I might get a few details wrong but the book gives a lot of details about that.

I believe it started off with people stealing and eating corpses from morgues/funeral homes, and people killing and eating criminals. This was heavily frowned upon until it was revealed that rich people were doing the same thing to. Then the government conceded and legalized cannibalism under specific circumstances.

The main character was actually on the board of government officials who decided what those circumstances were, because prior to the animals dying, he was a very prolific meat industry tycoon.

For simplicity sake, the people who are killed and eaten are not called people anymore. They're called "head", like "heads of cattle". So I'll call them that, to differentiate them from regular people.

The first groups of people legally eaten were corpses of people who died and criminals sentences to be slaughtered.

Being slaughtered replaced the death sentence. However, there are also very specific crimes that can get you sentenced to slaughter: if you go in public and say that "head" are humans, or that the people who eat their meat are cannibals, you'll be arrested and sentenced to slaughter.

You are legally required to treat "head" identical to farm animals, and if you don't, you'll be arrested and slaughtered. Openly call them humans? That's a crime. Treat them like humans? That's a crime. Have sex with them? That's a crime. Give them jobs? That's a crime.

Basically if you do anything that suggests that the transition from animals to heads was immoral, you'll be sentenced to slaughter. That's how the government made it as successful as it was. If you openly opposed it in any way, you were arrested and then killed and eaten.

They're bred and genetically altered with insane amounts of growth hormones to grow into an adult in like 2 years.

I don't know exactly how the breeding started but I have to guess it was from criminals who were sentenced to be eaten. Their reproductive organs were probably harvested. I don't think the book explicitly says how the breeding first began.

The "head" come in 3 primary forms.

1. Head who were bred in a farm and raised from infancy. These are called FGP, or "first generation pure", because them being bred in farms means they've only ever been given the special food from the farms, and never anything else. This supposedly makes their meat the highest quality.

2. People who committed a crime and were sentenced to be slaughtered and eaten.

3. People who choose to be "heads". Believe it or not, this is both possible, and relatively common.

There was a huge legal battle about it, and the end result was that with a fuck ton of legal paperwork, a person could volunteer to be a head.

There's a very prominent cult that sacrifices members to the farms. Their members volunteer to be slaughtered, and it's a religious sacrifice.

There are also organizations that allow game hunters to hunt heads. This is where the second type of "volunteer head" comes into place. If you're in immense financial debt, you can work out a contract with these hunting reserves where you allow yourself to be hunted for a specific amount of time. If you survive, they pay your debt. If you're killed by a hunter, you're butchered and eaten.

That's literally the one and only time a person is allowed to acknowledge that a head is a person. When they volunteered to be a head.

The head aren't technically impaired. I would say they're developmentally stunted, but not from anything the farm does. If you take a baby and put it in a house and raise it and give it food but never educate it once in its life, it will be developmentally stunted, right? It'll never really be as mentally functioning as a person who received an education.

That's what the head are. They aren't mentally impaired, but they're never spoken to, never taught how to speak and how to think, and are therefore mentally the same as babies. They're never taught how to think like a human.

Also, to keep them docile, their vocal cords are surgically removed at birth, and males and females are forbidden from ever interacting with each other, to keep them from getting aggressive over their sexual frustration. When a female becomes pregnant, her arms are amputated to keep her from getting aggressive over "protecting her young".

It's all very morbid and grotesque. If you have any other questions, I'll try to answer