In the year 2022, the world is a suffocating, overcrowded wasteland defined by ecocide and a permanent heatwave. New York City’s population has swelled to 40 million, forcing the majority of citizens to sleep in hallways and on staircases while surviving on rations distributed by the Soylent Corporation. The film depicts a society where the natural world has effectively died; real food like meat, fruit, and even jam has become an unattainable luxury for all but the ultra-wealthy, who live in fortified luxury apartments. Within this world, Earth serves as a grim urban cage where humanity has exhausted its biological carrying capacity, leading to a total reliance on industrial synthetics.

The societal dynamics are characterized by a stark class divide and the commodification of human life. The elite enjoy air conditioning and "furniture"—women who are provided as part of high-end apartment rentals—while the masses are managed through militarized police force and brutal riot control measures, such as "scoops" that shovel protesters into trucks like refuse. The environmental interpretation is one of a de-technologized future; while the rich have access to advanced security and video games, the infrastructure for the average person has regressed to 19th-century levels of squalor, driven by the collapse of the global supply chain and the death of the oceans. This divergence from our actual 2022 highlights a world that failed to innovate its way out of the Malthusian traps of the 1960s.

Critically, Soylent Green is recognized as one of the first major films to explicitly name and depict the greenhouse effect. While our real-world 2022 population of 8 billion is significantly lower than the film’s implied global totals, the movie’s depiction of record-breaking heatwaves and biodiversity loss aligns closely with modern climate data. The film’s "Soylent" wafers have found a modern, albeit non-gruesome, parallel in real-world meal replacement products like Soylent, which explicitly took its name from the film. However, the film's central horror—industrialized cannibalism—remains a fictional extremity, as real-world agricultural technological advancements like GMOs prevented the total food collapse the film's creators feared.