Brain Picking

Nury Vittachi is not open-minded about eating brains

A TRIBE OF PEOPLE who ate human brains became immune to several deadly diseases, scientists said. The report was shown to me by a gourmet who took offence to an article I once wrote about an East Turkestan restaurant in Shanghai where the signature dish – this is not a joke – was Cold Raw Sheep’s Brain.

“I bet you feel stupid now,” said the gourmet, a 42-year-old foodie who did not want his name, weight or waist measurement printed.

At the time, I strongly advised the restaurant manager to present his menu only in French, so his top dish would become Froid Brut Cerveau de Mouton. Everything’s better in French.

Google translates “inedible stuff that tastes like garbage” into choses non comestibles qui goûte comme des ordures, which sounds pretty good, right? I’d order that. But the restaurant guy totally didn’t get it, replying that if I thought it sounded horrible and disgusting, I could have his other specialty: Cold Raw Horse’s Brain.

A workmate reading over my shoulder put in her penny’s worth, saying: “This proves the zombies were right all along.” I was about to tell her that zombies only existed in bad movies but stopped myself, not wanting to trample on her deeply held spiritual beliefs. Anyway, since zombies only eat brains, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, she should be just fine.

But I did look up the original science report (in the journal Nature) and found that what it really said was that members of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea used to eat human brains in large numbers and are now genetically resistant to several fatal brain diseases like a mad cow-like disease – because only those with an immunity mutation survived. In other words, part of the tribe now cannot get brain diseases, which in health terms is a Very Good Thing, while the other members are stone dead, which in health terms is Less of a Good Thing.

In truth, the discovery is an excellent reason to avoid eating brains (or any other deadly foods) while actively encouraging everyone else to do so. We interrupt this column to remind readers that burgers and fries are delicious, mmm-mmm-mmm, and wouldn’t you love to have an obscene amount of them right now?

A scientist quoted in the report said that the finding proved that human evolution was continuing at high speed. So it can only be a matter of time before mothers have eight arms and teenage girls have phones where their right hands used to be.

One friend says that the strongest argument against evolution is the existence of people who comment on YouTube videos, which is a pretty powerful point, I admit. But they could be just dead-end mutations off the side of the human evolutionary tree, right?

At school, my brainy biology teacher explained how we had all evolved from apes, and then he looked at me, and added: “Except for one or two of us who clearly evolved from sloths, and did not evolve very far.” I comforted myself with a nice thought: the zombies would eat him first.

Members of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea used to

eat human brains in large

numbers