Tender Is the Flesh

Content Warning: The source text includes graphic depictions of cannibalism, sexual assault, mass human suffering, incarceration, misogynistic violence (including reproductive violence), and death by suicide.

Through the normalization and proliferation of cannibalism as a legitimate corporate enterprise, Bazterrica figuratively demonstrates the way that capitalism dehumanizes people, reducing them to products and incentivizing them to feed on each other, literally or otherwise.

In imagining a world where people are raised and slaughtered as livestock, Bazterrica draws attention to the mass manipulation of people through governmental and economic systems. As one of the teenagers puts it when he posits that the alleged virus is a hoax, “Can’t you see they’re controlling us? If we eat each other, they control overpopulation, poverty, crime. Do you want me to keep going? I mean, it’s obvious” (153). These tensions also play out on a personal level in the lives of those who work at Krieg. For instance, though Tejo dreads his work and considers it unethical, he fulfills his duties out of a desperate need to provide for his father and other family members. Nor is he alone in following that line of reasoning, as Sergio’s explanation of his work as a stunner makes clear. The taller job applicant exemplifies how people fall into this cycle of violence; while he is repulsed by processes at the slaughterhouse, he applies for the job after his girlfriend becomes pregnant.