Rhinehart actually took the name from Make Room! Make Room!, the 1968 novel of overpopulation and famine by sci-fi author Harry Harrison, on which Soylent Green is very loosely based. The company blamed algal flour, an ingredient curiously close to the plankton that the movie's food product was supposed to contain.īut there's a distinction with a key difference here. Many users complained of gastrointestinal issues - farting, mostly - which led to multiple Soylent product recalls in 2016. Created in 2013 by Rob Rhinehart, a busy software engineer who wanted to eat nutritiously without consuming regular food, Soylent is exactly what you'd expect would result from that experiment: bland, powdery mush with a variety of masking flavors. Let's get this one out of the way: Yes, we know there's an actual meal replacement shake and protein bar called Soylent. Soylent green is mint chocolate, it turns out. Let's open it up and cautiously sniff each item. As with Blade Runner and its setting, the Los Angeles of 2019, the movie's predictive power is a mixed bag. (Instead we're grappling with the threat of the Omicron variant, which itself sounds like a Charlton Heston movie.)ĭoes this mean Soylent Green got nothing right about our 21st century world? Not so fast. Presuming that a fad for cannibalism doesn't arrive with the next NYC fashion week, we can safely say that humanity has successfully avoided the threat of the movie's main premise. That's right, we've reached the point when Hollywood told us that millions of New Yorkers would be fighting each other over protein bars made from the finest processed human. Less well known is the year Soylent Green is set in: 2022. (Soylent Green is a hot new food product in this starving overpopulated future New York Heston's detective character discovers it is not made from plankton as the manufacturer claims.)

'Soylent Green is people,' lead actor Charlton Heston bellows as he is carried away on a stretcher, simultaneously becoming a meme and summing up the plot so thoroughly that there's little need to catch the rest of the film. If you know the 1973 movie Soylent Green at all, it's likely for the arresting last line.

Harry harrison soylent green