Tender Is the Flesh

Description

After a pandemic makes animal meat poisonous, society legalizes and industrializes the breeding of humans for consumption, marketing their bodies under the sanitized label “special meat.” Marcos works within this supply chain despite his moral revulsion, needing income to support his father, who has dementia. Grief over his infant son and estrangement from his wife have already left him isolated when a female human bred for slaughter is delivered to him. Rather than kill her, he keeps her and begins an illegal relationship that intensifies his conflict with the system he helps operate. Agustina Bazterrica uses Marcos’s compromised position to examine how bureaucracy, euphemism, and private need can normalize exploitation while leaving individual conscience dangerously divided.

Themes