History Main / HumanResources

* A short segment of ''Series/NightGallery'' features a man whose business is getting passage out of the country for the most reprehensible murderous criminals. He does so by toasting his client's voyage and slipping him a mickey, then shipping him out of the country... as canned dog food.

* In ''Film/MotelHell'', various Farmer Vincent's products are made of human meat.

* The organ donor system; you agree to it, then fall over dead, and some doctors cut all the useful bits out of you to use in someone else. Often it is illegal for the donor's family to profit by this; in some countries, there is a small payment. Likewise with donating eggs, sperm, blood, and bone marrow -- with the added convenience of omitting the "fall over dead" part.

* In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'', it's revealed that [[spoiler:the Heroes' Relics are made from the bones and hearts of slaughtered Nabateans, humans who could turn into dragons. Their blood was also taken and transfused into humans, and the manifestations of the power granted by that blood are the Crests borne by those humans' descendants—the students.]]

* Archaeologists found a piece of a human skull from the eighth century in Denmark. It had a hole that seemed to suggest a trepanation. Then they realised the hole had been drilled long after the person died. The runic incantations to Odin and other deities led to only one conclusion: Some guy had dug up a skull, hacked off a piece, carved runes and drilled a hole in it...and then worn it around his throat as an amulet.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' starts with 'Iguana' Bob, whose stores tend to include a slight bit of long pig when the iguana is low. ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' also includes the people of Arefu potentially giving blood to the Family in exchange for protection or being left alone, and the ''children'' of Little Lamplight, who are only able to survive thanks to the radiation-cleansing properties of a specific fungus that suddenly flourished after having all the dead adults dropped into it. The Little Lamplighters continue to provide nourishment for said fungus. The player character in ''Fallout 3'' can also sell human blood and... ahem... strange meat to some of the above groups, although not usually producing it himself or herself.

* Taken to its logical conclusion in Eternals2021, where its revealed [[spoiler: that the Eternal resurrection process is powered by human life - every time an Eternal comes back from the dead, a human just dies.]]

* Late into ''VideoGame/{{Loopmancer}}'', your investigation of Tompson Technologies, a MegaCorp who develops artificial organs from apes, leads you to a ghost town called ditch village. You uncover an entrance to an underground lab, and realize the civilains, contrary to what the media reports, aren't evacuated from a plague - they're imprisoned to be used as living vessels in growing organs by Tompson's staff.

* ''TabletopGame/WraithTheOblivion'' has this as a defining principle of Stygia and many of the other Dark Kingdoms. Nothing really lasts in the Shadowlands; even Relics, the ghostly reflections of beloved objects in the world of the living, will fade in time. The only thing that has real endurance is soulsteel, and the only way to make that is [[AndIMustScream soulforging]] luckless ghosts. Sure, you can use the animalistic Plasmics, the unthinking Drones, or the corrupted Spectres, but there are only so many to go around, and some of them take a lot of effort to wrangle... and there are so many wraiths crossing over who may not be able to "productively contribute" otherwise.
** Swar, the Dark Kingdom of India, may be even worse. For those few who manage to prove themselves worthy of entry, it seems to be a colorful paradise in the otherwise drab wastes of the Shadowlands, a place of eternal music, with delicious food and fragrant waters that flow in mighty rivers. Thing is, that food and that water needs to come from ''somewhere'', and the music is mostly meant to cover up the tide of screaming from the luckless souls who have their Corpus boiled down to provide the raw materials.

* The ''ComicBook/MarvelAdventures'' Franchise/SpiderMan ran into this with his "smart-cloth" black outfit, which required the host's bioelectric energy to perform its wearer's commands. Spidey ended up loaning it to [[ComicBook/FantasticFour Reed Richards]] to analyze, but Johnny ends up letting it loose and it runs into a disgruntled thief named Eddie Brock, and voila, the Marvel Adventures take on Venom is born.

** [[CloneArmy Clone troopers]] fall under this in the most literal sense, being designed and trained to be sent to fight and die in the Grand Army of the Republic. A novel mentions "recycling tanks" for those who are brought back from the battlefield dead, dying, or alive but not so well that they can recover easily/fast/cheaply. A surgeon, who is later horrified by how dismissive he was of them as people, idly remarks to himself that clone organ transplants are easy, with hardly any rejection. [[CloningBlues Poor bastards.]]