{"id":118,"date":"2019-07-04T13:57:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T13:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/randomthoughtsltd.com\/?p=118"},"modified":"2024-04-04T13:16:26","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T13:16:26","slug":"eating-people-is-wrong-published-sunday-24-march-2019-0923","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomthoughtsltd.com\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"Eating People is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
First published in the NASGP Newsletter in February 2019 <\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Recently, in Troms\u00f8, the Arctic capital of Norway, I came across the name Carleton Gajdusek. That name took me back many years and halfway round the globe to a village in the Fore district of Papua New Guinea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man is standing in the doorway of his hut, clinging to the doorpost, his head nodding, before making his way unsteadily, emaciated and ataxic, to another hut. He has kuru.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Gajdusek was an American virologist and he spent the last years of\n his life in Troms\u00f8. He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the \naetiology of kuru. Traditionally, the Fore people honoured their dead by\n eating their flesh, the men receiving the muscles for strength, the \nwomen being left with the brain and scrag ends. The custom of eating \nhuman flesh had already died out with the missionaries, and Gajdusek \nhypothesized that kuru was caused by an infective agent \u2013 he called it a\n \u2018slow virus\u2019\u2013 with a long incubation period. He postulated that it was \nconcentrated in the nervous system, explaining why women were more \nlikely to develop kuru than men. He showed that chimpanzees injected \nwith brain tissue from dead kuru sufferers developed the disease. We now\n know that kuru, like vCJD and some other fatal neurodegenerative \nconditions, is a prion disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cannibalism has a deep, transgressive and occasionally pathological fascination. Remember Hansel and Gretel? Cannibalism runs through Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Black Mischief: Basil Seal sees a red beret in a cooking pot and realizes that he has just eaten his girlfriend. In 1991 The Silence of the Lambs attracted huge audiences and five Oscars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early maps showed distant continents inhabited by monstrous beings and by cannibals. Geographical features became more accurate but the myths survived. Many of the monsters were clearly imagined. But we cannot be sure about the cannibalism. How far can early explorers\u2019 and missionaries\u2019 accounts be trusted? Depicting the inhabitants as savages permitted Europeans to subjugate them in the name of civilization, and to exploit their resources. Even if sometimes, as in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609, it was the European colonists who resorted to cannibalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern techniques show that post-ice-age Britons in Gough\u2019s Cave in Cheddar Gorge butchered other humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\n the 15,000 years since then, there is uncomfortable evidence of \ncannibalism almost everywhere researchers look. Though it is rarely \nclear whether the victims were killed for their meat, or what the \npurpose was. To honour the dead, to intimidate or punish enemies, to \ncelebrate victory, to stave off starvation, as a remedy or a ghoulish \ngourmand treat?
I try to imagine what it might be like to butcher \nanother human. Of course I have cut the flesh off a human. A living \nhuman. Making that first incision into a draped abdomen was always \nbreaking a taboo. Once inside I just got on with the job, perhaps the \nsame emotional shift happens to people desperate enough to cannibalise. \nBut \u2018Eating people is wrong\u2019 as Junior declares in the Flanders and \nSwann song, so even those who have eaten human flesh as a last resort to\n survive are reluctant to admit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1846 a wagon train set out from Missouri for California. Heavy \nsnow trapped the pioneers in the Donner Pass for nearly four months till\n a relief party arrived. Some of the 48 survivors were unwilling to \nadmit that they had survived by eating the flesh of their dead \ncolleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know what discussions went on in the Donner Pass, but when \nthe plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team and their supporters crashed \non a remote glacier in the Andes, the survivors agreed that should they \ndie, their bodies should be eaten to give their companions a chance of \nlife. Two months later, 16 people were rescued. Knowledge of the \nsurvival pact mitigated the initial horror with which the events were \ngreeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no law in England against eating human flesh, and finding a legal response reflecting the revulsion felt when psychiatrically disturbed people eat human flesh, sometimes in public, is difficult.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Still, acknowledging cannibalism would tarnish the image of true \nBritish heroes. No-one survived John Franklin\u2019s expedition to navigate \nthe Northwest Passage in 1845. Almost certainly the crew resorted to \ncannibalism, but that is something Victorian Britain didn\u2019t want to know\n about. And perhaps it still makes us uneasy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armies besiege cities to starve the population into submission. Not surprising that once the cats and the rats have been eaten, starving people consider their dead fellow-citizens as a source of food. Over half a million people in Leningrad died during the three dreadful Russian winters of the Nazi siege. Some days several thousand people succumbed to starvation and cold. Each spring the melting snow revealed cannibalized bodies.

There is no law in England against eating human flesh, and finding a legal response reflecting the revulsion felt when psychiatrically disturbed people eat human flesh, sometimes in public, is difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Killing people for food is of course murder, however tragic the \ncircumstances. In 1884 the yacht Mignonette was caught in a storm. After\n several days in a lifeboat two of the survivors decided to kill the \ncabin boy. They were convicted of murder, although, perhaps due to \npublic sympathy, their capital sentence was commuted to a short period \nof imprisonment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days smartphones may save stranded travellers from having to \ntake such extreme decisions to survive. But our planet is heating up and\n drying up. Food security is already a problem. Thousands of people from\n lands which can no longer support them are fleeing to more fortunate \ncountries. In time, billions could be crowded into such space as is \nleft, without land or resources to feed them. What might happen then?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soylent Green<\/a>, a film made in 1973, offers a scenario of a world in 2022 \u2013 only three years from now. Climate change, pollution and overpopulation have driven people into cities, and for food they rely on diminishing quantities of \u2018Soylent Green\u2019, a nutritious biscuit made, its manufacturers claim, from plankton. But demand is exhausting the supply of plankton, so where does the protein come from? Charlton Heston finds out, and as the authorities take him away to silence him he yells out \u201cSoylent Green is people\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next post: Singing in the Brain<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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First published in the NASGP Newsletter in February 2019 Recently, in Troms\u00f8, the Arctic capital of Norway, I came across the name Carleton Gajdusek. That name took me back many years and halfway round the globe to a village in the Fore district of Papua New Guinea. A man is standing in the doorway of … <\/p>\n

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