Feral Boy is on board with this. (Worth taking into consideration, Clock members, for the next "summit".)
"You can nosh on me"
by David Plotz
The Internet shivered with horror and
fascination last week at the revelation that the Jamestown colonists
cannibalized each other during the dreadful winter of 1609. According to
the report in Smithsonian, the skeleton of a 14-year-old girl shows
clear signs of being butchered for food, with telltale knife marks on
her skull, jaw and shin. Fellow colonists probably ate her "brain,
tongue, cheeks, and leg muscles." The "starving time" during the first
year of Jamestown left most of the 100-odd colonists dead. Ghastly
firsthand accounts hinted at cannibalism (as well as the eating of
horses, dogs, cats, vermin and shoes), but this is the conclusive
evidence that archeologists and historians have been waiting for.
It's
the nature of taboos that they extinguish the capacity for calm
discussion. Cannibalism occupies a dark cellar in our brains. Merely the
mention of a famous episode — the Donner Party, "Alive," the whaleship
Essex, the famine in North Korea, Jeffrey Dahmer — provokes fear and
disgust. (I also find that it inevitably provokes transference: It is
literally impossible for me to think about an episode of cannibalism and
not wonder what I would have done in the same circumstances. I suspect I
am not alone in this.) Even when the cannibalism is driven by necessity
rather than perversion — so-called "survival cannibalism" — most people
are repulsed.
This may make you not want to be in a lifeboat with
me, but I have never understood the horror and shock about starvation
cannibalism. Human flesh isn't anyone's first choice for dinner (or not
anyone normal), but the cannibalism taboo has always seemed pretty
flimsy as taboos go. In a dire food shortage, one of the very first
things you should do is eat the corpses of the dead. Human corpses have
the proteins, fats, vitamins and calories that starving people most
need. I don't endorse sacrificing the living to feed the starving —
though even that done through some fair process may be justified in
particularly dire circumstances — but cannibalizing corpses to fend off
starvation seems like an easy call, and not a disgusting one.
A
decade ago, I visited an Ethiopian village destroyed by famine, and I
saw what is still the most horrifying thing I have ever seen: a
6-year-old boy named Saoudi — stick legs and arms, distended belly —
whose lips and tongue were brown from eating dirt. It's very likely that
Saoudi didn't survive the year, and if he did, he probably has
permanent health and brain damage from the lack of nutrition. There were
no corpses to eat in Dire Kiltu, but had there been, would it have been
wrong — or even disgusting — for those villagers to have eaten them? To
have fed their famished children protein and fat, rather than
indigestible dirt and grass and shoe-leather, which is what starving
people often eat? Survival cannibalism is terribly sad, because
starvation is sad, but it is certainly less sad — and less revolting —
than almost all of the alternatives.
So if you ever find yourself
with my corpse at a remote plane crash site, you know what to do. These
meaty thighs, the well-marbled belly, the beer-soaked liver — they won't
be of any more use to me. Please, help yourself.
David Plotz
is editor of Slate. He's the author of "The Genius Factory: The Curious
History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank" and "Good Book."
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