A virus makes all animal meat poisonous, and society solves the protein problem the obvious way: it legalizes cannibalism. Humans bred for food are called “heads”, their meat is “special meat”, and nobody ever says the word out loud.
That is the real horror of Agustina Bazterrica’s novel (2017, Premio Clarín; in English, Tender Is the Flesh): not the slaughterhouse, the vocabulary. Marcos works in a meat plant and hates it, is gifted a female “head”, doesn’t kill her, names her Jasmín… and the ending is one you will not shake off. Seriously.
Minimalist prose, suffocating atmosphere. It reads as an allegory of the meat industry and of how language launders violence. Finished it in April 2026, and I still think about it every time someone says “product” instead of “animal”.