"An End to Starvation?" (Pelican Books, 1973)

Before the 1970s, the idea of reprocessing human body parts had only been officially proposed once. In 1790, Arnold Bumb, an alchemist, necromancer and avid shopper, suggested that amputated human limbs be surgically spliced onto livestock to make them more efficient. His pamphlet "The Duck With My Wife's Foot" was very popular among agriculturists (and fetishists) of the time.

But it wasn't until the 1970s, when poverty levels were at their highest since the the second world war, that the government published a white paper proposing a solution to Britain's impending food deficit.

Since the advent of modern medicine, hospitals had been incinerating post-operative surgical and biological waste, and to many people this was considered both uneconomical and unethical. In the early 1970s, a nationwide study into the numbers of body parts amputated annually showed that there were enough discarded limbs, organs and even hair, to feed a county the size of Lancashire, as long as people supplemented their diet with fingernail biting, thumb sucking, and by popping over the border into Yorkshire for an occasional pub lunch.

The government's trial schemes were so successful that some hospitals, such as Royal Wimpy Infirmary, St. McDonalds General and North Findus Hospital shifted away from healthcare and became fully-fledged food processors and suppliers.