Try the Long Pork
There are a few taboos that are close to universal. Don’t shit where you eat — human waste is unclean and dangerous. Don’t have sex with family members or young children. And whatever you do, no matter how hungry you get, don’t eat people.
It’s just not the done thing. Cannibalism is the realm of serial killers and shipwrecked mariners. The 19th-century case of R v Dudley and Stephens established a precedent: even if you are starving in a lifeboat, killing someone to eat them for the purpose of survival is still murder. Necessity is not a defense. Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish are remembered as two of the most twisted serial killers of all time, largely on the back of the reputation for consuming the flesh of their victims. Dahmer was so obsessed with his victims that he wanted to keep them forever. Eating them was a way of absorbing their essence.
And yet not all cannibals are created equal. There are the serial killers, yes, the ones for whom the meal is a victory feast or a perverse form of trophy-taking. There are the starvation cannibals, the Donner Party and the Franklin Expedition, who turn to human flesh in extremis. Then there are the ritual cannibals. They eat their dead ancestors, or their defeated enemies, or their neighbors. The consumption has a purpose beyond simple feeding or reveling in triumph. There is a spiritual component. If someone’s qualities are housed in their body somewhere — their bravery, their spirit, their intelligence, their stubbornness — then perhaps you can appropriate them by consuming their locus.
The Korowai of Indonesia practice cannibalism — for a specific purpose. They believe that shapeshifting witches known as khakhua are responsible for unexplained deaths. When a khakhua is identified — usually a young man — the relatives of the deceased will murder and eat him, as a form of punishment and revenge. If the khakhua is from the same clan as the deceased, he will be bound and delivered to another clan to eat, in order to avoid impropriety.
Ritual cannibalism can often be separated into exocannibalism — consuming the flesh of other tribes, often defeated enemies — and endocannibalism, or the consumption of your own dead. Many tribes, such as the Wari’ of Brazil, practiced both. The Wari’ would grieve for several days after a loved one passed. They believed in a peaceful afterlife, but in order for the deceased to arrive safely, their family would have to stop grieving them. Cannibalism was a way of obtaining closure and preventing extended grief. Small parts of the body would be removed and eaten, usually by distant kin (immediate family would be forbidden from partaking). The rest of the body and the deceased’s possessions would be burned and buried.
Of course, the stereotype of cannibalistic savages has been ruthlessly exploited down the years. In fact, the term “cannibal” derives from Christopher Columbus’s account of the “caniba” islanders he met on his voyage. His initial accounts reported peaceful, friendly natives who enjoyed trade with their European visitors. Over time, however, he began to add details of anthropophagism, and depicted the native as savage man-eaters. Why? Well, when Queen Isabella sanctioned further expeditions west, she gave strict instructions that the natives be left alone and undisturbed — except “the cannibals,” for whom all bets were off. Missionaries flocked westward to save the immortal souls of the barbarous cannibals, which incidentally justified enslaving them and stealing their land. The cannibal mythos was used to greenlight the wholesale pillaging of the New World.
The truth is that cannibalism had been alive and well in Europe for years before Columbus ever sailed west. Of course, cannibalism dates back to the neanderthal period and likely before. Famines in medieval Europe provoked outbreaks of cannibalism, but it was not just desperation that drove them — supposedly, Richard the Lion-Hearted ate a Saracen’s hand during the Crusades to demonstrate his power over them. Common remedies were made from crushed bones, fat, blood and organs, often taken from the freshly deceased — they were believed to have medicinal properties.
Not just Europe, either — China has an illustrious history with cannibalism, even in times of plenty. The general and emperor Shi Hu Jilong collected wives and concubines, and loved throwing lavish feasts in which the central dish was the beheaded body of a concubine; supposedly he would parade around her intact head to show that he had not stinted by selecting an ugly meal.
It seems this universal taboo isn’t so universal after all. People have been eating each other ever since we figured out that we’re made of meat. Still, I’d advise against trying it. Eating human flesh is a great way to get prion diseases, like kuru. Better just stick to pork. Or cassowary; according to the Korowai, that’s the closest analogue to human flesh. You know, in case you were curious.
