Human cannibalism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"... me from a hospital interne at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of the first healthy human carcass killed by accident, that they could dispose of as they chose. I cooked it in Neuilly, at the Villa of the Baron Gabriel des Hons, ..."--No Hiding Place, page 306, William Seabrook, 1942 |
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Human cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings. A person who practices cannibalism is called a cannibal. The expression cannibalism has been extended into zoology to mean one individual of a species consuming all or part of another individual of the same species as food, including sexual cannibalism. Some scholars have argued, however, that no firm evidence exists that cannibalism has ever been a socially acceptable practice anywhere in the world, at any time in history.
Individual acts
Prior to 1931, The New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed in an accident, then cooked and ate it. This was after he had falsely claimed (he admitted in No Hiding Place (1942)) in Jungle Ways (1930) that he ate it in an African tribe:
"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."
See also
- Alexander Pearce
- Alferd Packer, an American prospector, accused but not convicted of cannibalism
- Androphagi, an ancient nation of cannibals
- Asmat people, a Papua group with a reputation of cannibalism
- Cannibalism in popular culture
- Cannibalism in poultry
- Chijon family, a Korean gang that killed and ate rich people
- Custom of the Sea, the practice of shipwrecked survivors drawing lots to see who would be killed and eaten so that the others might survive
- Homo antecessor, an extinct human species, suspected of practicing cannibalism
- Human fat has been applied in European pharmacopeia between the 16th and the 19th centuries.
- Human placentophagy, the consumption of the placenta (afterbirth)
- Idi Amin, Ugandan dictator who is alleged to have consumed humans.
- Issei Sagawa, a Japanese celebrity who killed and ate a fellow student
- List of incidents of cannibalism
- Manifesto Antropófago, (Cannibal Manifesto in English), a Brazilian poem
- Noida serial murders, a widely publicized instance of alleged cannibalism in India
- Placentophagy, the act of mammals eating the placenta of their young after childbirth
- Pleistocene human diet
- R v Dudley and Stephens, an important trial of two men accused of shipwreck cannibalism
- Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a progressive condition that affect the brain and nervous system of many animals, including humans
- Vorarephilia, a sexual fetish and paraphilia where arousal occurs from the idea of cannibalism
- Wari’ people, an Amerindian tribe that practiced cannibalism
