Human flesh tastes like good pork. I am not saying this, I am very picky and do not eat anything, but those who have tried it, ancient and modern cannibals, whose testimony is recorded in history or in the news. In Polynesia, human flesh was actually 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 nutrient dense.
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The Maori chief Tuai – brother of the mighty Rangatira Korokoro – who visited London for 11 months in 1818 and surprised social gatherings with the performance of the haka long before the All Blacks, said what he liked most about his country was “the festival of human flesh”. missed”, which seems logical if they let him live on fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding. He remarked that he preferred to eat women and children (more tender) and that if he had to eat man's flesh, that of a black man, preferably about 50 years old, seemed better to him than that of a white man. Apparently we're too salty. However, that didn't stop Captain Cook from being eaten by the Hawaiians after the battle in which he was killed in 1779. Curiously, the explorer's remains that were recovered (a few bones and five kilos of meat) had been salted for the larder.
Engraving from 1557 showing a scene of cannibalism in Brazil.
Cook (before becoming a Teller himself) had been very interested in anthropophagy in the Pacific. He took part in a human sacrifice and tasting and described in detail how officers of the HMS Endeavour, disembarking on a beach, found the remains of a group of cannibals: strewn on the sand were entrails, broken heads and a heart at the end of a stick shaped like a fork and on the Bow of a canoe laid. The great naturalist Banks was left with a freshly peeled forearm.
Still from “The Snow Society” by JA Bayona.
Other cannibals have testified that the Chinese are very good in the sense of “tasty”, and there is a well-known story of a Chinese ship that was shipwrecked in an archipelago off New Guinea in 1858 and whose 300 crew were all eaten in a veritable apotheosis of bread rolls . except for four in the spring (it is not clear why they were thrown away and whether the cannibals asked for the complaint book).
Although they could be eaten for pleasure and in some societies the gastronomic factor, greed, seems to prevail (I was always impressed by the answer of his guides to the explorer of the Congo River when he asked what the drums were saying during they played). passed: “Food is coming”), ritual cannibalism was the most common: one ate a person as a sign of respect and even affection (for his dead, where would they be better) or to acquire some of his qualities, 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 (a rare occurrence given the choice) they gained the power to look at those they faced without batting an eye. The Basuto, for their part, ate the liver of brave enemies, which was considered the seat of courage; the ears, where intelligence resided, and the testicles, where his strength resided. It's true that if they ate so much, they should tell you the reason.
A notable case was that of General Sir Charles McCarthy, who was born in Cork and killed by the Ashantis at the Battle of Nsamankow in 1824 while leading a force of the Royal African Colonial Corps (RACC, not to be confused with the Royal Automobile Club of). commanded Catalonia): His heart was devoured by the chiefs and the flesh distributed to the lower commands; The bones were kept as national fetishes. They could be claimed in exchange for the Benin Bronzes.
Several contestants from the reality show “The Conqueror of the Caribbean” (ETB) tried to tear pieces off a pig with their mouths in the “cannibal challenge” HOSTOIL
Among certain African tribes, it was understandably taboo for warriors to eat rabbits. Sometimes devouring a person had a propitiatory meaning: a Fijian chieftain always ate a man as a precaution when he needed to have his hair cut, a spiritually dangerous occasion (and one that required him to leave the barber shops in Fiji).
The use of the past tense, as I do in these examples, is reassuring, but traditional cannibals still exist in some parts of the world: the traveler Norman Lewis told me that he met one in Papua New Guinea who was “very polite ” has been. He also confirmed that we tasted like pork.
All of this is, of course, due to JA Bayona's new film “The Snow Society”, which is about the plane crash in the Andes (1972) and the survival of those who were saved by eating the bodies of their companions. Tragedy of the dead. This story, captured in the bestselling ¡Viven! (1974, the same year that Born Innocent, Carrie, Jaws and The First Bukowski were released in Spain) it had a huge impact on those of us who were teenagers in the seventies, and shaped our relationship with cannibalism. The idea that one could become a cannibal if the occasion demanded it was a shocking second step in our relationship to the subject, after discovering it in explorer films and in Robinson Crusoe (the castaway saves Friday when they eat him). wanted, and then redeems him). have 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 continuation of reading “¡Viven!”, one day I had the opportunity to have a meal in person with one of the survivors of the accident, Eduardo Strauch. It was 2008 and, painter, I ordered entrecôte. He preferred vegetables and fish. He told me that, in his authoritative opinion, human flesh tasted like beef.
The creepy “hssssss” that Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) uttered as he told Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) how he tasted a human liver was Hopkins' idea.
The fact is that cannibalism, from the Neanderthals and Homo antecessor to the modern horror films of post-apocalyptic anthropophages, through the controversial essay “Cannibals and Kings” by Marvin Harris, the indescribable film “Cannibal Holocaust” and “The Silence of the Lambs” (with our Chef) Hannibal Lecter's favorite), constantly flees from the ethnological world, where one has tried to place him reassuringly (the cannibal is the other: distant and primitive), in order to sneak in everywhere. The phenomenon is complex and multifaceted and one could rather speak of cannibalism: ritual, necessary, gastronomic, political (Idi Amin, Obiang), psychopathological (like that of modern cannibals like Issei Sagawa or those who cannibalize themselves, and we are not talking here about eating nails, skin or runny nose), medical (it is considered healthy to eat human liver and mummy) and even sexual (even if you are not a praying mantis). It has occurred in virtually all human societies since the origin of the species. We have made it a big taboo, even though eating someone who is already dead (necrocannibalism), although frowned upon, is generally not a crime. But those of us who are truly hungry and have no other way out indulge in anthropophagy like the Tupinambas (who were among the most famous cannibals along with the Caribs and the indigenous people of the Marquesas and Fiji, known as the “Cannibal Islands”) ). Richard Fleischer's 1973 film Soylent Green, very close to the drama of the Andes, imagined a cannibalistic future for everyone: corpses, including those of Edward G. Robinson, were made into cookies, the only source of food for a planet with all resources exhausted.
Chris Hemsworth and his performance as a castaway in Ron Howard's film “In the Heart of the Sea”.
In shipwrecks, it is customary to apply the law of the sea, that is, to eat the unlucky survivor – in the case of the whaler Essex, who made the film “In the Heart of the Sea”, Captain Pollard ate his young cousin Coffin ( !) —. Cannibalism also occurred in lost expeditions (like Franklin's), famines, and extreme war situations. A modern example is the long and terrible Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, during which the consumption of human flesh became so conspicuous that passing through it made one a candidate for the daily menu, depending on the neighborhood. Japanese soldiers practiced cannibalism not only for survival and unhealthy cruelty (as in the Chichijima incident, in which Japanese officers swallowed parts of American pilots: future President George Bush narrowly escaped), but also as a war strategy, as Antony Beevor noted. Incidentally, Ridley Scott's Napoleon contains a scene that seems to allude to cannibalism during the Russian retreat in 1812.
“Self-Portrait with 12 Disciples,” by Greg Semu.
We Westerners also had our ritual cannibalism, which is remembered in some of our myths, such as that of Kronos, Atreus, that of the Laestrygonians or that of the Bacchae, not to mention Hansel and Gretel. And one could argue – the pagan Romans did – that Christianity, which forms the basis of our belief system, is based on a genuine act of anthropophagy: communion (which, by the way, was alluded to by several survivors of the Andean accident). justify your decision). The Eucharist has many similarities with the ceremonies of receiving a god (or his symbolic representative) typical of other cultures. This week, among the ethnological collections on display at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, I was able to observe the impressive self-portrait with 12 disciples by the Samoan-born artist Greg Semu, born in Auckland in 1971. In the image, which is part of his work “The Last Cannibal Supper, Because Tomorrow We Will Become Christians”, Semu is depicted as a wild, half-naked and tattooed Christ, surrounded by other indigenous people, including bare-breasted women, in a provocative and provocative manner Fashion polysemic imitation of Leonardo's Last Supper and in front of a plate with what looks like a roast pig…
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