at all, saying nothing.  It was hard to tell by the flickering campfire,
> but
> > he just didn't look at all good.  I said, Hey pal, are you OK?
> >
> > No.
> >
> > Full stop.  I said, Well, um what is wrong?
> >
> > He said, Those veggie dogs.  They are all still sitting down there.  My
> > stomach might stamp them "Return to Sender" any min..
> > buuuurrrrrLAAAAAAHHHHH...
> >
> > Right into the campfire.  We scattered like scared roaches trying to
> avoid
> > the big column of barf steam.
> >
> > He felt better almost immediately, but that one massive barf pretty much
> > doused the fire, so that was the end of our starlight reverie that night.
> > {8^D
> >
> > If you have ever eaten soy-based meat substitutes, you will understand
> why
> > the notion of living on that stuff is so scary.  {8-]
> >
> > spike
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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-- 
"In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses
stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." -
Remembrance of the Daleks
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