*Proceed with caution: this article contains spoilers and disturbing imagery*
I am an avid reader, so in the average year I read between 15-20 books. One book that has stuck with me recently is Tender is the Flesh. I think there is a lot to love about this book.
Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica takes place in a dystopian society where all animal life has contracted a virus that is deadly to humans. Now that humans can no longer eat animals, the government permits the breeding and slaughtering of humans for consumption.
The differences between the “special meat”, as they call them, and other humans are vast. The special meat is genetically engineered so that they age faster. They have their vocal cords removed after birth. They are raised in small cages, much like our real-life cattle. And they generally don’t have the same amount of consciousness as other humans, mentally they are about as intelligent as infants.
The story follows Marcos, a manager at a meat processing plant who experiences firsthand the barbaric reality of what slaughtering humans like cattle entails.
Marcos lives alone as he and his wife haven’t been on speaking terms since their infant son passed. So when a breeder for his plant sends him a human girl to raise and eventually kill, the same idea as raising chickens to eat. Rather than seeing the girl as food he sees her as company. He names her Jasmine.
There are multiple points in the story where we are exposed to just how gruesome this process is. When showing some new applicants around the processing plant, Marcos explains in great detail how the meat is killed and dissected. Later on, we see him observing a breeding farm where he sees just how the meat is bred and separated by quality.
Eventually, Marcos loses all grip and starts treating Jasmine like his wife, a difficult task when this very thing is known to be illegal.
I appreciate the realistic aspects of the story. It takes the slaughterhouse and the meat industry to an appalling level of gore, but this is important because in reality. It illustrates the same fate that billions of real-life animals face every year. This is comparable to the way George Orwell’s Animal Farm depicts communism.
The book puts these inhumane practices into a new light that makes us want to look away, causing us to feel sick to our stomachs. This is an incredibly important topic to make commentary on as the meat industry has used horrible practices and conditions for raising animals for decades.
Tender is the Flesh also touches on how capitalism will always favor profit over welfare. Where there is money to be made, they will make it, regardless of the trade off. Which in this book gets as absurd as eating another human being.
What I don’t exactly appreciate about this book is that toward the end, the relationship between Marcos and Jasmine becomes so inappropriate that I have a hard time rationalizing it.
The story skews away from a horrific commentary on capitalism to an upsetting “love” story between the two. While the point of the book is to say that we wouldn’t treat other humans the way we do to animals in the industry, Marcos begins to treat Jasmine in an inhumane way. In a gross sexual manner that doesn’t feel right for his character.
The ending of this story for Jasmine feels like all the progress Marcos makes in understanding the absurdity of this lifestyle has been thrown out the window.
My favorite part of Tender is the Flesh is the visceral detail that Bazterrica goes into. This book invokes incredible feelings for the reader, ranging from sympathy to utter disgust.
Some of the details the author included made me feel genuinely revolted, but for this story, I think it’s important that they do so. Bazterrica is not painting an abstract picture of the horror that is a slaughterhouse, leaving it up to you to decide how that makes you feel. She wants to make you feel a very specific way, because it isn’t abstract; that’s simply what it’s like in that environment.
