Turned a much younger fren on to the movie, Soylent Green (1973) today. He had never heard of it. He looked it up on his phone as we were talking and he said, "Oh, it takes place in 2022." I completely forgot about that, well, it's only been almost 47 years. But 2022, wow. It caused a pause. Personally, I always fancied myself The Book.

By the year 2022, the cumulative effects of overpopulation, pollution and an apparent climate catastrophe have caused severe worldwide shortages of food, water and housing. There are 40 million people in New York City alone, where only the city's elite can afford spacious apartments, clean water and natural food (at horrendously high prices, with a jar of strawberry jam fetching $150). The homes of the elite are fortressed, with private security, bodyguards for their tenants, and usually include concubines (who are referred to as "furniture" and serve the tenants as slaves).

Within the city live NYPD detective Frank Thorn and his aged friend Sol Roth, a highly intelligent former college professor and police analyst (referred to as a "Book"). Roth remembers the world when it had animals and real food; he has a small library of reference materials to assist Thorn. Thorn is tasked with investigating the murder of the wealthy and influential William R. Simonson, a board member of the Soylent Corporation, which he suspects was an assassination.

The Soylent Corporation produces the communal food supply of half of the world, and distributing the homonymous brand of wafers, including "Soylent Red" and "Soylent Yellow". Their latest product, "Soylent Green", a more nutritious variant, is advertised as being made from ocean plankton, but is in short supply. As a result of the weekly supply chain and distribution bottlenecks, the hungry masses regularly riot when supply runs out, and are brutally removed from the streets by means of "Scoops" -police crowd control vehicles that literally "scoop" the rioters from the street with large hydraulic shovels.