It sounds interesting. Humans are actually exceptionally bad meat animals as we take far more time to reach a reasonably harvestable size than animals we actually use for livestock. You'll get 60lbs to 80lbs of meat from a fully grown human, but it takes 15 to 20 years to get it. That is not a sustainable food source. That's why cloning and other technological solutions are used in so many Dolcett stories.

You may want to check out the balance in this game. It's similar to what you want to do:

https://forum.pulptoon.com/forumsXenforo/threads/the-flesh-harvest-a-dolcett-village-management-game.21413/

Although I've yet to address it in any of my stories, my "head-canon" for the world they take place in is that the human lifespan extends exponentially over a handful of generations so, my as today's 60yos resemble to the 40yos of thirty years ago, people would stay at their prime for much longer, essentially aging to about 25-30 then staying there for fifty years or so, meaning that a couple could have children, raise their to young adulthood, eat them then start again with babies two, three or even four times over, with of course the survivors of each batch maturing and having their own children.

>>24959
I think that's why it's best when human meat is treated as a luxury or treat rather than a staple foodsource :)

Humans live for more than 100 years. First 20 years they age as normal, then for another 100 years stay at 20-40, throughout which have 10 children in average, or 1 child in 10 years, which means at any given moment they have average of 2 children under the age of 20, and thus look just like a normal young family from our world, you just don't know that this 30yo looking couple are actually 70yo and their two lovely kids had several older siblings who aren't around anymore. It is common sense that an average of 2 in 10 kids make it to become 20yo themselves, but if they made it this far it means they aren't interested in getting snuffed in the first place, so they'll make it to 120 and raise another 10 kids alright, of which 2 will survive to replace them in the population count.

>>24970
Yup, that's more or less what I've settled on for my world, especially the stories set further in the future :)

>>24958

That this question(s) come up now is amazing to me, because I had thoughts about it some time ago while reading Edward's and especially Symbri's stories.

It may be helpful to do some maths:

* How many humans are fed by a cow, a pig, a sheep, a goat, a deer, a chicken, a fish?
* How many humans are fed by a converted Animal?

* It takes months to raise a cow, a sheep, a goat, a deer and only weeks for a chicken.
* It takes years to raise an Animal (even with theoretical acceleration drugs).

* Experts calculated that to raise RL-livestock needed to feed a certain amount of people takes mutiple times the resources of feeding the same people directly with the resources.

Although the problems with more than 8 billion humans are obvious there is no perfect answer. Cloning for sure wouldn't help, it would make everything worse, given the results of the maths above. For the same reasons cannibalism as a solution to feeding people ‒ like shown in the 1973 science fiction film "Soylent Green"[1] (loosly adapted from "Make Room! Make Room!", a 1966 science fiction novel by Harry Harrison) ‒ is also not sufficient.

While the "Great Famine"[2] could slow down the growth of the European population by killing "only" more than 10%, the "Black Death"[3] had a greater impact and is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of the population in Europe and round about 30% worldwide ‒ more or less depending on various sources. As successful they were in medieval times they wouldn't have the same outcome in ours. Even AIDS and Covid had no chance against the modern medicine.
I suggest we are seven and a half billion too much today. If we don't radically reduce meat consume there will have drastic measures to be taken. As cruel as it sounds: purges, cullings[5] or a World War III (remember what Einstein said about World War IV [4]) might be the consequences.

Until then, I agree with Edward that "it's best when human meat is treated as a luxury or treat rather than a staple foodsource" (>>24962).


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931317
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Hypothetical_scenarios
[5] This is the subject matter of the episode "Luck of the Draw" of the show "Sliders" (Season One).
​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Fun Fact:
​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Compare the episode description at https://www.earthprime.com/episode/luck-of-the-draw/ with the universe of one of our hard-working authors, the King of Lottery Worlds:
< There is a lottery in California which dispenses whatever amount of money the person requesting desires. Based on the amount chosen, those entrants face random selection to win the lottery, which provides the winner with White Card privileges and $5 million. The White Card allows you to purchase whatever you want, and the merchant will not deny you. It’s the economy’s way of saying thanks for “making way.”
< Making way? Well, if you win the lottery, it’s just another form of population control. After a gala ball, the weekly winners are taken up to their hotel suites where they are administered a powerful drug that kills them. Barbaric? Well, the people here are heavily into the next life, so they cherish being able to make way, as the money they win from the lottery goes to their next of kin.
< The penalty for subverting the Lottery system is called “the Process,” and they’ll make you pay in pain before they kill you. That takes place at the Municipal Processing Center. If you subvert the lottery, you will be arrested by the Lottery Commission Police (LCP).

Hi, Symbri, do you see also some similarities? Of course there is no cannibalism ‒ the show has to be family-friendly. :D
BTW, the title was awarded by our other zealous writer Edward Hyde (Sidneyvers), not by me, although I second it. ;)

>>24959
>Humans are actually exceptionally bad meat animals
Oh dear, I had no idea how bad it actually is.
(Gemini: "Commercial market pigs: They reach their market weight of around 110 kg (240 lbs) after about 6 months.")

>>24960
That looks interesting. I'll take a closer look...

>>24961
I like this system. It should be easy to add a "physical age" to the humans in my simulation.

>I think that's why it's best when human meat is treated as a luxury or treat rather than a staple foodsource :)
And I think that's a good thing. But for my hypothetical game I'd like to have markets, butcher shops, restaurants...
So there must be some surplus.

>>24970
Yes, what I'd like to try next is a "core population" system.
These are the people who have no interest in getting snuffed.
And two of the children of these couples inherit this "core" property.

>>24972
Wow, thank you! That's a lot of material.

As I said, my simulation is currently very simple - there's basically only birth and death ;)
I'd like to add a job-system, and jobs produce (conventional) food, and...
by then, the code will be so complex that I'll lose interest... -_-

@Lolicullus
Sorry for going off-topic, but may I ask what this alphanumeric string after your name means?

>>24974

> Sorry for going off-topic, but may I ask what this alphanumeric string after your name means?
No problem. It's a tripcode, a hash to prove that (independend from the nickname) the same person is posting.
For more information see:
https://guro.cx/faq/tripcode.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Tripcodes

One way would be to speed up growing up. via tech or magics such that the poopfactory stage is skipped and the kid is physically and mentally 10 within 2 months. growth slows so that physically 24 takes another year or 3. Aging halts after that as long as properly fed.

Might or might not apply to both boys and girls, with much higher ratio of girls. perhaps certain foods need to be eaten before Y sperm can be made.

To aid learning, memories, skills, common sense, can be passed on like asari/vulcan melds

The desire or need to eat meat might be magically removed somehow before first birthday. but the food or breastmilk is rejected by the body past that.

side effect might be the first two months kids might eat like meme goats.

- from pondering on: Why wait 20 years to eat a meatgirl when magic or tech could skip to the good parts. Also, the social side effects of less dependency and bonding time making people more open to people eating.

- the setting might be a colony world that had one weird scientist dude, a goat, and a fridge full of frozen eggs survive a crash. Mad science with zero oversight was done in the shipwreck. Now its a century later and meatgirls is the norm. Or something.

>>24958
A large number of women is necessary for procreation. Meanwhile a much smaller amount of males is needed for sperm donorship. So for such a computer simulation to work without depopulation or without having to resort to magic, you need to greatly decrease the number of females being eaten, while greatly increasing the number of eaten males.

>>24988
In the stories of mine set further in the future, I have genetically engineered "farm piggies" that the general population don't see as human, just as livestock for meat. They are born by implanting multiple embryos in genetically modied sows and grow to toddlerhood in a matter of days then take approximately three years to resemble an "organic" ten year old but with limited intelligence, never really mentally developing beyond 3 or 4.

Like with meat today, you don't need to eat it at every meal. It can (and should) be special. My photo stories all take place under the premise that 20,000 women are born for every one man. To produce enough boys for genetic diversity, you have to have high birthrates and a low life (female) life expectancy. The only women allowed to live past, say, 30, are those who have given birth to the rare man.
In this situation, girl-meat isn't the point, it's just a bonus. Culling women is required, so you might as well enjoy them!

In Dolcett fantasies it’s common that people only want to eat the sexiest women. Special care would need to be taken to not breed good looks out of the population.

>>25157
That's actually a very good point! If it's the most attractive women and girls who are eaten before they can reproduce, that would be a pretty significant "selection pressure"!

>>24978
> One way would be to speed up growing up. via tech or magics ...
>>24990
> ... grow to toddlerhood in a matter of days then take approximately three years to resemble an "organic" ten year old ...
What tech and even magic can't overcome is the "Law of Conservation of Energy"[1]. If the grow is speed up then the same amount of energy/food/resources has to be invested ‒ only in a shorter time. ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy


>>24988
> you need to greatly decrease the number of females being eaten, while greatly increasing the number of eaten males.
This is a good point. And if the males are consumed before puberty they may taste as delicious as females, which are also tastier in a young age without all the hormons ‒ it's the same as with calfs, piglets, lambs or baby goats.

I've been thinking on the topic too.

Basically, you have to have your stable population, and then they need to produce all these "food" babies on the side.

To have a stable population, each woman needs in average to produce 2 kids, 1 male, 1 female.

Let's say a woman can start safely having babies around 15, then once every 18 to 24 months.

So to have a stable population, a girl can have 2 babies by the age of 18. Then, assuming a 50/50 ratio of girls/boys at birth the rest is bonus.

Let's assume a woman can have babies until 45, that means each woman could produce 18 offspring that could become food.
You could potentially raise this number if you assume that some of the food offspring have babies themselves before being consumed.
Although in our stories, 15 is usually already old for becoming food.

So definitely not enough for them to become a staple food, but also enough that assuming women reproduced as much as safely feasible, it should be enough that families could probably afford human meat once or twice a year.

Now even with that, that leaves us with a problem, which is that if we assume as often in our stories that girl meat is the preferred food, how do we deal with the boy's overpopulation?

You could assume that for some reason (an illness, natural evolution shift, ...), the girl/boy ratio at birth shifts. In which case, a 1/18 boy/girl ratio would be ideal for these numbers.

You could also assume artificial insemination to selectively breed girls.

But that's all a pretty industrial process, even the assumption that a woman will breed nonstop from 15 to 45 kinda borders on slavery or some sort of religious fanaticism. Which I guess could be possible settings for that kind of universe.

Now if you wanted to increase that supply or ease the burden, you could make it so women can give birth younger, for example with a medication. Though the main issue for that is that they're not physically mature for giving birth So you'd need to come up with something for that. surgery, or maybe some kine of intensive training at a young age for "widening" them.

If you assume a girl starts pregnancies at 6, then you add 6 potential offspring, raising that number to 24.

You could also assume women can give birth longer, like increasing lifespan like Edward said. If you assume they can give birth until 100 years old, for example, then you add about 37 offspring. However, with people living longer, that also doesn't really increase the supply per year significantly.

Something helpful would be to ensure most of these pregnancies are multiple pregnancies. If you assume for example that they have triplets in average, then even with normal ages, they can have 60 children each (76 with early pregnancies), 58 of them being potential food. Still not staple food level, but already better.

Now if you want to go to staple food levels, then I guess the only way would be to have some population that doesn't eat meat (or human meat at least) and still reproduces.
That could be a meat farm (which would make the artificial insemination and multiple pregnancies easy to explain), or maybe a class system.


So yeah, to sum things up, to have a setting with a stable population where human meat is consumed more than once, possibly twice a year, you pretty much have to have a livestock population that doesn't consume human meat (probably no meat at all) and is basically dedicated to breeding as much as possible. And this population has to be larger that the cannibals population.

If we wanna math it out:
In most developed people consume about 100kg/person/year of meat. Raising to up to 120 in the US.
The human body weight is about 14% bones, and let's say 1% non edible organs.
That means if we had human as our main meat, we'd have to eat about 115kg of human cattle every year.
If we estimate that a cattle girl is aged 9 or 10 in average, that would put her at around 30kg of weight.
So we'd need to eat about 4 girls a year.
Considering an active breeder can normally produce about 18 offspring before age 45, and assuming they're culled when not productive anymore, a breeder produces an average of 0.4 meat girls per year.
That means realistically, you need 10 breeders per meat consuming human.
Considering there are around 8 billion humans, we'd need around 80 billion breeders, which would be a real struggle to feed.

We can make that a bit better with the multiple pregnancies hypothesis. If they produce 60 children each, that 1.33 meat girl/year for each cattle. So we only need 3 breeders per meat eater (bear in mind that includes those not of breeding age). That's only 24 billion breeders to produce all the meat.
But even then, considering you need to grow the livestock around 10 years before being consumed, 360 billion cattle would need to be kept at all time if you count breeders and meat girls.

That's a ratio of 43 cattle per meat eater (3 breeders, 40 meats).
So if we want a more reasonable hypothesis, let's assume that the total population must be kept at 8 billion.
That means we have 182 million people that are "meat eaters", 546 breeders, and 7280 million meat girls, ranging from babies to 10 years old.

The workload of taking care of that many cattle heads would be pretty intense, but probably manageable. Ranchers can raise about 1000 cattle per worker, so about 1 in 23 people would need to be a rancher.
Possibly, you could unload some of that work onto the breeders, having them trained to take care of their calves.
Which would be kinda necessary, because ultimately, as we mentioned, human meat would be way less efficient than traditional livestock, and so we're essentially trying to do the same workload with 1/44 of the active population contributing.


So as an alternative to a human farm system, we could imagine a universe where the population is highly religious and follows a fertility cult with a class system.
The lower class would essentially be the cattle and the working class.
They would have food restrictions, making them vegetarian, with a food regime that hastens puberty, induces frequent multiple pregnancies, and changes the balance of boys/girls at birth.
Women would have a sacred duty to either sacrifice themselves to their rulers, or serve them by procreating as much as possible.
Various religious ceremonies and rites would guide them to do that from a young age.
Training young girl's holes with ceremonies that require fucking larger and larger dildos.
A coming of age ceremony could involve them getting ritually impregnated.
Regular ceremonies would involve intercourse for all girls in a position to become pregnant.
Although most of the girls would be ritually offered as religious sacrifices to the higher class in an ascension rite, where they would become chosen, to offer themselves to their rulers, fulfilling their ultimate duty in life

The higher class would be the rulers by divine rights, much less numerous, and would feast on the lower class' offspring.
I imagine girls and women in that class would be much more free to dispose of their body, although I can't imagine the religion would be entirely without sexual rites for the higher class either. But probably more centered around ritual orgies. The offered girls would probably also be ritually enjoyed, offering themselves as sexual toys before being turned into food.

Alternatively, the sacrificed girls could be chosen at birth, essentially becoming a third class of meat girls.
The breeders only would have rites training them for breeding and giving birth.
That would leave the meat girls to have a religious regime with foods designed to enhance the quality of their meat and flavor, and rites raising them to sexually serve their higher class masters without deforming their bodies like the breeder's rites might.
Another possible setting could be a pandemic that causes girls to randomly and frequently fall pregnant from a young age without intercourse, essentially cloning themselves, causing an overpopulation of girls that are themselves gonna become pregnant.
The population becoming out of control essentially forcing governments to perform culling and encourage cannibalism.
Though I think the "pandemic" trick is more of a classic and ends up feeling a bit more like a deus ex machina.

>>25164

Wow and LOL!
If your estimations don't show how unrealistic cannibalism as a regular meat source is, then I don't know what else could proof it.
As a luxury good it may work, but that is far away from the universes we have seen on /lit.
However, dear authors, do not become discouraged by this evidence. Keep on writing, because we like your stories. :D

>>25163
I mean I guess technically if you use them with plants, you could have them creating their own food. Just pump human meet piggies with chlorophyll. If we're just going to not think too hard about the situation

>>25168
Isn't that the point, 'though? It's a fantasy world and it works because that's what's necessary for the story! I do admit, 'though, I tend to over-think the practicalities and that can spoil some stories for me. Case in point, there was one I read on an old forum once that was objectively very good but had a glaring issue for me. The premise was basically a woman gets in trouble at work and has to be cooked and eaten at a company event. Because she accepted the medical insurance etc for her daughters too, that means they're also on the menu. In the story, her husband drove them to the event then, while there, decided that he would volunteer his meat too. In my head, I was immediately thinking "But they left their house this morning fulling intending for him to come back and he drove to the event. What happens to the car and house now?" and little things like that can take me out of a story.

>>25168

In most of our stories, we already asking that the reader suspend their disbelief enough to accept that a lot of people are willing to be eaten, so asking the readers to also ignore the inevitable rapid depopulation doesn't typically seem like a stretch to me.

That said, I have certainly gotten hung up on just how fast all the girls are getting gobbled up, especially in vore stories, where it's common for one adult to digest another whole adult in a day and still be hungry for more. This bothered me enough that I wrote a story just to illustrate a novel (very sci-fi) solution for how to rapidly replace the consumed girls.
https://aryion.com/g4/view/1119972

>>25164

> That means realistically, you need 10 breeders per meat consuming human.

Actually, a 10 to 1 ratio is the standard assumption for a stable population of prey vs predators IRL, so that checks out.

AL, you mention in passing that expanding the breeding age range doesn't help much with the problem, but I'd like to emphasize that point some more. The real problem you are trying to solve isn't that there aren't enough girls to eat, it's that they can't be produced as fast as society would consume them. This means that the only things that could possibly help are: to increase the production rate (multiple / more frequent pregnancies), or to decrease consumption (class division between pred and prey). Rabbit's famous ability to multiply quickly is due to the remarkable combination of having large litter sizes and being able to bear such a litter several times per year. Of course, it also helps that they only occasionally eat their own kind.

Fully normalized cannibalism is, indeed, fundamentally unsustainable. Even in the extreme case of an essential all-female society where women are literally constantly pregnant, each woman could only consume a girl as frequently as she gives birth (multipled by litter size), otherwise the population would inevitably be decreasing. Perhaps surprisingly, the age of the girl when consumed only changes the effort required to raise her, but has no impact on the number of girls which can be eaten, per capita, so eating them at birth or in adulthood works out the same mathematically.

>>25168
The point is indeed not to discourage anybody.
Each author is entitled to choosing how his universe works.

But first of all, I find it fun, to think about how it could realistically be a sustainable thing.

Secondly, if I were to create such a universe, I'd want to have a realistic setting, and I'm sure there are others who have the same inclination, so if anything, those reflections might help them figure out how they wanna go about this.

Thirdly, for those who don't want to include such realism in their stories, I believe having a basic understanding of what's realistic or not can still help empower them to choose how they want to break away from realism and understand where they're asking their readers to suspend disbelief.
I'm generally of the opinion that any choice the author wants to make is fine, but that it's best if it's actually a choice, and not something that's done through ignorance and that they might come to regret later because they hadn't thought about it and wouldn't have made the same choice had they known.

>>25169
Realistically, that's probably desirable anyway to have the meat girls be vegetarians. Notice how most of the animals we eat are mainly herbivorous.
But the main issue is that most of this population (in my simulation, about 7 billion of it) is little girls below 10 years old.
It's important to stress, because that means they're unlikely to be able to do pretty much any hard labor, like growing enough food to feed themselves.
And each breeder has to take care of about 40 kids at any point in time, while being pregnant for 50% of their adult life. Not the easiest thing to do.
One assumption I kinda silently made and realized afterwards is a bit silly, but which might help, is that I assumed a monogamous breeder society by assuming each breeder has to produce 2 offspring that won't be eaten for sustainability.

So in this case, there's about 2 adults for these 40 kids, and importantly, one of them isn't gonna be pregnant half of the time. So these males could be the ones being farmers. And that seems to about track. A modern farmer can produce enough to feed around 150 people. So only about a fourth of breeder males would need to be farmers. But that also doesn't leave much of the population to do all the other things that are required to sustain those modern techniques.
So yeah, that silent assumption might save the realism of that setting, but I'm not even certain it's enough.

If you were to go the other way and assume males would spend their time impregnating women ... Let's say a male can fuck a breeder once per hour, that makes him available to breed maybe 10 of them a day.
It seems the probability for a woman to get impregnated is about 25% chances until around 30, dropping afterwards, with a recommended 2 or 3 intercourse sessions around ovulation. So it takes for a male fucking a female around 12 times to impregnate her.
In our 18 month cycle, a male can breed 5475 times, which impregnates 456.25 females. This gives you the male/female ratio you need in your population to keep the breeding working.

If you assume instead that you're artificially impregnating the females, then I assume a male can impregnate many more females than that.

So essentially, this number being pretty insignificant, you can more or less divide by two the population of breeders and add 1 to the number of meat offspring a female can produce, which reduces the required population slightly further.
So the larger impact of this is on the population of breeders you require. Though it's a minor impact because it isn't by large the largest part of the population.
And since your adult/kids population ratio is further decreased by that, you're increasing the issues with getting things done.

>>25172
Actually, you make a good point I failed to address.
While all you're saying is true, if you assume there's a population of eaten and a population of eaters, then having an accelerated growth drastically reduces the number of meat girls that need to be alive at any one time (essentially by ensuring they're big enough to eat at a younger age and thus have a shorter lifespan).
And since it's the largest part of our population, then it has a pretty big impact (less mouths to feed. less kids to handle).
And so if you assume that you can feed the same overall population, it increased the size of the eaters population quite a bit.
It doesn't change the fact that if you want it to be a staple food, you need a population that's breeding without eating human meat, but it does help with the figures. Especially if you start thinking about the workload that goes into feeding all that population, because you're increasing the adults/kids ratio.

I haven't found good figures about how many workers it takes to support the work of a farmer. But technically, you'd need to take that into account.
And even then, you haven't produced any clothing or housing, or provided many other basic necessities to your population.

I'm not quite sure how much of an actively working population it takes to sustain things, but I think even in my "realistic" scenario, that's the biggest concern.

So if anybody can find good data on that, maybe the best approach would be to assume you have a certain adult population based on those figures, and then work back to how often people can realistically eat human meat and what your population looks like.
Because ultimately, what might limit your population's ability to consume human meat might very well be its ability to provide basic necessities to many kids that need to be alive at any one time as they're growing up.

I've been mulling over a scenario where an advanced alien civilization invades and captures Earth. Due to their warrior culture, they believe consuming sentient beings on special occasions enhances their vitality. Out of all the species they reign over, human females are considered especially delicious. In exchange for not glassing Earth into uninhabitability, the unified Earth government offer up women and girls gained through a mandatory lottery, criminal sentencing, or through volunteerism for export as meat livestock. Due to the ceremonial requirements for sapient animal consumption, the demand is kept low, but since Earth is supplying the local galactic sector for the upper class of a single polity, that still requires a decently large amount of female livestock which means the methods of acquiring said livestock still require large bureacratic organizations, societal demands and attitudes and the inherently dehumanizing industrial methods of processing.

I have had the same thoughts. Yes, there must be a huge supply of women for meat. I wake up and I am in a Dolcett world. One idea is that there is a 100 to one girl to boy birth ratio. And no way to change it. So the men are treated like masters because they are so important. The girls are disposable. A further idea is that girls are chosen to become breeders. They go to something like a camp/prison where they live just to create babies.