Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(47)
Cannibalism in nature is also widely seen as a natural response to stresses like overcrowding and food shortages. The unfortunates involved in shipwrecks, strandings, and sieges have also resorted to cannibalism, and by doing so they exhibited biologically and behaviorally predictable responses to specific forms of extreme stress. Although the conditions may have been unnatural, the actions that resulted were not.
Additionally, like male spiders that give up their lives and bodies to their mates, ultimately increasing the survival potential of their offspring, so too did the bodies of Donner Party members like Jacob Donner serve a similar function for their families.
Finally, in cannibalism-related tragedies like the Donner Party, survivors have been given something like a free pass for committing acts that would otherwise be considered unforgivable by their cultures.
But where did this taboo come from? Why is the very idea of human cannibalism so abhorrent that except in a very few cases it justified the torture, murder, and enslavement of those accused of being cannibals?
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16 The tale of the Donner Party wasn’t the only cannibalism-related story to emerge from the American West. In February 1874, gold prospector Alfred (or Alferd) Packer led a party of five men into Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. When weather conditions deteriorated, he murdered and ate them. When the bodies were discovered the following spring, four of the five had been completely stripped of flesh. Although the skeletons showed signs of butchering, each was relatively complete and the bones showed no signs of smashing or cooking. Packer had no need to process the skeletons further, presumably because he had enough meat to survive until the spring. During Packer’s sentencing, the judge was rumored to have made the following statement: “There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you depraved Republican son of a bitch!”
17 Alternately known in the literature as the “snowshoe group,” I used “The Forlorn Hope” to avoid confusion.
18 The Nisenan (sometimes referred to as the Maidu) were the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
19 I.e., debilitated, lacking strength or vigor.
20 Fasting or starving people often exhibit increased sensitivity to cold.
21 Catabolic reactions (from the Greek kata = downward + ballein = to throw) are those in which larger molecules are broken down into smaller molecules, releasing energy. Anabolic reactions work in the opposite direction.
22 In a system designed to maximize industrial output, Leningrad’s blue-collar workers received the greatest food allowance, followed by white-collar workers, and finally dependents (who received as little as the equivalent of one and a half slices of additive-adulterated bread per day). Rations were reduced a total of five times between September and November 1941.
23 Most estimates put the eventual civilian death toll at somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million.
24 During the Stalin era, the NKVD was a law enforcement agency, closely associated with the Soviet secret police.
25 Starved Camp is thought to been in Summit Valley, California, just west of Donner Pass.
26 The subtitle was subsequently eliminated from the online version of the article after complaints by readers.
27 The short-term, positive effects of cortisol release include a burst of energy (through an increase in blood sugar levels) and a lower sensitivity to pain (by reducing inflammation).
13: Eating People Is Bad
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush you squalling thing, I say.
Peace this moment, peace or maybe,
Bonaparte will pass this way.
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he’ll beat you all to pap,
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel snap, snap, snap.
— The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
The word taboo has a Polynesian origin, and the English explorer and navigator Captain James Cook reported that its use by the South Sea islanders related to the prohibition of an array of behaviors—from eating certain foods to coming into physical contact with tribal leaders. Unfortunately for Cook, the first official link between the terms taboo and cannibalism may have been based on his crew’s initial, though evidently mistaken, fear that Cook himself had been cannibalized.
On February 14, 1779, after what turned out to be a serious misunderstanding, Cook was clubbed to death by Hawaiian islanders, who then cooked and deboned his body before divvying it up among local chiefs as a way as of incorporating him into their aristocracy. Since it was only right that Cook’s own people got their share of the body, a charred section of it was returned to Lieutenant James King, who asked the Hawaiians if they had eaten the rest of it. According to King, “They immediately shewed [sic] as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” So while the islanders had murdered, cooked, and filleted the explorer, they hadn’t eaten him, though the latter point is often misrepresented in accounts of the incident.
Reay Tannahill, a British historian who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, was perhaps best known for her books Food in History and Sex in History. In 1975 she wrote Flesh and Blood, the first scholarly study of cannibalism accessible to the general public. In it, Tannahill proposed that Judeo-Christian customs related to the treatment of the dead contributed to the strongly held belief that eating people was wrong. Specifically, she referred to the “belief that a man needed his body after death, so that his soul might be reunited with it on Judgment Day.” Since cannibalism involved dismemberment as well as other procedures familiar to those in the butchery profession, it was no surprise that these practices induced in Christians and Jews alike “an unprecedented and almost pathological horror of cannibalism.”