Toward a Better World #2: Reconsidering Cannibalism

Toward a Better World #2: Reconsidering Cannibalism

You see a lot of crazy things in the world today: Tofurkey, chocolate-flavored French fries, Spork-on-a-Rope. In an effort to help my fellow food enthusiasts cut through the clutter, see the correct path more clearly, and live happier, healthier lives, I'm sweeping off the welcome mat to Reality and offering my unqualified insights into truth and justice, my gentle cajoling toward more complete acceptance of common sense, my notes...toward a better world.

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People used to say, "If man was meant to fly, God would have given him wings." We now know people who talk like that are crazy.

Some now say, "Cannibalism is wrong," but it won’t be long before these people, too, are seen for what they are: short-sighted moralistic wing-nuts.

There’s nothing immoral with cannibalism. Hey, it's the 21st century: wake up and smell the napalm; morality hardly exists.

The only question you need to ask yourself is: "Can I bring myself to do it?"

And when it comes to cannibalism, the only reasonable answer is "Whaddayagoofy? Of course I can do it!."

With the constant craving for new food sensations, I say it's high time to drop the silly prohibition against consuming our fellow people. Take a look around: cemeteries are filling up, and with a future that promises to keep us in a state of Constant and Total War, we're going to have to dig a lot more six-foot holes to bury potential chow. What a waste of time and effort! What a waste of food! Children are starving in China. We should be digging barbecue pits.

At my back I always hear, nattering nay-sayers drawing near; some will inevitably murmur that there are so-called medical reasons for not eating human beings. But look, if modern science can develop an Orgasmatron (http://www.orgasmatron.com) and new ways of communicating with people on other astral planes (AstralChat, patent pending, DCH, Inc), then surely we in the science community can find a way to get FDA approval for putting PeopleMeat, HumaNuggets and Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pies in the deli department.

Of course, none of this will happen without adequate supply and demand. Both these preconditions for economic success are already there. In a few years, we're going to have way more product than we know what to do with, so supply is no problem And demand? Sheesh. Are we not already enjoying surrogate cannibalism when we partake of Holy Communion or Manwich?. Wasn’t Soylent Green a very popular movie? Are you going to tell me I'm the only guy with A Modest Proposal on the cookbook stand?!

Of course, some traditionalists are probably still hung up on the morality issue. My recommendation is to just do a little rethinking and rewording, same as we’ve done with old-timey expressions like "till death do us part" and "government by and for the people." Just reconsider and revise the old Christian cliche to give it more modern relevance: "Love they neighbor; he's delicious!"

Any way, that's the plan. I offer it gratis. I am David Hammond, and this has been my humble effort to move us all…toward a better world.

Reminds me of a short story I read decades ago. I think it was by Stanley Ellin.

It was about visitors from outer space who helped humanity in many ways - eliminated war, conquered disease, etc. A character in the story finds a book belonging to the aliens and tries to translate it. After some effort he figures out the title is "How to serve man."

You guessed it -- the story ends when he discovers that "How to serve man" is a cook book.

David Hammond wrote:Toward a Better World #2: Reconsidering Cannibalism


Any way, that's the plan. I offer it gratis. I am David Hammond, and this has been my humble effort to move us all toward a better world.

Any Jeffery Dahmer meal plans?

Taking this in the spirit of reasoned discussion, there's a major objection: disease. Aside from the fact that most of what's out there would not be well-marbled, prime carcasses (tough, scrawny, too fatty, etc.), the possibility to spread disease is just too high.

Viruses -- everything from sniffles to AIDS, plus CJD (mad cow), would make it very difficult to identify which remains would be edible. Currently, avian and porcine flus are a major source of widespread disease, even though (a) we slaughter many animals to prevent disease spread, and (b) viruses jumping species are not very common.

Realizing that virtually every infective agent in a human body would be transmissible to whoever ate them would make this an industry that would never get off the ground.

Plus, it's not kosher or halal.

JoelF wrote:Viruses -- everything from sniffles to AIDS, plus CJD (mad cow), would make it very difficult to identify which remains would be edible.

Joel,

By the time the food has become "remains," it's too late to grade the meat. The only reasonable solution would be to grade the meat while it's still "on the hoof" -- I'm thinking a worldwide tattoo program would do the trick, perhaps with tax credits for those who are willing to contribute their bodies to some kind of international food depository.

Hammond

George R wrote:You guessed it -- the story ends when he discovers that "How to serve man" is a cook book.

George,

The alien book in the story was actually titled "To Serve Man."

The very fascinating aspect of this sci-fi (or was it really so "fi"?) story was that these extraterrestrial humanophages were portrayed extremely intelligent (they brought humans the cure for diseases, had really cool defense systems that eliminated war on earth, and had technologies for improving crop yield). What this tells me is that this very prescient author understood that human meat is brain food. Eat people; get smart. It's simple.

Hammond

Bruce wrote:

David Hammond wrote:Toward a Better World #2: Reconsidering Cannibalism


Any way, that's the plan. I offer it gratis. I am David Hammond, and this has been my humble effort to move us all toward a better world.

Any Jeffery Dahmer meal plans?

Bruce,

See, Dahmer was insane and he defamed the cannibal spirit. He kept heads in unrefrigerated cans of chemicals -- puh-leeze. That's just playing with your food.

I feel one should show the same respect for human meat cuts as one would show for a good slab of ribs or a prime filet.

Hammond

George R wrote:Reminds me of a short story I read decades ago. I think it was by Stanley Ellin.

It was about visitors from outer space who helped humanity in many ways - eliminated war, conquered disease, etc. A character in the story finds a book belonging to the aliens and tries to translate it. After some effort he figures out the title is "How to serve man."

You guessed it -- the story ends when he discovers that "How to serve man" is a cook book.

It was a Twilight Zone episode (could have been a book, too, but who reads?).

stevez wrote:

George R wrote:Reminds me of a short story I read decades ago. I think it was by Stanley Ellin.

It was about visitors from outer space who helped humanity in many ways - eliminated war, conquered disease, etc. A character in the story finds a book belonging to the aliens and tries to translate it. After some effort he figures out the title is "How to serve man."

You guessed it -- the story ends when he discovers that "How to serve man" is a cook book.

It was a Twilight Zone episode (could have been a book, too, but who reads?).

Steve,

On the T-zone espisode, the primary alien cannibal was played by none other than Ted Cassidy, who went on to even greater fame as Lurch in The Addams Family.

But, I'm getting off the point...what do you think of cannibalism?

Hammond

stevez wrote: It was a Twilight Zone episode (could have been a book, too, but who reads?).

It was a Twilight Zone episode, written by Rod Serling in 1962, but based on a short story by Damon Knight, written in 1950.

To inpsire awe and arouse the passion of any literay soul, it is enough to listen to the voice of Serling punching out a prologue or epilogue, cigarette dangling twixt first and second fingers, as in this one case, recounting,

"the recollections of one Michael Chambers, with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or more simply stated, the evolution of man, the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone's soup. It's tonight's bill of fare . . . on the Twilight Zone."

Respectfully submitted for your perusal,
Alfonso

Alfonso XIV wrote:It was a Twilight Zone episode, written by Rod Serling in 1962, but based on a short story by Damon Knight, written in 1950.
Alfonso

Serling was great, and a real boon to the industrial video business. I was in a meeting last week, and one of the in-house "creatives" actually came up with the incredibly tired idea of using a Twilight Zone approach to sell Firestone tires. I think I've written at least two videos with a T-Zone approach myself (but that was long ago, when it was still original to do so )

One thing that bugged me about the Knight story is that Michael Chambers tells the story in flashbacks, etc., as he is on the spacecraft on his way to "dinner." Even as a kid, narrative techniques like that made no sense to me.

But... what do you think of cannibalism?

Hammond

David Hammond wrote: On the T-zone espisode, the primary alien cannibal was played by none other than Ted Cassidy, who went on to even greater fame as Lurch in The Addams Family.

But, I'm getting off the point...what do you think of cannibalism?

Actually, my Twilight Zone Companion indicates that the alien cannibal was played by an actor named Richard Kiel.

As for for topic of cannibalism, I find it all-consuming.

Alfonso

Headcheese?

Sorry for recycling material, but this seems quite relevant to the present discussion:

Antonius wrote:My all time favourite term of praise for a dish... appears in Roger Williams' book on the language of the Narragansett Indians (1643) and is used to describe a dish of human head and brains reputedly enjoyed by the Mohawk:

"A delicious monstrous dish"

A more widely applicable phrase than you might think...

The Mohawk and other Iroquoian peoples were cannibals but ate human flesh not so much as a regular source of nutrition but rather for symbolic, religious, spiritual reasons.

The traffic in human flesh should be permitted but controlled...
A

An Early Urban Myth

Galen reports what seems very much to have been an instance of what in modern times has come to be known as an "urban myth".

Galen wrote:The similarity between the flesh of man and pig in taste and smell has been observed when certain people have eaten unawares human meat instead of pork. Such incidents perpetrated by unscrupulous restaurateurs and other such people have been witnessed in the past...*

Of course, it is possible that what Galen speaks of was in fact not a matter of "urban myth" from classical Antiquity but the truth.

Now, I've heard tell of a couple of sausage makers in Milwaukee...

Antonius

*Galen was born in 129 A.D. and died some time after 210. The cited passage is from Book 3 of his De alimentorum facultatibus 'On the properties of foods'. The translation given here is from M. Grant's book, Galen on Food and Diet (London: Routledge. 2000.)

Antonius wrote:The traffic in human flesh should be permitted but controlled...
A

A,

Once again, you express a just and reasonable position.

Hammond

David Hammond wrote:...PeopleMeat, HumaNuggets and Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pies in the deli department...

Surely if corn-fed and grass-fed beef can be distinguished in flavour, would it not be true that people who have very different diets would also themselves taste differently on the trencher? Would not a Southern Italian bring something very different to the table than the proverbial 'Wild Scot', or a Thai or an Eskimo? And which treatment would go best with each variety? Would a Tartar make good Tartar? Would a Hamburger be good as a meat patty? And would Paddy be fatty enough to replace the boiled bacon of the past and take his place beside a mound of steaming cabbage? A brave new culinary world faces us... could even stare us back reprovingly (Tote de l'homme de Provence)... Monstrous delicious!

Are we not already enjoying surrogate cannibalism when we partake of Holy Communion or Manwich.

With regard to Manwich, I prefer to avoid stirring up controversy but with regard to Holy Communion, this issue has already been broadly debated by Inquisitor and Schismatic alike... In saying 'surrogate' are you re-veal-ing your position on this matter of the Lamb?

A

I distinctly recall the Twilight Zone episode and, at that time, remembering having read the story some years before.

I preferred the written story to the TV version, perhaps because the ending had greater impact when I first read it.

You're right about Damon Knight being the author. I must have confused authorship with Stanley Ellin's "The Specialty of the House." The specialty was called "Lamb Amirstan" and only available a few times a year.

For a discussion of people consuming exotica (rats, pigeons, endangered species, human flesh, etc.) look at the web page for "The Michel Guide to Horror: Cafes, Pubs, Clubs and Restaurants of the World."

I have no idea as to the accuracy of this material, but it suggests that if you have a taste for Long Pig opportunities lie with restaurants controlled by religious sects or by The Mob. Of course, you are not likely to be told the nature of what you are consuming. Then there are supposededly secret societies of "grands gourmets," mostly in western Europe, devoted to forbidden pursuits.

http://members.tripod.com/~HORROR_guide/specialities.html

George,

That Michel Guide is very...provocative.

I was intrigued by the line, regarding restaurants serving "long pig," that "Police were forced to admit that such things happen more often than is widely suspected."

Hammond

Antonius wrote:
Surely if corn-fed and grass-fed beef can be distinguished in flavour, would it not be true that people who have very different diets would also themselves taste differently on the trencher? Would not a Southern Italian bring something very different to the table than the proverbial 'Wild Scot', or a Thai or an Eskimo?

A

A,

I think this is definitely going to prove to be the case. We will find, as we get to know the people from around the world, that there are many different tastes out there. Some we will like, and others may not be quite our cup of meat.

Gut reaction is that I will probably prefer Samoan, but only time will tell.

Hammond

stevez wrote:It was a Twilight Zone episode (could have been a book, too, but who reads?).

Let us not forget that a variation of this tale appeared during a Halloween special of my generations premeir television program "The Simpsons".

Homer discovered the cookbook "Cooking Humans", while on board an alien craft. Then the alien dusted off the book to reveal the title as "Cooking for Humans". Undaunted Homer removed even more dust from the book cover to reveal the full title of "Cooking Forty Humans".

If it's okay for the Simpson's it's allright in my book

Flip

Flip wrote:Homer discovered the cookbook "Cooking Humans", while on board an alien craft. Then the alien dusted off the book to reveal the title as "Cooking for Humans". Undaunted Homer removed even more dust from the book cover to reveal the full title of "Cooking Forty Humans".

Let's not forget "Mmm... Soylent Green" from "The Itchy and Scratchy Movie" ep.

"On the T-zone espisode, the primary alien cannibal was played by none other than Ted Cassidy, who went on to even greater fame as Lurch in The Addams Family."

"Actually, my Twilight Zone Companion indicates that the alien cannibal was played by an actor named Richard Kiel." Alfonso

Easy enough to confuse Kiel with Cassidy, as Kiel was the enormous actor who played "Jaws" in the late Bond movies, as well as several other carbon copies of that role elsewhere.

mark

mrbarolo wrote:"On the T-zone espisode, the primary alien cannibal was played by none other than Ted Cassidy, who went on to even greater fame as Lurch in The Addams Family."

"Actually, my Twilight Zone Companion indicates that the alien cannibal was played by an actor named Richard Kiel." Alfonso

Easy enough to confuse Kiel with Cassidy, as Kiel was the enormous actor who played "Jaws" in the late Bond movies, as well as several other carbon copies of that role elsewhere.

mark

Mark, yes, I had discussed this with Alphonso XIV, who was kind enough to lend me his Twilight Zone Companion so as to help me avoid such egregious errors of attribution in the future.

Interestingly (as least to me, and I believe pdanne pointed this out to me), Cassidy's Jaw's character takes "a bite out" of his enemies, thus continuing, in a type-casted kind of way, the cannibalistic subtext of his characterizations.

Hammond

The following post may contain thoughts or descriptions that will be upsetting to our more sensitive posters.

I just received Extreme Cuisine for my, well, a celebration, and will be happy to share when I have finished the book. The first chapter started with Dog and Cats, which my daughter told me never to dare speak of again, so I will be happy to discuss it here. Who knows how she would have felt about the section on preparing elephant hooves?

Continuing into the mammal chapter, I find the sections on primates and bears distressing. Primates because the pictures and presentations did give a whiff of cannibalism (gazing into the eyes of dessicated, smoked monkeys or reading about sucking the eyes from stewed monkey skulls, gag). The section on Bears was distressing in a different way - apparently there is often a certain ceremonial brutality in how we handle bears, and anecdotes were provided which reinforced this. Not to be coy, but I will not provide details.

Primates are treated with more respect, it seems.

For me there are many problems with voluntary cannibalism - disease as noted above, for anything communcable that afflicts our meal is surely something we can catch. Then there is the company such a meal is likely to be shared with - I would feel a bit worried about how easily one might transit from dining companion to dinner. That brings us to the issues with finding suitable carcasses. The last thing you would want is to be forced to eat just the old and sick. Given what price blowfish merits, I can easily imagine truly unseemly bidding wars over young accident victims.

No, gentle interlocutors, morality aside, I just do not think this flies in a country that will not even let us do research on stem cells. Not a practical idea at all, unless we had some nomination process for the abbatoir. Perhaps politicians, after their second term in office? Think of the possible salutory effect!!

Then there is the company such a meal is likely to be shared with - I would feel a bit worried about how easily one might transit from dining companion to dinner.

Reading Anne Appelabum's Gulag at the moment-- in its own way a book of Extreme Cuisine, and extreme everything else too. A common method of escape from a gulag located in a pretty inhospitable tundra area (that would be most of them) was for three guys to escape together. What one of them didn't know was that the other two had picked him for the escape as a walking meat locker; they would kill him and eat him at some point along the journey. The hitch is, of course, that at some point the two survivors would almost always wind up looking at each other the same way, and it would inevitably end with some night where each fought to stay awake longer than the other, literally for his life.

If the ice-veined utilitarianism of this way of looking at your fellow man seems disturbing, of course, it is no more than a microcosm of the entire gulag system's attitude toward the uses to be made of human beings for the greater good of whoever had the whip hand....

dicksond wrote:I just received Extreme Cuisine for my, well, a celebration, and will be happy to share when I have finished the book. The first chapter started with Dog and Cats, which my daughter told me never to dare speak of again, so I will be happy to discuss it here.

Concerning food, it's hard for me to see that there's anything good or bad but thinking makes it so.

As my mentor, the great CW Fisher once said, "All meats become sad foods the moment you think about what you're eating, otherwise they generally fall under the happy category" (http://theapologist.blogspot.com/).

I feast upon the flesh of my fellow creatures every day, sometimes three times a day, and I like the taste of a bloody steak, a freshly slaughtered lamb, a whole roast chicken that I rend into bite-sized morsels with my hands (Seth, thanks for Stroud's pix).

Carnivorousness feels like my natural condition. However, being endowed with a conscience (such as it is) and a heart (in at least an anatomical sense), I find myself (once every year or so) feeling just a tickle of guilt and uncustomary remorse when, for instance, I pass a truck full of freaked-out pigs (eyes bulging, nostrils flaring) on the road to becoming hams and sausages.

The issue of eating dogs and cats is a tough one for Westerners to confront. Me, I sometimes look at my wheaten terrier, Sebastian, and tell him straight out: "Buddy, if worse comes to worst, you're dinner." I'm pretty sure he feels the same about me.

Hammond

Well, I'm not escaping prison with YOU!

dicksond wrote: The section on Bears was distressing in a different way - apparently there is often a certain ceremonial brutality in how we handle bears, and anecdotes were provided which reinforced this. Not to be coy, but I will not provide details.

For some peoples, the issue of cannibalism also arises in connexion with bears. Specifically, some Indian tribes [in Oak Parkese: Native American ethnic groupings] of the far northwest (southern Alaska and western Canada), there is a taboo against eating grizzly bear meat. The taboo clearly has underpinnings in the mythology (where grizzly bears and humans interact intimately) but in turn must be regarded from a further, 'practical' or physical standpoint.

First, grizzlies (as well as other bears) can have a somewhat human appearance, specifically when they stand on their hind legs. Second, within the environment in question, grizzlies and humans came into direct contact -- even competition -- for two basic foods that would regularly be 'harvested': berries and salmon. From this perspective, grizzlies and humans can be classified together at one level.*

Within that level grizzlies and men can, of course, be distinguished and in the mythology the points of difference are given their proper significance (e.g., use of clothing, cooking of food, building of houses for humans vs. no clothing, no cooking, use of caves for grizzlies). But still, the points of similarity were striking and sufficient to engender a feeling of relatedness to the grizzlies and thus also a taboo against the eating of their flesh. It was also sufficiently strong as to compel these Indians to perform funeral rites for any grizzlies that they had cause to kill. The funeral rites, together with the taboo, speak to the strength of the feeling of relatedness.

Antonius

* The same sense of relatedness, albeit leading to different conclusions, surely lies behind the ritualistic and often savagely cruel treatment of bears in other cultures, such as in (northern) Europe. Useful when they could be somewhat harnessed, bear-like qualities were also always to be feared; torturing and vaunting over a bear must have been a cathartic experience for the descendants of Twisto, even after the formal conversion from Woden-worship to Christianity. On the other hand, the positive aspect of bear qualities and the association of the (dangerous but necessary) warrior with the bear were long-standing and clear. Note, for example, all the Germanic names with 'bear' or a surrogate term for bear as one element and the specifically North Germanic shock-troops, the berserkers, 'bearshirts', who were devotees of Woden and thought to be invincible.

Antonius,

The human tendency to taunt 'super masculine' though allegedly 'lower' life forms is time-honored.

As I read your comments about 'vaunting' bears, I was reminded of bull vaulting, traditionally part of the rites of Dionysus (which, as Euripides dramatizes in The Bacchae, included elements of ritual body-rending and perhaps cannibalism). Bull-vaulting eventually evolved into bull fighting, which is for southern European cultures every bit as wickedly cruel as bear-baiting for northern European cultures.

The Wife, who ran with the bulls in Pamplona last summer, assures me that the bulls who are killed in the ring are eaten by the townfolk, with certain internal organs being highly prized. That is, queerly, somewhat reassuring. If I were a bull (rather than merely a bullshit artist), I think I would prefer to die in the ring than be pole-axed in a slaughter house.

Incidentally, Berne, Switzerland, is named after the bears that used to be baited in pits for the pleasure of medieval tourists and townspeople; there are bear pits in Berne, in use, to this day.

Hammond

I read a simpler (though related) explanation of the reluctance to consume bears. Supposedly, some hunters (Euro-American) would not eat bear meat after skinning one.

The reason was similarity of a bear skeleton to a human skeleton.

Not having performed an autopsy of either species, I can't comment further.