In the early decades of the 21st century, humanity’s appetite outpaced its wisdom.
It began quietly enough — warnings from virologists about novel strains of bird flu crossing into humans, livestock contracting previously unseen pathogens, wild animals retreating deeper into extinction. For a time, meat prices soared, then dipped when desperate governments culled entire herds. Biosecurity tightened; farms became fortresses. But it wasn’t enough. One by one, species that had fed humanity for millennia fell to disease, leaving barren fields and empty barns.
The solution, as many had long predicted, came from steel and glass rather than pasture and soil. Lab-grown meat. Engineered crops in sealed vertical farms. Synthetic milk from yeasts designed in corporate labs. The world transitioned, some willingly, many bitterly, from the familiar warmth of farm life to the clinical chill of biotechnological production.
It was during the Trump Era — an era that surprisingly stretched into a third term through legal maneuvers and constitutional backbends — that this great transition cemented itself. Freedoms chipped away under the justification of "national security" and "resource stabilization." Media consolidated, protests criminalized. Borders hardened, then disappeared entirely beneath a unified governance called The Federal Nutritional Authority, answerable only to itself.
At first, it worked. For a generation, humanity survived in a fragile equilibrium. The Food Zones, colossal protected cities of hydroponics and tissue farms, fed billions. Rations became standard. Real meat — old meat — became black-market luxury, often harvested illegally from surviving wild populations or from smuggled clones.
But biology, like rebellion, has no respect for man's cages.
It began with the crops. A fungal infection, later traced to a single genetically modified organism approved during the desperate days of the Second Transition, spread through vertical farms like wildfire. Plants wilted overnight. Then the tissue vats followed — mysterious prion-like proteins causing catastrophic collapse in the cell cultures used to produce synthetic meats. The labs tried to pivot, to engineer resistance, but years of monoculture, gene homogenization, and cost-cutting left them vulnerable. Within months, half the Food Zones stood empty. Within a year, the world entered a freefall.
Governments rationed harder. "Resource Allocation Enforcement" squads — grim-faced, underfed young men and women — combed through neighborhoods, confiscating hidden food, breaking down illegal gardens, jailing "hoarders" and "saboteurs." Dissent wasn’t crushed anymore. It simply starved.
In the vacuum, new cultures of survival took root.
Some communities turned to insects, mushrooms, and algae, cultivating what they could in hidden basements. Others regressed to ancient methods — rooftop gardens with heirloom seeds, trading rainwater for precious calories. Cities became graveyards of the old ways, littered with the hollow shells of protein farms and collapsed skyscraper gardens.
But darker adaptations emerged too. Stories whispered in refugee camps of the "Meat Traders" — bands of survivors who preyed on the weak, selling cuts of human flesh to those too desperate to refuse. At first, they were reviled, hunted down by the last gasps of law. But as famine deepened, disgust eroded under the gnawing, unbearable hunger. Organized networks formed, rituals and taboos developed to make the unthinkable... survivable.
Humanity hadn't reverted to cannibalism as a barbaric fallback. It evolved into a necessity — controlled, ritualized, sanitized. New societal strata appeared: the "Chosen" — volunteers, criminals, or debtors who gave themselves to feed others. At least, that's how the official registries framed it. In reality, many were simply taken.
Meanwhile, the elite — the architects of this new age — fled into isolated arcologies, self-sustaining cities with their own private food sources, shielded from the collapse they had engineered. They watched from their fortresses as the rest of the world burned and starved, perhaps pondering whether their own survival was truly possible without the great mass of humanity to support their ambitions.
Technology, once humanity’s salvation, became its tomb.
Drones buzzed across dead fields, their cameras searching not for threats, but for life — edible life. AI models, designed to optimize food distribution, now optimized human livestock management in hidden camps where the lines between survivor and commodity blurred.
Yet, even in this new dark age, the ember of rebellion refused to die.
In shattered cities and hidden enclaves, people remembered. Not just the lush times of abundance, but the lost promises: that humanity could overcome its flaws without chaining itself to cold machines or to colder masters. Guerrilla farmers, rogue scientists, rogue communities — they worked in secret to resurrect true agriculture, salvaging ancient seeds from gene vaults, resurrecting soil ecosystems long thought dead.
The new revolution wasn't political. It was biological.
By 2085, the first signs of recovery flickered. Wild forests returned where old suburbs once sprawled. Animals, those that survived the plagues, adapted into strange new species, unrecognizable but vital. And humans, those stubborn creatures who had consumed the world and then consumed themselves, once again learned to live with the land rather than above it.
But it would take generations to heal the scars.
The memories of the Bitter Harvest would linger: of the Food Zones crumbling into rot, of rations carved from human sacrifice, of the silent cities where neon lights once promised plenty but delivered nothing but despair.
And every child, born into this rough new world, would carry within them the genetic memory of that great failure — and the slim, fragile hope that, this time, humanity would choose wiser.
