A cannibalism tomethatoffers food for thought
From Hannibal the cannibal to bloodthirsty chimps, what is it that drives humans – and animals – to eat their own kind? Warning: You’ll need a very strong stomach
At times it’s close to turning into a Jive Bunny medley of things that are vaguely cannibalistic
Eat Me: A Natural And Unnatural History Of Cannibalism Bill Schutt Profile Books €17.50
Years ago, the late Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, told me that he had eaten human flesh. Was it a confession or a boast? With Burgess, it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference.
He had, he said, once eaten with a remote tribe in Malaysia. Only after he had finished everything on his plate did the chief of the tribe reveal that they had been tucking into a human being. ‘It tasted like a cross between chicken and pork,’ Burgess reminisced. He then went into a long digression on the subject of autophagy, or the practice of eating oneself. To some extent, we are all guilty of it: after all, we all swallow our own saliva, and in moments of extreme boredom, I sometimes chew on the inside of my cheek.
Bill Schutt, an American professor of biology, kicks off his sometimes overjaunty history of cannibalism with a Hannibal Lecter quote from the book The Silence Of The Lambs: ‘A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone.’ These days, even serious books are obliged to have an element of showbiz about them. Fair enough, but he then ropes in Norman Bates from Psycho. This is gratuitous because, for all his many shortcomings, Norman was no cannibal.
Schutt tries to justify his inclusion by claiming that Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock based the film, ‘drew on’ the story of a real-life American psycho-cannibal called Ed Gein, ‘concentrating on the mother fixation while playing down the mutilation and cannibalism’. This is simply not true: by the time Gein’s cannibalism was revealed, Bloch had just about finished his novel, and he didn’t ‘play down’ Gein’s cannibalism: it doesn’t come into the book at all.
It can be unsettling to catch an author over-egging the pudding from the off, but the rest of the book is much more judicious, often debunking the sensationalist claims of earlier cannibal-spotters.
For instance, there is a very good chapter on Christopher Columbus and Walter Raleigh, who both pretended that the natives they encountered in distant lands were mad cannibals. It made it so much easier to justify slaughtering them, and to boost their own heroic reputations.
Both were fan ta sists by nature: Columbus also claimed to have come across humans with such long tails that they had to dig holes in the ground before they were able sit down. Raleigh claimed he had seen men with heads in their chests, and others with feet pointing backwards, which made it hard to follow their trails.
The early part of Eat Me is devoted to cannibalism among animals, the remainder to cannibalism among humans. There is, as Schutt observes, something both repugnant yet fascinating about any sort of cannibalism. This even applies to the otherwise humdrum world of tadpoles: when I read that nature makes some of them grow sharp-edged teeth, all the better to eat one another, I began to feel a little queasy.
At least tadpoles are more patient than sand tiger sharks, which start eating each other in the womb: baby sharks are born with stomachs already full of their devoured siblings, sometimes up to 19. As Schutt observes, this is the ultimate form of sibling rivalry.
Sharks already have a bad image, but after this book hits the shops other, cuter animals would be well advised to hire a decent PR. Schutt outs chimpanzees, polar bears, woodpeckers and sea lions. In fact, polar bears are among the worst offenders, killing and eating cubs even when they are not driven to do so by hunger. Creepily, this may be because the males have worked out that the females come into heat more quickly when their offspring have been killed.
One of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzee, also commonly engages in cannibalism and infanticide – often eating infants outside of their own group.
And even Hammy Hamster must hang
his head in shame. Or, rather, her head: it is the females of most species that are more inclined to cannibalism when stressed at being in a cage with other hamsters. But of all the animals in the world, the one I’d least like to be is a male banana slug, which is cursed with a corkscrew-shaped penis. This makes it very hard to extract after intercourse, so the impatient female simply bites it off and then, in Schutt’s all-too-vivid description, ‘slurps it down, spaghetti-style’. There is a happy ending of sorts: the male banana slug then instantly changes sex, and spends the rest of his life as a female banana slug.
Schutt spreads his net wide, dealing with everything from dinosaurs to Neanderthal Man and from cannibals in fairy tales to BSE. At times, the book comes perilously close to turning into a Jive Bunny medley of things that are vaguely cannibalistic, jazzed up with bad puns for chapter titles (‘Apocalypse Cow: The Origins Of BSE’) spelt out in letters shaped like bones.
He devotes a whole chapter to the hippy-ish fashion for cooking and eating human placenta. For his research into Eat Me, Schutt ate placenta, sautéed with tomatoes, garlic and onions. ‘Firm but tender, it was easy to chew… it faintly reminded me of the chicken gizzards I used to fry up as a student.’
At another point, he even manages to drag Keith Richards into the picture – citing that story of the Rolling Stone snorting his late father’s ashes. ‘Ashes to ashes, father to son,’ wrote the rocker in his autobiography.
A similar familial devotion lay behind the cannibalistic tradition of the Fore tribe in New Guinea, which lasted right up to the Sixties. They believed it is better for a dead person to be consumed by his or her relatives than by maggots, and so would eat the recently deceased from top to toe. Unfortunately, this spread the fatal brain disease of kuru, a version of CJD.
Stranger still was the fashion in China during the Sixties and Seventies for what Schutt calls ‘epicurean cannibalism’, in which those charged as enemies of the state would be cut open when still alive and their body parts cooked as part of a gourmet cuisine, served in government canteens. A longer-standing Chinese tradition, documented over a period of 2,000 years, had children showing respect by slicing pieces off their own thighs or upper arms, then preparing them in a rice porridge and serving them to their proud parents.
And what of the female redback spider, which consumes her boyfriend’s abdomen during copulation, or the tales of sailors adrift who have had to pull straws to see who’s going to be eaten first? But that’s enough of that. Is lunch ready?