When famine strikes, I wonder why there is such a great societal aversion to cannibalism. Is it not better to survive by eating from those who already died than to perish with them?
Take for example the French retreat from Moscow under Napoleon. The temperatures were epic brutal, reaching -40 degrees. The troops did not have food sufficient for the march home, nor could they scrounge enough from the countryside. But due to cold and exhaustion, soldiers were falling dead and quickly freezing solid. So why not choose to survive by feeding on the fallen?
Further, it is better to make the decision in advance of when you will resort to cannibalism, rather than waiting until you are so weakened by starvation that you can no longer reverse course.
The old aversion is based, as most such taboos, on empirical evidence that it is bad for you.
Diseases. Think about it, a cow has some bovine disease. You can still eat the critter and not end up sick because humans do not get that sickness. Now, you butcher and eat another human, who happens to have Hep B/HIV/Flu. Guess what. You now have a very good chance of having Hep B/HIV/Flu.
If you are at such extremes that eating others is looking good, it is likely you will not have the facilities to properly cook a chunk of meat to the point that you would not have to worry about disease. Think wild hog amount of cooking.
Its a good way to pick up neurological diseases and I simply don’t think its healthy to feed off the same species be it humans or farm animals. In the UK mad cow disease was spread by feeding calves rendered parts of other cows, and in New Guinea they have also had issues eating parts of other humans.
Kuru belongs to a class of infectious diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), also known as prion diseases. The hallmark of a TSE disease is misshapen protein molecules that clump together and accumulate in brain tissue. Scientists believe that misshapen prion proteins have the ability to change their shape and cause other proteins of the same type to also change shape. Other TSEs include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and fatal familial insomnia in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle (also known as mad cow disease), scrapie in sheep and goats, and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.
Research indicates that the first probable infections of BSE in cows occurred during the 1970’s with two cases of BSE being identified in 1986. BSE possibly originated as a result of feeding cattle meat-and-bone meal that contained BSE-infected products from a spontaneously occurring case of BSE or scrapie-infected sheep products. Scrapie is a prion disease of sheep. There is strong evidence and general agreement that the outbreak was then amplified and spread throughout the United Kingdom cattle industry by feeding rendered, prion-infected, bovine meat-and-bone meal to young calves.
Basically, if my understanding is right, you can no longer feed animals back to each other (like using chicken parts in chicken feed) and you can’t use CNS parts in feed, either. I don’t think it would be good practice to be eating same species food products (especially brain and spinal tissue).
You are correct in your understanding of this. I’m in the transportation industry and it is forbidden to even transport a feed product in a trailer that has previously contained a product of like origins without a certified washout.
Example: transporting feed intended for cattle in a trailer that previously hauled a bovine derived ingredient
As to cannibalism, even if you put aside the risks of disease, I think it’s an ethical barrier that many just couldn’t cross regardless of its benefits as they relate to survival. jmo
Sounds like a great idea. try bringing yourself to do this with your recently dead son/daughter/wife or anyone you have a close relationship with as this will probably be the same people that you watch die around you. Lastly, I think the big man in the sky kind of frowns down on those sorts of things but this would just be my superstition.
I would also tend to agree that this is a fundamental taboo derived from an actual health issue.
That said I was in a safety meeting this morning that ran about two hours longer than I expected and I could barely refrain from killing and eating this one pudgy guy at the end of the table. Man, he looked tender.
There were donuts on the table…but I’m really trying to cut out processed carbs so eating the donuts just seemed kind of wrong.
Disease is certainly a concern, but how many days are you and your family going to go without a bite to eat before ethical judgments and social norms are just so much balderdash from a sociology textbook? And the abstract possibility of disease may seem less a threat than the immediate reality of starvation.
I once had a long discussion with a Jewish friend about whether human flesh, properly prepared by a Rabbi, was kosher. If memory serves, we came to the disturbing conclusion that yeah, it probably was.
On the funny side, I too was once in a long meeting, poorly scheduled. It was to run from 10AM-2PM, and no lunch was provided. About noon-ish I told the project manager that one of three things was about to happen: either we would be let go to get lunch, lunch would be ordered for us and catered, or I would carve me a platter of developer tartar (curry-flavored, of course). Something must have made him realize I might eventually be serious in this, as we were almost immediately released to go across the street to the cafeteria.
