It's people!

I was in Whole Foods the other day and I'm pretty sure I saw soylent green in the nutrition bar aisle. It was behind the lemon zest green tea Relax Bars, but in front of the Bonk Peanut Explosion Hi-Energy Bars. In case you're wondering what soylent green is, it's people. Or as Charlton Heston decried in that very underplayed way of his, "IT'S PEOPLE!"

In the movie Soylent Green, Heston plays a cop in 2022 who discovers that the evil Soylent Corporation is turning corpses into nutritional wafers. It was a cheesy yet intoxicating futuristic flick made in the 70's with a cheesy yet intoxicating cast: Edward G. Robinson, Brock Peters, Chuck Connors, and Dick Van Patten. In it, the world runs out of food, so the Soylent Corporation has the visionary idea of offering people a kind and gentle euthanasia so that their dead bodies could be turned into power bars for the rest of the pathetic population.

So there I was, perusing the shelves for my own personal soylent. I was hoping to find one that would make me younger and taller. As I looked at the labels, I realized I had no idea what all the ingredients were, which led me to conclude they might be people. I think it's a logical jump. I saw fractionated palm oil, soy lecithin (whatever that is), evaporated cane juice, chocolatey coating.....why not a guy's knuckles? Was it so far-fetched to think that the FDA and the CIA haven't kept up with the whole nutrition bar obsession, and that people and their parts have been secretly slipped in?

After much hemming and hawing, and avoidance of anything even remotely green on the label, I picked the KIND bar. It has nuts and fruit, and that's pretty much it, except for glycerol, which gave me pause, but they claim it's plant-based so I guess I'll believe them. I opened the bar and checked for fingernail fragments. In the absence of visual evidence, I ate it.