#1 Reason you shouldn't read Tender is the Flesh

Warning: Contains spoilers

If you've been online in the past year, instead of hiding under a rock, chances are you've heard of Tender is the Flesh. I was immediately captivated when I read the book jacket. It speaks about a world where animal flesh becomes poisonous to humans. In an attempt to establish normalcy, the powers that be develop a new system. A new form of meat that isn't toxic to people. Humans.

If your first reaction to that premise is, that could never happen, this is not the book for you.

I'd also avoid fantasy, horror, and dystopian literature while you're at it. The book plays at our best and worst trait as humans, our ability to adapt. At first, people are horrified by the idea of eating other humans. Slowly, the zeitgeist changes as the government creates rules surrounding "the transition." Rules that help elucidate the narrow, but important distinction, between humans and meat.

Rule number one: We don't call the meat human. They're head, humans, and first generation pure. But they're not people. Your six-year-old niece is qualitatively different than the six-year-old head at the slaughterhouse. Your niece is a human, the head is bred for human consumption. This book explores what it means to be human and who shapes reality. Are there intrinsic traits that make us human? Or do the powers that be define what makes someone human? The government policies that protect certain people, the media that shapes the public narrative, and the people that propagate that message.

We see the dehumanization of people every day in our society.

If you don't believe me, google "children in cages America" or "detention camp history USA." If you want to go further back in history, a quick search of "slavery" will help you understand that our DNA doesn't define our humanity. The Three-Fifths Clause in the constitution posed that slaves should count as three fifth of a free person. The premise of the book might seem extreme. But it isn't a departure from reality, it's an extension of our worst realities. What happens when we consider our worst history and push that idea to the max?

Now comes the controversial part - who's the hero of this book? Who's the villain? There isn't one. And that's the point. The main character isn't designed to be a protagonist. He also isn't designed to be an antagonist. He's designed to exemplify the self-interested nature of humans, even compassionate humans.

Marcos is like any other human might be in this society. He works at a processing plant to pay the bills for his father's long-term care, a euphemism for slaughterhouse. Marcos has turned off his emotions to survive in a dystopian society where humans are meat.

In many ways we empathize with Marcos. How hard it must be to work a traumatic job so that he can provide for his father. The grief he feels at the society that has been lost to the transition. He's reliable, compassionate, and intelligent, albeit traumatized. When he is gifted a young female head, he treats her with compassion. He protects her and can't bring himself to process her, not when she looks and feels so much like human.

(spoiler alert) Until it becomes convenient to process her, at which point it comes easily.

If you want to read a novel and have a clear sense of the good guys and the bad guys - this is not the novel for you. That's the number one reason I don't recommend this book to everyone.

If you finish Tender is the Flesh and think "Marcos is a bad person," you didn't get the point. The novel isn't about whether Marcos is a good person or a bad person. It's a novel about how the best and worst trait of humans is our ability to adapt. It's a reminder that humans can pity others while dehumanizing them. It's a commentary on what truth is, and who shapes it. And most importantly, it's a reminder that humans aren't good or bad. But we are self-interested, and that might be the most dangerous quality of all.