There is an old question that no one ever gets tired of asking, and a blogger on seriouseats.com has asked it again. Would you eat human being? The Donner party did it; The survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 did it; William Golding more than implied it in The Lord of the Flies. The question is posed on seriouseats.com after the blogger saw an episode of No Reservations, the Anthony Bourdain show in which he travels the globe eating whatever is traditionally served in that region. It has seen him eating nearly anything and nearly any part of anything walking this earth. But human? Bourdain did not eat human on his trip but stories abounded of how missionaries who braved the French Polynesian islands often became soup ingredients.
The fact of the matter is that cannibalism exists today, surviving as a ritual act and an act of extreme desperation. It has been recorded in Indonesia, in Liberia, in Brazil (which has a long history of cannibalism, see The Manifesto Antropófago), in Tanzania, and in Colombia, among other countries.
Asking this kind of question, sheepishly as it was posed, jokingly as it was posed, in seriouseats.com does no justice to the site. It only treats the act of cannibalism as some version of a squeamish, teenage taboo, and it overlooks the fact that cannibalism is something that more often that not occurs in the most horrific of environments.
–Nick
My Foodprint 