Tender is the Flesh

After authorities report that the GGB virus makes animals dangerous to humans, animals are destroyed and governments legalize the breeding and slaughter of humans as 'special meat.' Marcos Tejo works as the right-hand man at the Krieg Processing Plant. He distrusts the official account of the virus and recognizes the industry's euphemisms, but he remains deeply embedded in the system because the work pays for his father Don Armando's nursing care. His life is also defined by the sudden death of his infant son Leo and the separation from his wife Cecilia, who has gone to live with her mother.

Marcos's meat run exposes the institutions that sustain the new order: Señor Urami's tannery, El Gringo's Tod Voldelig breeding center, Spanel's butcher shop, the Krieg slaughter line, Urlet's human game reserve, and Dr. Valka's laboratory. Members of the Church of the Immolation legally volunteer for sacrifice, while Krieg secretly routes their bodies to Scavengers rather than treating the church as opposition to the new order. Marcos repeatedly expresses revulsion at parts of the system while continuing to perform his work within it. He supervises slaughter, allows diseased head to reach Scavengers, manages clients, and enforces the same regulations that define captive people as property. El Gringo then gives him a twenty-year-old First Generation Pure female. Marcos initially treats her as an unwanted commercial problem, but he feeds and shelters her, frees her from her rope, washes her, and eventually has prohibited sexual contact with her.

Part Two reveals that Marcos has named the female Jasmine and that she is eight months pregnant. He has taught her parts of domestic life, keeps her hidden and locked inside the house, monitors her with cameras, and prepares Leo's old room for the expected child. His attachment does not remove the power structure between them: Jasmine remains legally property, cannot speak because her vocal cords were removed, and faces death if the relationship is discovered. Marcos uses his former connections as a domestic-head inspector to evade an inspection that would expose the pregnancy. At the same time, Don Armando dies; Marcos scatters his father's real ashes at the abandoned zoo and gives his sister Marisa an urn filled with dirty sand for the farewell service.

The later chapters continue to erode any simple distinction between Marcos and the society he condemns. He witnesses hunters eat the indebted musician Ulises Vox, sees teenagers kill the zoo puppies, confronts Valka's human experiments, discovers that Marisa is slowly cutting pieces from a living domestic female, and responds to a Scavenger attack on a Krieg truck by proposing that the plant poison head and feed them to the Scavengers. When Marcos finally returns home, Jasmine is in a dangerous labor. Cecilia comes at his request and delivers a living boy. Jasmine reaches for her child, but Marcos tells Cecilia that the baby is now theirs. He calms Jasmine and then strikes her unconscious with a club. Cecilia's objection is that Jasmine could have produced more children. Marcos drags Jasmine to the barn to slaughter her and closes the novel by saying that she had 'the human look of a domesticated animal.'