Plot synopsis
Set in the year 2022, Soylent Green depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that occurs because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted uncontrolled population growth; New York City's population is 40,000,000, with more than half of it unemployed. Global warming, air and water pollution have produced a year-round heatwave and a thin, yellow, daytime smog. Food and fuel are scarce resources because of animal and plant decimation, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged to control and reduce overpopulation.
Meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and even alcoholic beverages are scarce and extremely expensive; for example, a six-ounce jar of strawberry jam is 150 "Ds" (US Dollars). Like the soylent food factories, the farms producing foodstuffs are heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians. For most of the populace, natural foods are a rarely, if ever, enjoyed luxury. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food — soylent yellow, soylent red — made by the Soylent Corporation; their newest and most popular version, soylent green, is made from plankton, according to the food firm.
Soylent's food products are mostly distributed as brightly colored crackers which may be eaten with margarine, although they are also seen being sold as bread-like buns and in crumb form. The word "soylent" is a portmanteau combining soybean and lentil (cheap, very high-yield crops).[citation needed]
Specific Soylent products are distributed to the populace on different days of the week, yet even then those supplies are limited and there is much competition among people to get their rations early. The competition is such that if the supply is exhausted, rioting for food is common. To deal with this problem, the distribution centers are heavily guarded by police who deal with rioters very heavy-handedly, using "scoops" — half-loader, half-garbage truck vehicles which scoop up rioters and dump them in rear storage units; such callous, violent treatment is presumably fatal to some rioters.
In contrast, the rich elite live in spacious apartments, with regular access to real food, tobacco, and alcohol, though even then they often are of poor quality. Some of the rich can even afford "furniture", the film's term for concubines economically attached to the apartments.
Robert Thorn, (Charlton Heston), is a New York City police detective investigating the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a director of the Soylent Corporation. Thorn lives with his aged "police book" partner Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) in a one-room tenement apartment. Long before, Sol was a college professor, but now is employed as a police researcher. Unlike most people in A.D. 2022, including Thorn, Sol received a formal education and is literate; education of any sort is available only to the wealthy elite. Sol and people such as he are known as "books", because real books are out of print, as there is no wood for paper, along with electricity, water, food, and printing press shortages.
During his investigation of Simonson's murder, Thorn slowly uncovers a conspiracy, centered around the Soylent corporation. When the dispirited Sol opts for euthanasia, Thorn forcibly follows him, and makes two shocking discoveries. First, he sees motion pictures of the beautiful Earth of former times, shown only to those being euthanised, which brings him to tears. Second, after Thorne is unable to stop Sol's death, he follows the disposal of Sol's body to a heavily guarded waste-management plant, and discovers that Soylent green is made from the recycled cadavers brought in from the government-sponsored euthanasia centers. This leads to his famous outcry, "Soylent Green is people!"