Emergency Food Supplies: Should You Eat People?

 

When we consider the problems of starvation, malnutrition and general hysteria following a major disaster cannibalism begins to rear its ugly head. After all, in a disaster we would gladly eat any kind of meat including birds, lizards, dogs, cats, and perhaps even vermin if the need arose so why not the plentiful corpses of human beings as well? Although you probably cringe just to think of it, let’s take a serious look at the potential benefits and dangers of bringing people to the dinner table.

Is there historical precedent for consuming the dead?

Lengthy sieges tended to bring out cannibalism as supplies ran low. These bodies from the Siege of Leningrad are being buried properly, but many others were not so lucky.

Yes, in many cases. Some are infamous, such as the Donner Party of 1846 in which a party of stranded pioneers resorted to eating each other in order to survive until rescue could come to them. Others are smaller parts of a greater tragedy such as the Biblical account of the siege of Samaria in 2 Kings 6:28-29, in which two women agree to consume their sons in turn to survive, but one woman refused to kill her son despite eating the flesh of the other. Josephus includes a similar accounts of cannibalism spreading throughout the city of Jerusalem during the siege by the Romans under Titus in 70 AD.

Other accounts include stories of tribes such as the Korowais of New Guinea who consume humans as part of religious or ritualistic practices. In their practice the people they consume are called kha­khua, and are not considered to be human at all but rather a disguised sorcerer who is killing other members of the tribe at night via his magical abilities. In fact, when confronted by astonished Westerners who asked them about their cannibalistic practices, they were openly confused as to why they were thought to eat humans. After all, they don’t eat people, they only eat khakhua!

A key point here is that eating people in almost any society around the world, whether modern or ancient, requires some manner of special circumstance or magical interference to justify it. Humans do not regularly eat each other in the same manner we do domesticated cattle. Of course, this historical data alone doesn’t answer the question of whether or not we should add human to our menu, but it does give evidence that some people have used the flesh of man to satiate their hunger when the need arose in special circumstances.

Is eating people medically dangerous?

Since the moral side of the question must be decided on an individual basis, you should be aware of the medical concerns associated with human meat. Eating people is in many ways no different from eating pig, and indeed people are often described as “long pork” by the few cannibals who have been asked to describe their macabre meals. However, there are two key problems with eating people that no other meat really has: prions and compatible physiology.

Prions

Brains contain a high level of prions, and so any damage resulting from eating damaged prions is likely to compromise your mental abilities.

Prions are proteins found in certain parts of the human body (primarily the brain, spinal system, bone marrow, and small intestine) that can cause serious and deadly damage to the body when consumed. Although healthy prions generally present little harm when consumed, if damaged prion cells are eaten they can interact with the healthy ones in your own body to cause certain stereotypical symptoms commonly associated with cannibals in many recent apocalypse movies. Shaky hands, neurological disorders, and other severe mental damage can be caused by faulty prions tearing your own prions apart.

It should be emphasized, however, that this is not guaranteed to happen! If a cannibal consumed someone with healthy prions they would suffer no prion damage and would demonstrate no symptoms as a result. Many movies have the “check for shaky hands” method for keeping cannibals away but unfortunately you would not necessarily be able to use it to check for real cannibals.

Compatible Physiology

Generally speaking, it is a very bad idea to consume meat from creatures that are very similar to yourself. Pigs have historically been considered to be dangerous to eat if improperly cooked for this reason, since many diseases that can be contracted by pigs are easily passed on to the people who consume them. Human meat is even more dangerous, since diseases that infected the original host can typically easily evade your own immune response and cause damage. Although proper cooking can reduce these risks somewhat, there is always an element of danger to consuming another human for this reason.

So, should you eat people?

Foraging is a much more practical skill than consuming humans, and one that is less likely to kill you in the long run.

Cannibalism is morally repugnant to most people, including myself. In many respects eating people is considered to be going beyond a last resort, and is psychologically shattering to many people who’ve been forced to resort to it. Even if you were willing to look past this, the physical practicality of eating human meat is rather poor owing to the high chance of contracting a disease or destroying your mind via prion degradation. Rather than planning on consuming people you would be better off learning how to forage for food from other natural sources, since most areas of the earth have at least some edible animals or vegetation available.