Tender Is the Flesh, Or Whatever. How a Book On Cannibalism Fails To Satiate

I was in elementary school when I’d first learned about vegetarianism. One of my childhood best friends, a half-Hispanic, half-Hmong girl with gloriously thick black hair and already such an individuality to her, said kindly about meat one day, “I don’t eat that shit. I’m vegetarian!”

She had shared that she was vegetarian since she was a child simply because she knew that killing animals to consume their meat was wrong. Because she didn’t want to be complicit in a system that was capable of inflicting so much pain unto a living thing. She was vegetarian because it was the right thing to be. Before it was ever a trend or a way of virtue signaling.

Sure. Whatever.

That day I went home in utter disbelief. I had no idea that not eating meat was even an option. For a Korean-American who regularly ate pork belly for breakfast and marinated beef for lunch, vegetarianism was the punkest thing I’d ever heard of. Food, particularly Korean barbecue and all its gamey trappings, was a cherished part of my larger culture. But I learned that day that people like my friend Maylee existed. People said no to meat, and not just because they didn’t like the taste, but because they believed it was horrific. Barbaric, when boiled down to it.

An average Sunday breakfast at the Han household.

I mulled over this possibility, the not eating meat, as I ripped into a juicy slab of galbi Mom spent marinading the whole day before. My fingers were brown and sticky, clenched onto the short rib of a cow that died for my pleasure.

“She’s fuckin’ crazy,” I said, tearing into the muscle. The fatty tendon in between my molars.

Throughout the next a decade or so, and as social media began influencing more of our values, I noticed how vegetarianism and veganism swept the nation. For some, it became a core tenet of a compassionate life. For most, it was a trendy way to establish your integrity and holier-than-thou conscience. Today, being vegan is likened to a badge of honor. A big fat sticker on your head not unlike the USDA grade beef stickers on a marbled piece of filet mignon that screams, “I’m fucking better than the rest of you.”

Or at the very least it says, “I’m trying to be.”

And here’s the thing. Now that I’ve gotten older and matured a bit, I can’t hate on that. I don’t question anyone’s choice to not eat meat. Not anymore. Even if some people might’ve adopted veganism as means to virtue signal, the very fact that they made the morally superior choice, is valid. It is true and infallible. These people aren’t wrong.

Veganism is, at its core, fundamentally the moral and principled choice to make. This is especially true in an era where less-than-moral values rule our media, our institutions, our everyday behaviors.

While all vegans aren’t inherently kinder or better people, they have made a convicted choice to do less harm, inflict less pain, and opt out of a bloody affair in the midst of an already-excessively bloody society. They have actively refused to participate in a system wherein industrial-sized killing machines flay and vivisect living, feeling things. They have said “no thank you” to being the reason why chickens scream until the morning. Why their feathers swing like pendulums in the iron-tasting air, until it reaches the shit-infested ground where they were bred and later slaughtered.

They did right thing. They made the right choice. No matter how much the rest of us might find it unbearably annoying and self-righteous, vegans/vegetarians did the right, good thing, and the rest of us should strive to, too.

This is the point Tender Is the Flesh attempts to make.

And by the end, completely fails to do so.

The Bones and Muscles of Tender Is the Flesh

Tender Is the Flesh is a dystopian horror novel by Agustina Bazterrica. In it, a virus has contaminated all animals and rendered all meat fatal, and cannibalism has become legal and commercialized as a result. We follow the protagonist, Marcos, who begrudgingly works at a human meat processing plant to pay for his dying father’s care and keep his mind off the death of his baby boy (and his wife who’s left him in the wake).

This description had me salivating. I read stellar reviews about the book and how it made people crawl out of their skin, reconsider veganism “for real this time,” and how some scenes made the hairs on their arms stand up.

I’m a fan of slightly grotesque, violent, and dark stories, and I had high hopes for the book that was apparently having readers put it down for breaks because of how grotesque, violent, and dark it is.

At the start of it, I was genuinely invested in Marcos, his past, and how a cannibalistic society might actually look like. It had all the makings of a thought-provoking, visceral read. There were some scenes so vivid in its description of human maiming, that even I who rarely squirms at graphic art, felt uncomfortable.

Take, for instance, the following (cut up and stitched together) excerpt from a chapter where the human meat processing is detailed:

"The female that [has been] stunned has now been flayed and is unrecognizable. Without skin and extremities, she’s becoming a carcass…

The intestines, stomachs, pancreases fall onto a stainless steel tables. The workers slide the entrails around in water. It loos like a sea that’s slowly boiling, that moves to its own rhythm. The entrails are inspected, cleaned, flushed, pulled apart, graded, cut, measured, and stored… They watch the workers scrape away the mesenteric fat. They watch them inject compressed air into the intestines… They watch them wash the stomachs and cut them open to release an amorphous substance, greenish brown in color, that’s then discarded. They watch them clean the empty, broken stomachs, which are then dried, reduced, cut into strips, and compressed to make something like an edible sponge.”(70-71).

While the subject matter is appalling on its own, I’m moved by the prose and its ability to strike the perfect balance between such matter-of-factness and vivid horror. Bazterrica recounts the mutilating of a human body as casually as she might curate a grocery list.

What we end up with is incredibly effective, non-pandering writing. Some people dislike the matter-of-factness and dry prose, and some even attribute that effect to it being translated from Spanish, but translation aside, I thought it provided a great balance between some of the most hair-curling descriptions of the literal processing of humans and the subdued and utter devastation we might feel as a witness.

This is where Tender Is the Flesh truly shines. In a book all about dismembering and emptying the human body, we find its bones and muscles in Bazterrica’s actual writing. Bazterrica pulls off an impressive feat and balances on a tightrope of abomination and truth. She plunges you into graphic horror about the skinning of a human in one moment, and ends chapters with such simple, beautiful sentences like: “Without the sadness, he has nothing left” (72).

She flexes this ability and builds a fine structure with its composition.

So Tender Is the Flesh has its muscle and bones.

But it’s missing the main thing I and many other readers like me need. Its heart.

A Body Without Its Heart

One day, Marcos is gifted an adult female of the finest quality. A “First Generation Pure,” which is a human born and bred in captivity. Marcos ends up keeping her and over some time, they eventually enter a romantic (of the sort) relationship. He teaches her how to shower and clean herself. He feeds her and lets her watch TV. He treats her like a human being. He might even love her.

The female, who Marcos eventually names Jasmine, falls pregnant with his child. Jasmine goes into a risky labor, and Marcos frantically calls his estranged wife, Cecilia, to come help.

Cecilia rushes over and helps Jasmine deliver her baby.

The child is a boy.

Jasmine is tired, but survived.

And in a rug-pulling twist, Marcos takes Jasmine out back to kill her. He and Cecilia then keep the baby they once lost.

SIGH. WHAT???

This is a twist and ending that completely gutted me. And not in a good way.

Tender Is the Flresh builds Marcos’s character up and leads us to believe that he is the last moral person in this world, a dissenter who so clearly sees the horror around him. He hates his job at the processing plant, refuses to eat the meat, judges his sister who unabashedly conforms to this barbaric society, and by cleaning, nurturing, and naming Jasmine, appears to genuinely care about her humanity.

There’s hope that we have found the one character to aspire to be like. That there is someone out there who seems to understand what’s good, what’s horrible. What’s right and wrong. We back Marcos and want him to overturn the “system,” or to be a beacon of hope in all the depravity.

This is built and built throughout the entire book, only to lead up to an empty “gotcha!” moment when Marcos decides to kill and use Jasmine in the worst way for his own benefit.

Why? What are we doing here?

This shock factor and the twist that “even the book’s good guy is bad and part of the terrible system” are so not shocking, that it reduces what could have been a truly tender look into humanity to another eye-rolling take. This twist is so clearly prioritized over showing real human compassion and heart here, that the entire book becomes the very thing it attempts to condemn.

And it uses its strong writing, vivid descriptions of bloody gore, and effective prose to distract us from the fact that it’s not telling us anything new.

Human nature is bad!

Capitalism is bad!

We’re all depraved!

There’s no hope for any of us, no matter how “good” we try to be!

Society is corrupt! We have no morals! Why even try?

I suppose fans of the book might argue, “But that’s the whole point!!!! We are all barbaric and immoral at the end of the day. Can’t you see this in the book where members of society eat human babies? Cut out vocal chords so specimens can’t scream? It’s all so depraved, and none of us are beyond humanity’s horrible touch!”

Okay.

And?

We all already get the point. We’ve gotten the point a long time ago. It’s been made a million times. We’re just so inundated with this same idea. We actively live this reality and see this sentiment expressed in so much of our media. This take is just so not tender. It’s been so overcooked, overdone, and leaves us feeling empty (and not in the good way great art does, but in the way where we don’t know why we’ve just spent 250 pages reading about something only to have the rug pulled out from under us). All we’re left with is a bunch of doom and gloom to chew on and chew on and chew on until our jaws become sore and spit it back out. There’s nothing here for us to swallow. Nothing to really digest.

In a ripe opportunity for the author to make us feel something, a choice was made to just fuel even more anger and hatred for humanity. And I’m just so sick of this narrative. I’m sick of the narrative that the human being is beyond help. That goodness is beyond our grasp. That we’re so desensitized to warmth and morality. That everyone lives a life of unchecked consumerism, selfishness, and baseness. That these things are humanity’s default factory settings.

It’s boring.

You know what would be really metal? If Marcos actually was the good person the book built him up to be. If we were given the hope that not everyone is so terrible. That there is still some goodness in a world full of murderous, senseless cannibals. A vegan beacon of light.

This is how Tender Is the Flesh could have actually been, well, tender.

Tender Is My Will

At the beginning of 2023, I had practically eliminated meat from my diet. After years of contemplating vegetarianism or veganism, I finally decided to put my plant-based money where my mouth is.

I wasn’t perfect, but I surprised myself by being able to do something so counterintuitive to my lifestyle, upbringing, and culture. I was at a pretty successful 80% vegan diet (the remaining 20% fell to things like the occasional egg or ice cream cone).

But I was still trying to be a better person!

And then recently, probably about a month ago or so, I just stopped caring as much.

I stopped checking the back of foods. I saw “Contains dairy or meat products” stickers and shrugged. I ordered burgers again.

Because at the end of the day, none of us can escape this wickedness, can they? This insatiable hunger to be bad and make the wrong choice. To inflict pain unto living things. And if we don’t satisfy this hunger through meat, there are a million other vices or crimes or impulses to hold us over.

It’s just all so hopeless and disappointing!

Welp. Anyway.