Ultimate Taboo

Ultimate Taboo
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Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
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Members of a Uruguayan rugby team ate dead companions after their plane crashed in the Andes in 1972, stranding them for more than two months.
It's a toad-eat-toad, spider-eat-spider, and yes, human-eat-human world.
Of all the screen villains, none is so disturbing as Hannibal Lecter , in The Silence of the Lambs . It’s not just that he kills people. He also eats them, thus contravening one of our deepest and most ancient taboos: that to consume human flesh is the ultimate betrayal of our humanity. But as zoologist and author Bill Schutt shows in his new book, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History , not all cultures have shared this taboo. In ancient China, for instance, human body parts would appear on Imperial menus. [Find out what happened to one of the Uruguayan rugby players who ate his teammates after their plane crashed .]
When National Geographic caught up with Schutt by phone at his home on Long Island, the author explained how, in the animal kingdom, cannibalism is extremely common ; why mad cow disease and a degenerative brain condition found in the highlands of New Guinea were both caused by cannibalism ; and how climate change could trigger mass cannibalism .
It came as a surprise to me that cannibalism was so widespread across nature. Initially, the party line was that the only times you would see cannibalism—unless you were dealing with black widow spiders or praying mantises —would be when it was stress-related or due to a lack of alternative forms of food. But starting in the 1970s and ’80s, researchers started to uncover many instances across the animal kingdom where it was completely natural behavior.
For instance, spadefoot toads , in the American Southwest, lay their eggs in transient ponds, some no larger than puddles. Because of the climate, these ponds are in danger of drying up at any moment. So if you are a tadpole, it pays, from an evolutionary perspective, to get out of the pool as quickly as possible. If the pond dries out, you’re dead. As a result, they’ve evolved a mechanism by which a certain percentage of the tadpoles turn huge, overnight, with large jaw muscles, wild-looking teeth, and shortened digestive tracts. What they are doing is eating their brethren in the ponds. By doing so, they mature faster and are able to get out quicker than their herbivorous brothers and sisters.
EXCLUSIVE: Male Polar Bear Chases and Eats Cub
Since Homer and the Greeks, we have been taught that cannibalism is the ultimate taboo. That continues from Homer through the Romans to Shakespeare, the brothers Grimm, Daniel Defoe, and Freud. You had this snowball effect where we were taught that cannibalism is this horror. If you combine this ultimate taboo with our fascination with food, what you get is a fascination with the topic.
When Columbus first arrived in the New World, he described the indigenous people as friendly and causing no problems. He had been told by Queen Isabella to treat these people with respect and kindness, except if it became clear they are cannibals, in which case, all bets were off. Initially, the Spanish were looking for gold and, when they didn’t find it, they figured that the next best thing was slaves.
Lo and behold, when Columbus came back, the indigenous people who had previously been classified as friendly were suddenly described as cannibals, so you could do anything to them. You could enslave them, take their land, murder them, and treat them like pestilence. And that’s exactly what happened, with the result that a lot of the islands were de-populated . The idea of cannibalism as a taboo was used to de-humanize the people encountered on these conquests.
During the Cultural Revolution, privately owned farms were collectivized. These techniques did not work, though, which resulted in a lot of people starving. Many people across China were reduced to incidents of what is known as “starvation cannibalism,” similar to the Donner Party. Families were often reduced to trading their children for the children of their neighbors, so they wouldn’t wind up killing and eating their own kids.
China is a special case because it was never exposed to the taboo against cannibalism. This is a Western taboo. If your culture dictates that, if you’re an emperor, you’re allowed to eat human body parts, then there’s nothing wrong with that. There are numerous descriptions of emperors and other members of the imperial court enjoying humans as a type of food, prepared in all different ways.
In 1847, the Donner Party set out to go to California, and wound up getting stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Rather than backtracking to the flatlands, they decided to over-winter in the Sierras with the hope that they might be able to push through at a later date. That became impossible, and there were a number of rescue missions that also ran into problems with the weather. The Donners split the party into two camps about seven miles apart, and there was cannibalism at both of them.
Do we have bones? No. Is there physical evidence? No. But there were descriptions by many members of the Donner Party themselves and the rescue teams that went in. There was no controversy at the time. The only controversy arose in 2010 when some over-eager public relations folks at a college put out a sensational headline claiming that there was no proof the Donner Party had eaten humans. But a couple of summers ago I spent some time with Donner Party researchers, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that cannibalism took place.
One Mexican spadefoot toad tadpole dines on another.
Nowadays, the idea that this is the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is not taken literally. But in the Middle Ages, that was not the case. Transubstantiation was believed to have taken place: The host and the wine literally became the flesh and blood of Christ. Therefore, in some sense, it was an act of cannibalism.
What happened with the Uruguayan rugby team is that, after they came out from the mountains and it was discovered that they had cannibalized the dead in order to survive, the public did not take that very well. They were not regarded as heroes but were looked down upon. Later one of the survivors made a statement saying that the reason they thought it was okay to eat their friends was because, during Communion, you were consuming the flesh of Christ. They figured, if they could do that, they could eat the flesh of their friends.
Years later, they interviewed this guy and asked, “Were you really thinking about Communion when you ate your friends?” He responded, “No, we were hungry. That’s what we were thinking and that’s why we did it.”
Cannibalism can also cause havoc in the food chain, can’t it? Tell us about mad cow disease and its connection to a condition in New Guinea named kuru.
One of the seriously negative aspects of cannibalism is that there are cannibalism-associated diseases, like kuru and mad cow disease. These are degenerative brain disorders, are always fatal, and come from eating nervous tissue that is infected with either prions, if you go for the prion theory , or some as-yet-unidentified virus. Both of these arguments are strong and I don’t think that this has been decided.
There are other diseases like scrapie , which you find in sheep, and a spongiform encephalopathy in mink, that do the same thing. In the cattle industry they started to feed ground up entrails from other cows to cattle, as a protein supplement. That is what led to this outbreak of mad cow disease. By consuming meat from these cows, the spongiform encephalopathy disease was transmitted to humans. This caused a huge tragedy in the 1980s in the U.K. and led to a ban on British beef to the U.S ., which is only just now about to be lifted.
This same type of disease almost wiped out an indigenous group in New Guinea called the Fore. When the scientists went in and started to study this, they realized that what they were seeing in the brains of these kuru victims was very similar to the effects of mad cow disease. Over the course of about nearly two decades, they put together the theory that funerary cannibalism among the Fore , especially kids and women, who were involved in the preparation of the corpses and cannibalizing body parts including the brain, was causing this horrible disease. Once they got it out to them that this was probably not a good thing to be doing, and laws were passed against eating their dead brethren, the disease was curtailed and the Fore did not become extinct. These spongiform encephalopathies serve as a negative selection pressure against cannibalism.
A female praying mantis consumes its mate on the underside of a poinsettia leaf.
I don’t want to make it sound like an assertion that this is going to happen. But if you look at the key reasons why cannibalism occurs across nature, it is usually due to overcrowding or a lack of alternative forms of nutrition. In the West we have a layer of culture that prevents us from cannibalizing. But we know that cannibalism has taken place with humans during famine. And with all of the changes that are taking place due to global warming, like desertification, it’s not a stretch that cannibalism might occur if large groups of people were suddenly without food.
In non-human cannibalism, the biggest surprise for me was how widespread it is across nature, for all sorts of reasons other than stress or lack of food. That blew me away. With human cannibalism, what shocked me was how extensive medicinal cannibalism was in Europe for hundreds of years. Human body parts were used right up to the beginning of the 19 th century.
I don’t know if it’s changed my view of my fellow human beings. I think, if we didn’t have these Western taboos, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more cannibalism. We’ve certainly been doing it for thousands and thousands of years, under certain circumstances. If those circumstances were to arise again, I can’t see why cannibalism wouldn’t also happen again.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Simon Worrall curates Book Talk . Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com .
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My generation (and the generation before) have long proclaimed ‘sexual revolutions,’ but to be honest, it all feels a little premature. Before we engage in our own disingenuous version, we need to have difficult — but genuine — conversations about being sex-positive.

To be broad and general, sex-positivity describes sex which is healthy, free of judgment, and consensual. As a philosophy, we can frame many of the ethical questions in our lives around it. For a firmer grasp, let’s discuss what sex-positivity isn’t.

It doesn’t mean you need to have a lot of sex. Likewise, it means it’s okay to say no to sex — without judgment or pressure.

You don’t have to be pro-pornography, or even pro-sex work. Whether you like or dislike these things, you’re not judging whether the workers or the work is right or wrong. Sex-positivity encourages non-judgmental discourse about these topics, and may even help you unbox your own feelings on them.

It doesn’t affirm every sexual act. Children, people who are intoxicated, and animals cannot consent.

Finally, sex-positivity isn’t just for women. It can, and should(!), be applied to people of all genders and orientations.

America is an overwhelmingly sex-negative place. Perhaps because of our Puritan roots or our free-market values, sex is completely commodified. Coercion, subversion, and violence within our own relationships is disconcertingly commonplace.

This, in a single thought, is the essence of sex-negativity.

As a direct result of sex-negative attitudes, a common perception is that sexual violence is far removed from the United States. Sure, there’s a foreign sex trade dealing in little girls and young women abroad. Further, it’s outside our borders that we’ll acknowledge rape as a tactic of war. Even sex tourism is okay if we’re doing it elsewhere. But are we courting cognitive dissonance with puritanical, sex-negative social heirlooms in regard to our own relationships and ways of thinking?

to make consumption of the traditionally unpalatable more digestible for people who have been raised within a culture of guilt and shame. For this reason, it’s revolutionary to live shamelessly and without fear, which makes sex-positivity more necessary than ever.

Sex-positivity encompasses body- and gender-positivity. Indeed, those who do not identify with a gender, or who are transgender, are among those who experience the most discrimination and violence. In housing, in work, in their families and personal lives, sex-negativity has taken over.

Violence is highly codified and sanctioned by both governments and corporations against those in the trans community, and there seems to be no relief in sight. Indeed, movements against trans-people seem to be picking up steam — not disappearing.

As long as these ideas exist in a vacuum, far removed from public consciousness, the ‘sexual revolution’ will never happen. Not here, not abroad, not anywhere. Confronting sex violence means confronting yourself. You.

For that reason, it may be the ultimate taboo.

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March 10, 2022 November 22, 2020 by Cynthia

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