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tender is the flesh book cover

Come Enjoy The “Special Meat”

 Author: Agustina Bazterrica

All the animals are dead – or at least, they should be. The government decided it was the only way after a deadly outbreak, transmitted from animals to people. But the human diet requires certain proteins that are best found in meat. What if there was a solution, then, that dealt with overpopulation and addressed this need for “special meat.”

In Tender is the Flesh, Marcos Tejo inherited the plant from his now demented father. It used to be the final destiny for unlucky animals, shipped in, slaughtered, and packaged. But Marcos’ plant looks different than his father’s. Here, they breed and slaughter people. It’s not legal to call them humans, though. They are simply “heads” or “product.”  Their vocal cords have been removed. They are non-verbal, naked, animals. And it’s not cannibalism, either, it’s “special meat.” Hands and feet, packaged, are “upper and lower extremities.” The language is precise. The slaughtering process is efficient, set up to reduce fear so that the meat does not sour. It’s all very organized. Very humane. Or so they say.

But it eats at Marcos, this day in and day out reminder of violent death. As he takes two new recruits through the plant’s operation, from the received shipment of caged heads to the slaughter, dissection, and packaging of all the different cuts, it’s evident that the line between him and them is one of semantics only. Especially when Marcos is gifted a beautiful female head. It’s illegal to use the heads for sexual purposes, but Marcos is grieving and as time passes, the head gets a name, is introduced to clothes, is hidden in his house, and is treated as human. But by day, Marcos continues his operation to kill. What will break first? His conscience or his cover?

Tender Is the Flesh is a deliberate riff on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and it’s just as nauseating, blood-soaked, brutal, and gritty. The characters are equally emotionless, their eyes having been scourged by daily sights of horrors, their conscious desensitized, their world skewed horrifically, but yet believably. And there is talk of more: of no true virus, of a government plan to deal with overpopulation, of schemes and lies. There is also grief over connections lost, both human and animal.

But the characters are stoic, their emotions tightly veiled. We must wonder how much is getting through to Marcos and what he will do with this head whom he is raping but also perhaps loving?

There are a lot of different angles the book could have explored, beyond the obvious mistreatment of animals, the meat industry, hypocrisy, and our innate ability to become easily desensitized, first allowing and then relishing in the horrors around us. But the thoughts are only skin deep (forgive the pun), and there is a lot of ground that remains uncovered. Who and what made the decision between who was human and who was a head – race, gender, religion, sexuality, wealth, something else? We’re never told. This alone is a huge opportunity missed.

Instead, we’re here for the torture and deprivation, and while Marcos feels for and laments the loss of animals and also of his young son (crib death), the grief never quite touches the heads. It’s more of an uneasy feeling with him, a “let’s not go there” sentiment, that, sadly, remains for the entire book.

The ending reveals a little more about the selfishness of humans, about what we can justify, about our own ruthless evil towards one another. But the story is nothing more than a horror show, the concept strong, yet underutilized. The author could have done so much more than horrify us, then churn our stomachs. She could have made us think about this “othering” more deeply, this difference between who we label human and who we don’t, and how such a thing can be so widely accepted. There was a great opportunity for something scathing and deep here, but the story stayed on the surface, the knife barely parting the flesh of a far darker and more visceral tale.  As it was, Tender is the Flesh was surprisingly unemotive torture porn with the seed of a far greater idea. Five stars for the idea, and two for the lackluster execution that barely touched on it.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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