1973 sci-fi movie, directed by Richard Fleischer based on Harry Harrison's sci-fi novel, Make Room! Make Room!

New York City, 2022 AD, population 40,000,000. Pollution has created constant heatwaves and food shortages. Whole foods are unavailable except to the very rich -- the populace survives on concentrated food proteins, available in varieties such as Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow and Soylent Green.

Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) is called to investigate the murder of William R. Simonson, the wealthy director of Soylent Corporation, the company which manufactures the synthetic food. His investigation leads him to the horrible origins of Soylent Green.

Interesting Soylent Green Facts

• The technical consultant for the film was Frank R. Bowerman, who was president of the American Academy for Environmental Protection at the time.
• The scene where Thorne and his roommate Roth (Edward G. Robinson) share a meal of fresh food was not originally in the script, but was ad-libbed by Heston and Robinson at director Fleischer's request.
• One of the scenes of the "beautiful earth" shown to Sol as he is dying is an opening shot from Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) (a flock of sheep on a green hillside).
• Edward G. Robinson's last film.
• The videogame in Simonson's apartment, "Computer Space", was one of the first coin-operated videogames, manufactured by Nutting Associates in 1971 and designed by Nolan Bushnell, who later founded Atari and designed "Pong."
• One set of scenes in the original release, where a second family is housed with Thorne and Roth, was deleted from later copies of the film.
• Coincidentally, the director's surname, Fleischer, is German for "butcher."

facts quoted from www.imdb.com

Soylent Green is people!

Or is it?

Actually, in the original Harry Harrison novel (Make Room! Make Room!) upon which it was based, Soylent was not made of people, but rather it was made of soy and lentils. Hence the name.

Apparently Richard Fleischer and crew didn't think forcing the entire population of the world to eat soy products was scary enough of a proposition, so they decided to throw in a little cannibalism for good measure.