Brian Cogging was ghouling a fixed assets accountant from Leeds named Sara Fry. He had pulled some strings to eat Sara because the last person he'd eaten, Taylor Threever, had been a longshoreman from Liverpool and had been roughly the human equivalent of a stray dog. Brian had been 69 then, and now that he was 58 he was determined not to imitate the missteps of his youth. For one thing, fixed assets was not the sort of daredevil accountancy that got into the flavor of the meat (Sara Fry had not been some stringy auditor), but was such a sedentary and monotonous occupation that one could hardly escape the field without being marbled in fat. Even healthy fixed assets accountants, which Sara Fry had not been, had a sort of soft glow about them that made you think about how well they would turn out on a bed of onions and carrots. In contrast, Taylor Threever had been strong and large and smoked a lot, which Brian had hoped one make him taste like brisket but which had made him taste like boiled hoof.
Brian supposed it was better than eating the elderly.
When cannibalism began to emerge as a growth industry, a lot of people had eaten the elderly, which (Brian had heard from reliable sources) had tasted less like food and more like the bits of sodden cardboard to which food occasionally comes attached. Of course, the problem was that with the planet, with a resting rate of about 105 dpm (deaths per minute) and about one of those corpses reaching the table for purposes of mastication at the same rate, things got out of hand very quickly. That meant that roughly one person per minute, during cannibalism's hay day, had been reinvigorated by an increment of 20 years. At this rate of about one ghouling a minute, the amount of time it would take for the 7 billion people on planet earth to each reinvigorate through the consumption of human flesh was 13 years and two months. And with the demand for human flesh doubling every quarter as it had consistently done since the growth of cannibalism as an observable trend, the corresponding rapid shrinkage of dpm, the question of from where might fresh and palatable human corpses be produced became rather an urgent one. The free market had very promptly solved, much to the delight of insufferable anarcho-capitalists of every shade, as cannibalism naturally became a luxury. The price of a human corpse rose from just over half a million pounds to just under 20 million in two years. Sure, there were still unsavory stories: whole retirement communities gone to pot, suspiciously vigorous men and women dabbing their chins as they exited care facilities in vintage clothing: nightmarish kennels endemic from Morovia to Karachi to Guayaquil where caged street urchins were plumped and brought to markets all over the world: 50+ years of marriage that ended in dinner, not divorce. Missing persons cases had skyrocketed, not just because people were being Shanghaied and filleted, but because once you had unexpectedly dropped 20 years, you generally had a lot of explaining to do--especially in the absence of a spouse, parent, sibling or child.
No, thought Brian, it was no way to run a planet: free range, local, that was the way to eat. Taylor Threever the longshoreman had dropped dead of a degenerative heart murmur. Sara Fry had been pasted by a lorry. Brian thought a lot about accountability. Sure, there had been a subtle uptick in world wide surveillance, but overpopulation, which, at the discovery of ghouling had seemed to be one of its immediate drawbacks had mysteriously been solved. War, as the world had known it, had been replaced with the line at the deli counter, and a whole string of inherited problems that mostly had to do with a well-let-them-worry-about-it-because-i'm-going-to-snuff-it-anyway mindframe had slowed and their trends had reversed. Winter was back on track. The Pacific Garbage Patch had been almost eliminated and over-fishing and the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest had been halted in their tracks.
As Brian tucked into Sara, he began to retread some calculations off-the-cuff. The capital he invested in his first ghouling had been the product of a lifetime of hard work and no small inheritance, but this second dinner had taken only nine and a half years and Brian was confident that he could shrink that interval but half again. Excepting some unforeseen event, like political silliness or serious worldwide economic downturn, Brian might be well into his twenties by the end of the decade.
Things are so much easier from the top.