Human flesh tastes like good pork. I'm not saying this, I'm very picky and I don't eat anything, but rather those who have tried it, ancient and modern cannibals whose testimony has been recorded by history or the news. In Polynesia, in fact, human meat was known as “long pig” and was considered tastier than pork. There are fewer, but there are those, who have compared it to chicken and beef. Recently it has been suggested that we are not particularly nutritious.
The Maori chief Tuai – brother of the powerful rangatira Korokoro – who visited London for 11 months in 1818 and surprised people at social gatherings by performing the haka long before the All Blacks, explained that what he missed most about his land was “the feast of human flesh”, which seems logical if they made him live on fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding. He commented that he preferred to eat women and children (more tender), and that if he had to consume man's meat, that of a black man, preferably around 50 years old, seemed better to him than that of a white man. Apparently we are too salty. Which did not prevent Captain Cook from being eaten by the Hawaiians after the skirmish in which he was killed in 1779. Curiously, the remains of the explorer navigator that could be recovered (some bones and five kilos of meat) had been salted for the pantry.
Cook had been very interested (before becoming a plate himself) in anthropophagy in the Pacific. He attended some human sacrifice with tasting and described in detail how some officials of the HMS Endeavor They found the remains of a cannibal party on a beach when they disembarked: there were intestines scattered on the sand, broken heads and a heart on the tip of a fork-shaped stick placed on the bow of a canoe. The great naturalist Banks was left with a freshly peeled forearm.
Other cannibals have testified that the Chinese are very good, in the sense of tasty, and the story is known of a Chinese ship shipwrecked in 1858 in an archipelago off New Guinea whose three hundred crew members were all eaten in a true apotheosis of rolls. spring except for four (it is not clear why they were discarded, nor if the cannibals asked for the complaint book).
Although you could eat them for pleasure, and in some societies the gastronomic factor, voracity, seems to have been predominant (I have always been impressed by what his guides answered to that explorer of the Congo River when he asked what the drums said as they passed: “Food is coming”), the most common thing was ritual cannibalism: you ate a person as a sign of respect and even affection (for your dead, where would they be better) or to acquire some of his attributes, usually the courage of a brave man or a warrior. One more reason to be a coward: they didn't even want you as a starter. The Zulus believed that by eating an enemy's eyebrows (which is rare, given the choice) they acquired the power to look at those they faced without blinking. The Basutos, for their part, ate the liver of brave enemies, considered the seat of courage; the ears, where intelligence resided, and the testicles, where his strength resided. It's true that if they ate all that so much, they should give you the reason.
A notable case was that of General Sir Charles McCarthy, born in Cork and killed by the Ashantis in 1824 in the Battle of Nsamankow when he commanded a force of the Royal African Colonial Corps (RACC, not to be confused with the Royal Automobile Club of Catalonia): his heart was devoured by the chiefs and the meat distributed among the lower commands; The bones were preserved as national fetishes. He could claim them in exchange for the Benin bronzes.
Among certain African tribes it was understandably taboo for warriors to eat rabbit. Sometimes devouring someone had a propitiatory meaning: a Fitjian chief always ate a man as a precaution when he had to get his hair cut, a spiritually dangerous occasion (and one that had to leave the hairdressers in Fiji deserted).
Using the past tense as I do in these examples is reassuring, but there are still traditional cannibals in some parts of the globe: the traveler Norman Lewis told me that he had met one in Papua New Guinea who was “very polite.” He also confirmed that we taste like pork.
All this comes, of course, on account of JA Bayona's new film, The Snow Society, about the plane crash in the Andes (1972) and the survival of those who were saved by eating the bodies of their dead companions in the tragedy. That story, captured in the best seller They live! (1974, the same year of the publications in Spain of Born Innocent, Carrie, Shark, and the first Bukowski), it greatly affected those of us who were teenagers in the seventies and marked our relationship with cannibalism. Thinking that you yourself could become a man-eater if the occasion required it was a shocking second step in our relationship with the subject after discovering it in explorer movies and in Robinson Crusoe (the castaway saves Friday when they were going to eat him and then redeems him from having the same habit). It was a great anthropological and cultural relativism lesson to see that you didn't always have to identify with the missionary in the pot. As an unexpected extension of the reading of They live! I had the opportunity to eat one day hand in hand with one of the survivors of the accident, Eduardo Strauch. It was in 2008 and, painter, I ordered entrecôte. He preferred vegetables and fish. He told me that, in his authoritative opinion, human meat tastes like beef.
The fact is that cannibalism, of the Neanderthals and the Homo antecessor to modern horror movies about post-apocalyptic cannibals through the controversial essay Cannibals and kings by Marvin Harris, the ineffable movie Cannibal holocaust and The silence of the lambs (with our favorite chef Hannibal Lecter), continually escapes from the ethnological, where it has been tried to be placed reassuringly (the cannibal is the other: distant and primitive), to sneak in everywhere. The phenomenon is complex and multifaceted and could rather be spoken of cannibalism: ritual, necessity, gastronomic, political (Idi Amin, Obiang), psychopathological (such as that of modern cannibals like Issei Sagawa or those who cannibalize themselves , and we are not talking about eating nails, skin or sniffling), medical (it has been considered healthy to eat human liver and mummy), and even sexual (even if you are not a mantis). It appears in practically all human societies since the dawn of the species. We have placed a great taboo around it, although eating someone already dead (necrocannibalism), although it is frowned upon, is not essentially a crime. But those of us who are truly hungry and have no other recourse, give ourselves to anthropophagy like tupinambas (who were among the most celebrated cannibals along with the Caribs and the natives of the Marquesas and the Fitji, known as the “cannibal islands” ). In 1973, very close to the drama of the Andes, Richard Fleischer's film Soylent Green He imagined a cannibalistic future for all of us: corpses, including that of Edward G. Robinson, were processed to become cookies, the only source of food for a planet with all resources exhausted.
In shipwrecks it has been common to apply the law of the sea, that is, eating the survivor with the worst luck – in the case of the whaler Essex that captured the film In the heart of the sea Captain Pollard ate his young cousin Coffin (!). He has also engaged in cannibalism in lost expeditions (such as Franklin's), famines, and extreme war situations. A modern example is the long and terrible Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, where the consumption of human flesh became so conspicuous that passing through depending on which neighborhoods made you a candidate for the menu of the day. Japanese soldiers came to practice cannibalism not only for survival and unhealthy cruelty (as in the Chichijima Incident, where Japanese officers ingested parts of American pilots: future president George Bush narrowly escaped), but as a war strategy, as noted Antony Beevor. By the way, the Napoleon by Ridley Scott includes a scene that seems to allude to cannibalism in the Russian retreat of 1812.
We Westerners have also had our ritual cannibalism as recalled in some of our myths such as that of Cronus, Atreus, that of the Laestrygonians or that of the Bacchae, not to mention Hansel and Gretel. And it could be argued—the pagan Romans did—that Christianity at the base of our belief system is centered on a true act of anthropophagy: communion (which, by the way, was alluded to by several of the survivors of the Andes accident to justify your decision). The Eucharist presents many similarities with the ceremonies of ingestion of a god (or the symbolic representative of him) typical of other cultures. This same week I have been able to observe among the ethnological collections exhibited at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin the striking Self-portrait with 12 disciples by the artist of Samoan origin Greg Semu, born in 1971 in Auckland. In the image, part of his work The last cannibal dinner, because tomorrow we will become Christians, Semu is portrayed as a wild, half-naked and tattooed Christ, surrounded by other indigenous people, including bare-breasted women, in a provocative and polysemic imitation of Leonardo's Last Supper and in front of a plate containing what appears to be a roast pig. ….
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