A harrowing tour of Señor Urami’s facility early in the novel meticulously details the rules and regulations surrounding the rearing and slaughter of livestock, while a bureaucracy of inspectors – Marcos began his career in their service – routinely check that people aren’t using the meat as cheap labour or as sex-slaves. Bazterrica, though, doesn’t rely on the reader’s pessimism she delivers a world – sterile and cold – that works through the logic of government-legalised cannibalism. Then again, based on the incredible amount of stupidity I’ve witnessed this year, it’s not an assumption that’s difficult to swallow. There’s something decidedly cynical in the assumption that if animals weren’t available most of us would choose to eat human flesh over a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Instead, he commits the most abominable of sins he starts treating the female as a human being. Marcos knows he should immediately sell the beast. Then one day, a supplier sends Marcos a female as a gift a genetically pure and fertile one, bred in captivity.

He has come, though, to despise the work – “the blood, the dense smell, the automation, the absence of thought” – his feelings of guilt and self-hate only compounded by his wife leaving him, following the tragic death of their infant son. When his father – now suffering dementia – sold the tannery to pay off loans, Marcos became the right-hand man to the new owner, Señor Urami. Before the “transition” he worked at his father’s processing plant slaughtering sheep and cows. Not long after, they began to breed people as animals to supply the massive demand for meat.” We’re told all this by Marcos. “They adapted the processing plants and regulations.

A rise in cannibalism – with immigrants and the indigent disappearing in large numbers – forces world leaders to act but rather than ban the consumption of human flesh, they lean into the practice, gradually transitioning society to a legalised form of cannibalism. In response, governments cull their livestock, empty their zoos, and mandate the use of umbrellas to prevent diseased birds from passing on the infection. The novel is set sometime in the future, when animals across the world have been infected by a virus that’s made them poisonous to eat. Tender Is the Flesh, by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica (and wonderfully translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses), is not for the faint of heart.

Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica ( Scribner 978-2-1, $16.00, 224pp, tp) August 2020.

Tenderis the flesh