In 1973, cult horror film Soylent Green proposed an unthinkable solution to ecocide caused by climate change, overpopulation and social collapse: the transformation of euthanised human ‘waste’ into ultra-processed food for the masses. The year of this imagined dystopia: 2022. It is striking, then, that recent years have seen a proliferation of cannibal narratives and images in media and popular culture. From metaphors of social marginality and rural poverty in Bones and All to images of scarcity, lack and hunger in Society of the Snow, Raw and Yellowjackets and dystopian games Fallout and The Last of Us to satires of capitalist excess and the depredations of post-Me Too dating in Fresh and Santa Clarita Diet to the resurgence of the ‘Dahmer industry’, eating humans has been described as ‘the defining cultural trope of our time’ (Summers 2022).

Cannibalism is seen as the foundational taboo on which civilisation rests. What, then, to make of the contemporary re-imagining of the food/flesh binary? This project aims to map the vast archive of cannibal representations in contemporary media alongside historic narratives and images that shape our current imaginings and re-imaginings of cannibal practices, focussing on the links between cannibal imagery and colonialism. Historically, real or imaginary stories about cannibalism ‘have justified colonial projects, sanctioned the recreation of indigenous peoples after white Europeans, and promoted the fabrication of imagined communities’ (Morris 2000: 110) – although research shows that more human flesh was consumed in Europe in the early modern period than in the rest of the world combined (Conklin 2001, Woodward 2014). The project will engage with this complex history to explore how colonial ideas about cannibalism live on in our own time in current debates about global food politics, unsustainable agricultural practices, modern slavery and labour exploitation, and ideas about class, race and gender.