Cannibalism

I was sure this group would have a dedicated thread, but couldn't see one. Here's the Smithsonian's take on the topic as in the use of corpses in medicine.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Gruesome-History-of-Eating...

Madsen's Confessions of a Flesh-Eater is a fine treatment of the matter.

I enjoyed To serve man : A cookbook for people and Flesh and blood

If you'd like to include the practice of autophagy, you should read the daftly conceived satire, The Committee. James Preston's The Cobra Event provides a colorful exposition of Lesch-Nyhan's disease.

At least it isn't condoned by the British Navy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evExHXFtNfQ

It's actually surprising, considering how widespread cannibalism has been, in so many different societies, that it doesn't show up more in literature. I guess authors just found it distasteful (no pun intended).

7: Does transubstantiation count? Because then it could be considered a phenomenon a lot more widespread. Leave it to John Calvin's "symbolism and penance" to take the fun out of everything. What do you expect, he was a French lawyer.

Well, personally I do think christians practice some form of ritual cannibalism (this is my flesh, this is my blood - come on). But I fear practicing christians are unlikely to agree.

But, ultimately, it's just a piece of bread and a sip of wine. So I don't think it counts a real cannibalism.

7.
It's actually surprising, considering how widespread cannibalism has been, in so many different societies, that it doesn't show up more in literature. I guess authors just found it distasteful (no pun intended).

William Albert Robinson, Deep water and shoal, would go with the pun, having inadverently eaten human flesh on Malakula in Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides) in 1930:

> What did it taste like? you ask. Like veal, as one of our well-known African explorers
> has stated? Or even like pork, which another has had the temerity to claim?
>
> If you'd like me to be absolutely truthful - which I know you don't, for it is awfully
> prosaic - I'd have to answer that the darn meat was so burnt and covered in ashes
> that it could have been almost anything. So if you must know what it tastes like to
> be a cannibal you will have to go there yourself.

9: Then they should practice harder, like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein, proving that Wisconsin has its share of cosmopolitan and rural practitioners of this culinary affectation.

In the Introduction to the Cremaster Cycle, Wakefield calls Barney's 5-film cycle "autophagous," self-eating, since it creates a new biosexual mythos and then continually references itself.

Christ did enjoin his disciples (and by rite of initiation, the gang which bears his name) to practice cannibalism. It's right there in the book.

Stranger in a Strange Land did its bit to literalize symbolic sacramental anthropophagy.

And one can't forget the performance art/films of Paul McCarthy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCarthy

And the ritualized violence of the Viennese Actionists like Hermann Nitsch

12
Which leads to one of my favorite punch lines: "Peter, EAT MY ASS!"

That bit wasn't in there, was it? (re-read pile, Bible).

A skilled player, by that account (those urns at Naj Hammadi must have been the BCE equivalent of a bedside bottom-drawer).

Actually those Nag Hammadi texts are early CE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library). Nitpicking - I know.

Quibbler! Shall mere facts taint my otherwise sound and orthodox scholarship?

Classic meditations on the taste of physiology: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/montaigne/montaigne-essays--2.html

This thread just came in handy in a dispute with a co-worker.

24
How so? Did you hit him/her over the head with it?

If a jowly cubicle quartered type (the bipedal equivalent of a crated veal calf), I have heard that human face makes for excellent guanciale (a sort of aggrandized fatback, but ever so much more flavorful and expensive) - indispensable in bucatini all' amatriciana.

"Soylent Green is people!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

And a side of Sawney Beans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIXJWoESiOQ

Once again, truth proves stranger than fiction.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/26/naked-man-eating-victims-face-killed-mi...

Who is talking about fiction? Sure, there must be several false statements of such things. But that doesn't mean there are no true statements.

30: I think Ludwig Wittgenstein just facepalmed himself.

I though eating a live squid might be crossing the line:

http://newsone.com/2017743/florida-cannibal-attack/

http://www.businessinsider.com/baltimore-cannibals-social-media-activities-show-...

Luckily Andy Samberg has a useful PSA on this pressing topic:

http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2012/06/andy-sambergs-anti-cannibalism-psa.htm...

Who knew Rachel Ray, middlebrow doyenne of Food Network and daytime TV, is a fan of cannibalism, bestiality, and incest:

http://www.funnytypos.com/rachael-ray-cooks-her-dog-family-yummers/

And I didn't think it possible she could turn me on any more intensely....

35: Then there's this:

http://media.onsugar.com/files/2011/01/03/2/1331/13311615/54/rachaelray_pinup400...

Her notorious FHM photoshoot. How fitting that a discussion thread focusing on cannibalism would end up on pin-up shots of Rachel Ray

Somewhere the ghost of Ben Hecht is smiling.