Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Cannibalism

#1
C C Offline
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books...iewed.html

EXCERPT: . . . [Bill] Schutt’s new book, "Cannibalism", which explores the practice across the animal kingdom, argues that we can actually learn a lot from observing any species that sometimes eats its own kind—including our own. Cannibalism has much to teach us about evolution, disease, racism, and even familial sacrifice and love. And it also, unsurprisingly, makes for delectable reading.

[...] Schutt suggests that this cultural myopia is the reason we don’t label as cannibalism, say, the contemporary fringe practice of moms eating their placentas after giving birth. The tissue is “derived from the fetus,” after all. Schutt travels to Texas to take up a home schooling mom of 10 on an offer to eat her placenta. Fried in a sauté pan with garlic and onion, Claire’s placenta looks like liver, chews like veal, and tastes like chicken gizzard.

So what does cannibalism look like in a culture that doesn’t attach as much stigma to it? Like many other peoples, the Chinese practiced survival cannibalism during wars and famines; an imperial edict in 205 B.C. even made it permissible for “starving Chinese” to exchange “one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives.” But, according to historical sources cited by Schutt, the Chinese also practiced “learned cannibalism.” In Chinese books written during Europe’s Middle Ages, human flesh was occasionally cited as an exotic delicacy. In times of great hunger or when a relative was sick, children would sometimes cut off their flesh and prepare it in a soup for their elders. One researcher found “766 documented cases of filial piety” spanning more than 2,000 years. “The most commonly consumed body part was the thigh, followed by the upper arm;” the eyeball was banned by edict in 1261..
Reply




Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)