Why don’t we eat people? (classic)

Hello I was search engine nation and beyond. February 20th is National Cherry Pie Day, as well as National Muffin Day. Two widely celebrated, widely observed American holidays with the same message. Some foods should be eaten. In honor of both of these holidays, we're rearing one of our very favorite episodes, which is about what foods you can eat and can't eat, and a young man with questions about both. Also, if you have a moment, we've been real good and haven't asked this for a while. Please consider reviewing and rating us on Apple podcasts. All of our moms and dads read their reviews and it makes them feel better about our jobs doing audio podcasting in 2026. Thank you. Our episode after these ads. First of all, can you say your name and how old you are? I'm four and my name is Adam. And did you just turn four or have you been four for a while? I turned four like a few days ago. You turned four in May, right? Okay. Okay. It's good to have a fact in checker. Auto had a ride with his mother to search engines recording studio because he had a question. Our interview had begun as all my interviews do. And after the guests, some candy from our office candy jar, auto had chosen a lollipop which he was now crunching on with some gusto. Meanwhile, I was just trying to begin our conversation with some soft balls. I asked you your favorite color, but I'm gonna ask you again for the record. What's your favorite color? Red. What's your favorite season? Winter. Winter? I like to build snowmands. Oh, that's pretty good. You're here with your mom, is that true? Yes. And what's your mom's name? And you know what your mom's job is. She works at restaurants. Okay, so just another quick fact check here. Hannah Goldfield, Otto's mom does not work at restaurants. She writes about them. She's a food critic for the New Yorker. And part of her ethos, and this will become important later, is that she considers it part of her job to, quote, "eat anything." You asked your mom a question recently. Do you remember what the question was? Why don't you eat human heads? Why were you wondering about that? Because I would ask you my dad what else I could eat for dinner. And did you suggest a human head, or did he suggest a human head? I did. And why do you think you're hungry for a human head? Because I know you eat cow. Yeah. Because I left like beef. I mean, so the full context was that I actually wasn't in the room at the moment that the question was first asked. And my husband was asking Otto what else he wanted for dinner other than what we were having that night. And I actually can't remember what it was. And Otto said sausage, chicken skin, and the meat of a human head. Okay. Okay. And Josh, my husband was obviously surprised and he laughed. And then he texted me. I was upstairs doing something. He was like, you got to come down and hear what Otto just said. So we repeated this whole exchange. And I said, Otto, do you know what would have to happen for us to eat the meat of a human head? And he said, yeah. And I said, you know, the person would have to be dead. And he said, yeah, well, they would already be dead like like an old person and their body was just there. And we could just eat the meat of their head. And I explained to him that humans don't eat other humans, but the more I tried to explain why the less of a good answer I had. Did I seem like Otto still wanted to know? Or was it kind of like the question had more sticking power for you than it did for him? I think it had more sticking power for me. I think that he kind of quickly realized it was taboo. And he backed off of it. And that's something I've been thinking a lot about about. I actually, I was talking about this to a friend and I described it as taboo. And he thought that that word was like not nearly as strong enough word. He felt like taboo was like, you know, taboo not to give up your seat for a pregnant woman on the subway. But you know, but it's I think it's one of the ultimate taboo's I have a friend who says that the truest taboo's are the ones whose existence we don't even acknowledge. It's an idea that we've decided culturally or instinctively is so rotten that it becomes hard to even explain why we don't do it because we don't even talk about why we don't do it. We just don't do it. Yes, exactly. So Hannah found herself stuck thinking about her son's brush with the cannibalism taboo, even after Otto had moved on. And she soon found herself poking around on the internet. I just like looked up cannibalism on Wikipedia and there's like a famous cannibal, which is such a funny word also, like when I when I hear that word immediately, I have this like cartoon image, maybe from like mad magazine or something of like a quote unquote, savage wearing like bones. It's a bone necklace. Yeah, bone necklace, loin cloth, the like Western explorers and like an iron pot. Yeah. And like the soups being like exactly exactly that's the camel in your brain. Right. You start to realize that Otto doesn't stop much logic to it. And if like tomorrow you got a PR blast email that said like the people who made the impossible burger have figured out how to like make a synthetic human steak, like a lab-grown human steak. So you can satisfy your curiosity about human meat without causing human suffering. Would you go? So the idea would be you can taste what human meat would taste like without killing someone. Killing someone. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think I would. I don't think if it was totally lab-grown, I think I would. Otto, would you eat human meat if you were allowed to eat human meat? And if nobody had to get hurt for human meat to be eaten. Yeah. And is it because you think it would be tastier because you're curious? Given curious. Will you eat things that are like that most people would be scared to eat? Like are you a picky eater? What's the rule on our house about food? Please try something before you say you don't like it. Which would suggest that you guys are slightly breaking your own rules here. If there's just a blanket prohibition on you. This strikes me as like it's so absurd and hilarious, but then I'm like, but why? It feels so taboo. It just, I feel like a slight sense of nausea, a little bit of shame. Yeah. And yet the most logical part of my brain is like, sure. It's weird. You know it's a taboo because there's the rule, but then there's something more powerful behind the rule that's like bigger than the rule. You know what I mean? It's like that's how you know you're in the presence of a real time. Yeah. I'm worried to even get near this thing. Even though I think I understand why the rule exists, even if there was a carve out, I'm kind of afraid of being caught near the course. Yes. Yes. Have you, like in the course of your life as a person who eats a lot of things? Have you eaten things that felt to you instinctively like as like you had a similar reaction as if you'd eaten human meat where you just felt like I shouldn't be eating this or like my mind is telling my body not to do this? Yeah. Nothing as extreme as the taboo of eating human meat, but the first thing that comes to mind is balut, which is it's a Filipino dish. I mean they may eat it another, another parts of the world. It's a fertilized duck egg. I think it can also be other poultry eggs, meaning like unlike an unfertilized egg that you eat with bacon for breakfast, it's been fertilized. So it's like the fetus of a duck. That sound you're hearing in the background is of a precocious and slightly bored four-year-old figuring out that if you make funny sounds with your mouth, the microphone will pick them up. Anyway, balut. So when you bite into it, is there like, you like pull out what looks like an embryonic bird? Wow. I had it only once many years ago at a Filipino restaurant, but it's very, very popular there, like so popular that kids eat it as like an after-school snack. And I try to remember that it's like everything is so based on what you grew up eating, what was considered normal. So it's like for me, yes, I can't quite get over how weird that feels, but I totally can understand how someone could grow up eating that and think it was the most normal thing in the world. When you were eating it, the FM radio station your brain was just broadcasting like, "No, no, stop now." Yes, for sure. It just felt off to me, not even like. No, no, no, but like, I'm doing this so I can say that I've tried it, but it's not something I will, you know, jump at the chance to eat again. Although I would like, if you offered me some right now, I would try. I just like, I have an insatiable curiosity about food. It's also just funny because it's like, if you were like, do you want to eat an egg? I'd be like, sure. If you were like, do you want to eat a duck? I'd be like, absolutely. If you were like, do you want to eat a baby duck? I'd be like, I don't really have a strong opinion about that. Right. What are the like reproductive politics of like that? Duck view this is bad. It's really weird. Like, there's just a, there's a complicated amount of culture in that response that I don't know how to explain it. Exactly. In America, there's a newer taboo, which says that people shouldn't be disgusted when they encounter foods from other cultures, which is absolutely polite, but also does not take into account that pretty much every culture has ideas about what's gross. And for some of those cultures, what's gross is actually what we eat. In India, where my editor Shruthi grew up, a lot of people are born and raised vegetarian. They've never eaten a bite of meat. Can you imagine how gross meat would be if you'd never eaten it? Or what inhospitable ideas you might harbor about the ropey, wet texture of animal muscles towards the people who complement crispy skin? Shruthi told me in the school lunchrooms there, she often see a kid react to their neighbor eating chicken. The way a kid here, it might react to their neighbor eating balloon. Disgust. The real disgust you feel in your stomach doesn't feel like it comes from culture. Our disgust feels hardwired, but that's just not true. If it were, auto would have just been born knowing he can't eat people. Instead, it's a rule he's being taught. And a rule he'll soon understand is so important, he'll forget that he ever had to learn it at all. Okay. I agree. I know. Thank you for coming in to ask your question. You're welcome. Hannah, thank you for coming in and bringing out a… Thanks for having us. I know you're free. There's something about eating a person, even if they're already dead, that we've all agreed is something to avoid. And we are not contesting that rule, but we are interrogating it. We're just asking questions about it. After the break, three stories about cannibalism, at least one of which I think will complicate your certainty about the anti-canibalism feelings that you think you are born with. We'll see. That's after some hats. Welcome back to the show. Normally, you know how podcasts work. This is not your first one. We did the intro part, then we do the part where I talked to an expert on cannibalism. Somebody who wrote a book, they'll say a bunch of smart stuff, I'll ask them follow up questions about it. This week we're going to do something a little different. So I read a bunch of books on cannibalism, some science, some cultural history, I watched a TED talk, there is a cannibalism TED talk, and then I called a friend. I mentioned in the first half, when I was talking to Hannah, that I had a friend who I text with about taboos. You're probably picturing a pretty pottery relationship right now, but it's just my friend, KELVA. KELVA Sanae. You may have heard him in another episode of Search Engine where we asked him how am I supposed to find new music, now that I'm old and irrelevant? KELVA. Welcome back. KELVA. I've been here. KELVA. KELVA. Ever since the last time you interviewed me for your podcast, I've been sitting here at disabled in this chair watching you, listening, waiting patiently for you to turn my microphone back on. KELVA. I'm sorry, I made you wait so long. KELVA. Finally. So the reason I wanted you talking here today, we text a lot, you're, I would say chronically open-minded to the point where presented with most rules, particularly with social rules, for the person I know who's liable to ask why, how come, are we sure, does it seem like a fair characterization? KELVA. I think that's a fair characterization. So then, before we even begin, I just want to make sure that I know what people are starting on, like, what is your feeling about people eating people? KELVA. My feeling about people eating people, I mean, look, this is a taboo that everyone recognizes is a taboo, but when you tell me about people eating people, I immediately want to break it apart into different pieces, right? There's people eating people on top of the mountain, after a plane crash, and some people have died, and the other people need the sustenance, right? That's one kind. Yes. There's a kind of ritualized people eating people where that's part of the culture, and you do it on special occasions, or for a special reason, or there's lots of different kinds of people eating people, but in general, yes, I certainly share the idea that it's something that we generally don't do, and I can't claim I've ever had an overriding desire to do it. Okay, so KELVA being KELVA is already a step ahead of me, defining some of our categories here, but I do have a plan for how this is going to go. Well, not a plan, a menu. Today, I'm going to serve you three stories of cannibalism. The Amuse Bouch is a historical story, possibly the origin story of our modern fear of cannibals. For the main course, I have a contemporary story of a person eating a person, and for dessert, a mystery set in remote Papa New Guinea. Okay, so the first story I told to KELVA, the Conquest. Okay, so okay, this story happens alongside the Western entry into the Americas, and I think it is where we got the modern meme of cannibalism, like the ubiquitous cartoon image that Hannah and I talked about, this guy with the boners, nose, cooking and explorer and a steaming cauldron, that image, like the origin story of that image, I think I have a story of that for you. The origin of cannibalism has taboo. Now we know how the taboo starts, and we can work on ending it. Yes. Okay, 1493, Christopher Columbus lands in Guadalupe, which at the time he would call Santa Maria de Guadalupe, he's on his second voyage to the New World. According to this one book I read called Cannibalism, a perfectly natural history by Bill Shutt, Columbus's prime directive, like his mission from Spain, was to find gold in the islands. I don't know why this belief was propagated, but the Europeans believed that silver was found in cold places, and gold was found in hot places. So according to their logic, it stood to reason this expedition was going to yield lots and lots of gold. So he arrives with an army of 17 ships, lots of well-armed men, and he reports back to his sponsors in Spain that there's this one group of native people called the Arrow Axe. And according to Columbus, these Arrow Axe, they are great. He writes that the Arrow Axe quote, "are fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and do all else that may be necessary." But according to Columbus, the Arrow Axe warned that there's this other group on certain southern islands, and this group is not as nice. They are called the caribs. The caribs do not want to be ruled. They're ready to fight. And Columbus says that the Arrow Axe warned him, "If the caribs beat you in battle, they might eat you." Columbus writes, "Thus I have found no monsters, nor had a report of any, except in an island carib, which is the second coming into the Indies, and which is inhabited by a people who are regarded in all the islands as very fierce and who eat human flesh." So this is a familiar story he's going to some faraway place, meeting a bunch of people, and basically trying to categorize them. Yes. Exactly. And like some of them, he seems like they're going to be helpful, some of them are not. So these locals are called caribs. Caribs somehow gets mistranslated into Cannib, and Cannibal becomes like what the Cannibs do. So this is really like, well, there was an idea that it was bad to eat people before this. We had a different name for them, like Cannibal goes to this moment. But this whole story is just right with like mistranslation, misunderstanding, and so we don't know what really happened, like did Columbus make all this up? Were the caribs actually originally eating their captured enemies? Were the aerax making this up to get Columbus to go after their enemies? Like, there's just a lot of debate here, even today. But what's important is Columbus told people that on these islands, some of the locals were dangerous, and that they would eat his men. Why did the eating thing loom so large in his mind? I feel like if I was meeting some people, possibly hostile, whether or not they would kill me, would loom a lot larger in my mind than whether or not they would eat me. I think it was just sort of like a particularly bad way to die in their minds because I agree. Like for me, I prefer not to be killed after being killed, being eaten would be like a tertiary concern, probably. Or maybe it's way of measuring distance, or maybe it's way of thinking, well, me and people like us, we don't eat people. And so if I encounter someone, and I hear that they do eat people, then those people are somehow maximally different from me and my people. I think there's a lot of evidence that that is what is going on here, because what ends up happening is Queen Isabella, who is like sent, Thomas on this journey, when she gets the reports back that some of these people eat people, she says that he's allowed to treat the cannibals differently from the other locals. Ooh, I see. So the incentive structure gets all messed up. Exactly. So she writes, this is the letter she sends. If such cannibals continue to resist and do not wish to admit and receive to their the captains and men who may be on such voyages by my orders. Nor to hear them in order to be taught our sacred Catholic faith and to be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are taken to these my kingdoms and domains and to other parts and places and to be sold. So basically, just the queen appears to be giving Columbus and his fellow colonizers special permission to subjugate and enslave cannibals in a way that he wouldn't be able to with other people. Because cannibal is sort of linked with a kind of a maximum cruelty or a definition of quote unquote savagery. Yes. And so what ends up happening, he shows up trying to find gold because again, he thinks you find gold in hot places. There's not as much gold as he was anticipating. And so since they're not finding gold, the Spanish just start looking for people to enslave. And that will be the resource that they go after. So now, even when they're an eraite country, they'll just label people there cannibals. Anytime someone resists them, anytime it's convenient, it's like this magic word cannibal. You call somebody cannibal, you can take that right away. But there's an irony here, right? Which is that for those people in Spain at that time cannibalism represented human beings at their worst, right? And for us, many of us now enslavement represents human beings at their worst. Yes. And so the idea was, if we suspect the way from what you're telling me, the idea is they were like, if we suspect that human beings are being at their worst, we're going to do the thing that future generations will think of as human beings at their worst. Exactly. There's actually another complicating story here. The whole time the Europeans are obsessed with cannibalism, the price of the cannibalism, just like in a slightly different form. So the thing they were accusing the cannibals of doing was ritual cannibalism. Like I eat you because I won in combat because it symbolizes something because I think that I get strength from doing it. What the Europeans have been doing was medical cannibalism, which is when you eat people or body parts because you think there's a medical benefit to it. So there'd been a trend from the 11th century through the 17th century in Europe of eating something called mamiya, which was a material made from ground up powdered mami's, which was supposed to be good for you. They had gotten it. Yes. Yes. Obvious question about the sourcing. Yes. Are these ethically sourced mami's? These were not ethically sourced mami's. These were deeply unethically sourced mami's. They were robbing mami's from Egyptian graves. This suggests that this would be a very valuable product because there's a finite supply of mami's. So it is a valuable product and it quickly becomes a problem, which is that they exhaust the finite supply. Did they call it peak mami? No, they just pretended like they had more mami's and started finding other recently dead people. That sounds, I don't want to go on a limb. That sounds bad. It was bad. So they had recipes to speed up the mummification process of corpses. There's a 17th century book called London Pharmacopii, which includes a recipe describing how to do this. I've read about it in Shutt's book, but the recipe recommends that, quote, "mamiya be made of the cadaver of red-headed man, age 24, who'd been hanged. The corpses to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of mer and alos. This was soaked in the spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, and again smoked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry." Was there a sense about why these people were being hanged or was the idea that we're hanging so many people we can just grab some of the ones that happened to have red hair? My guess is the latter, although I'm also not sure how you get from there's something special about an Egyptian mummy to whatever a special about an Egyptian mummy is also a special about a red-haired person, except for like maybe red-haired people were rare. But you know, in a non-taboo sense, that's the big, that seems like a big distinction, right? What do you mean? Are we killing people so we can eat them or are we doing weird things to corpses? Yeah, and I have to say, in my whatever like internal kind of taboo radar I have inside of me, killing people so you can eat them feels like way worse than doing weird things to corpses. Like if they were hanging. As someone who does not want to be killed so he can be eaten, I absolutely agree with that, and I'll say on your podcast right now, you know, hundreds of years from now, something happens to what remains of my corpse doesn't seem like that big a deal. It seems completely fine. Yeah, so I don't know. Completely fine, you're on the record, PJ. It seems mostly completely fine. They're gonna have to bury you in an unmarked location. They can just throw me in the ocean. Okay, so remembering Otto's question, why can't we eat people? I think what's nice about the carob story is it's kind of like the fact that we have this taboo against animals, we would have the taboo anyway, I feel very confident about that, but the language we have for it, like the fact that we call cannibals, cannibals, and the mental image that's in Hannah's mind and my mind of the, like, explorer in the Stephen Cauldron with Islanders going around him, like that comes from this historical moment. Like there was a reason to have political propaganda in 1493, well after Columbus sort of completed his mission of taking over the land and wiping out lots of people. We're left with this little artifact, and I just find that interesting. Anyway, that is our first story. Before we go to the next story, I just want to say that one aspect of cannibalism, I'm not going to spend very much time on this week is survival cannibalism. That's when people eat people because they're forced to by extreme circumstance. In America, we have the Donner party, who in the 1800s took what they were told was a shortcut on the Oregon Trail, then we're stuck camping through a very harsh winter. They ate some of their dead. In ROI, in the 1970s, there was very famously that rugby team who's playing crash in the mountains. Those survivors ate some of their dead as well. Obviously, those are vivid examples of cannibalism. For me, what I find most interesting is that in cases like the rugby team will say that they get a pass, but then we will also mark them for what they were forced to do. Like, it's almost like we've decided that they are in a different category now. The only reason I'm not spending much time on survival cannibalism is I think it's sort of the exception to Otto's question. Like as far as I can tell, the rule goes, if you're starving and people are dead, you can eat people. It's just that that fact will now dominate your Wikipedia page for the rest of time. So cannibalism might be acceptable under certain circumstances, but it's still going to be infamous. Yes, exactly. And like, it's sort of weird because those people have sort of terrible things. And it's like, I mean, I understand why they are infamous for the way they survived. But like, yeah, it's just a mark that I don't think they ever get to get around. And we'll use cannibalism to judge the terribleness of the thing they survived. Right. How bad was it up there? It was so bad they had to eat people. Yeah. And you almost like, it was funny. I was reading, I was trying to decide whether to include the Donner Party story in this. And I read a lot about the Donner Party story. And it's like, there's a lot of story there besides that fact. But I also understand my brain does it too. My brain is just like Donner Party eating people. That's it. Yeah. And maybe it's that little kid part of your brain, right? That's like fascinated by this thing that we don't do. So of course, any time there's a story about someone doing the thing, that's much more interesting than just like someone went into the snow and died. Yeah. It's also interesting in the story because like, there's even this much time later. When you read an account of it, the writing will be one way where it's like, you know, they'd read this book and the books are just a shortcut and the shortcuts are in the wrong place. And it's sort of one level of detail. And then once it gets into the cannibalism sections, it gets so much more detailed and so much more. Like at the time this person claims that they didn't do it, but later we found out they did do it. But it almost takes on the feeling of gossip where how the information got out becomes very important. And you just realize like, oh, we are fascinated by this. But PJ, and the interest of listener service, you explained in some detail how to make mummyya. Yes. Do you have a Donner Party recipe too? Oh my god. It doesn't seem like, honestly, here's what I will say about the Donner Party. The most fascinating thing about the Donner Party story is not about the preparation of humans. It's that, and I didn't know this, the reason they got lost is that there's all these people who are going out west. And there was like a cottage industry of people who were selling them guidebooks. And there was this guy who was essentially a huckster who wrote a guidebook that's like, so you're going out west? Here's how to do it. And what the other guys won't tell you is I've found a secret shortcut. Oh, it's like maps to the star's houses. Yes, except for this map to the star's house was a bad map that he had not actually tried himself. After publicizing the book, he tried it once, just like on a horse by himself. And so no one in a wagon had tried to do what he said was easy to do. And the whole time they're proceeding on this shortcut that they've read about in his book, and they're realizing how bad it is. He had gone out ahead as like promotion. And like nailed to the trees, notes encouraging people to keep following his path. And so things are getting worse and worse. And they're being understand the size of their predicament. And then they're finding these like cheerful notes being like, "Keep on going." That's the best part of the Daughter Party story. It's just the grimness of having received bad advice from someone promoting their book, which feels like a very modern problem. The survivors immediately went on goodreads.com. One star. Do not recommend. Well, I mean, I like the idea that Hannah's kid asks, why can't we eat people? And that your answer would include at least one recipe. - Yes, at least one recipe. There'll actually be another recipe before the end of this. - Spoiler. - Okay, so I'm not talking about will cannibalism, except for that. The other sort of cannibalism, the thing that I notice reading more about cannibalism and reading these books by experts about cannibalism, is that I have noticed a trend among the academics, which is that they don't like talking about murderous cannibalism, like Jeffrey Dahmer-style cannibalism, and the bill's shut book I read. He goes out of his way to say he is not gonna talk about like your Ed Guines, like your serial killers who ate people. He has a passing reference to the one German guy who consensually ate a person. - Famous German guy. - Who I have questions for you about, but he's like, he almost like doesn't want to count them in his cannibalism ethnography. Why, because they're outliers, they're too unusual? - Well, here's what's interesting. He says it would be disrespectful to the victims, but to me I'm like, but that's the taboo, isn't it? Like that's where you're like even in walking up to the electric fence, I'm gonna step away from the electric fence. Like I don't want to think about the part of this that is sort of at the core of it. - Right. - Okay, so I want to talk about the German cannibal. That's actually the second story I want to tell you, which I'm gonna call the trial. I feel like I should say if like kids are listening to this episode, this would be a good part to skip. Like this is not stuff I would have wanted in my 13 year old brain. But to me, kind of the most interesting murderous cannibal story when it comes to just thinking about the cannibalism rule and why we have it is the story of the German cannibal. Armin Maives, he was a German computer repair technician. He went on a cannibalism message board called the cannibal cafe and said he was looking for a man who wanted to be killed and consumed. A few people respond to the ad. He actually meets some of them who all eventually back out and he lets them back out. But then there's one man who says he wants to go through with it. And so Maives kills him and eats him. And they film the whole thing, including the part where the guy seems to be agreeing to everything that's gonna happen. So he's caught, it goes to trial in Germany. He's found guilty of Germany's version of manslaughter and gets a sentence of about eight years. According to reports of the time, Germans were shocked by the sentence. They thought it was way too late. It also probably didn't help that Maives was saying that he still had fantasies of reoffending once he got out of jail. And so the prosecutors call for a retrial. And they get the court to really pay attention to the tape. And interestingly in Germany, the way German law defines murder, one of the things that can make a killing a murder is that the killer was looking for sexual gratification and so they pushed that idea here. They're like, if you look at the video, clearly this was about sexual gratification. The video had been included in the first trial, but this time the court looks at it and they say, yes, this is Germany's version of murder. He's getting a life sentence. But I think you could look at this and you could say what you're actually seeing is a country trying to decide what are the limits of things will allow consenting adults to do to each other and realize like, oh, we definitely still have a cannibal as I'm telling you about it. - Although there's a way of thinking about that case in a consent based framework, right? You can think about that and say like, well, this other person, it wasn't truly informed consent. That's not something one can consent to if one is in one's right mind. Therefore, that consent is not valid. Therefore, we're gonna prosecute it as murder. That's separate from the question of, did he do something extra wrong beyond committing murder if we think it was murder, right? Like, would the sentence be the same if he had met up with this guy, made this agreement to kill him and eat him and killed him and then not eaten him? - Do you think it would have been the same? - Yeah, to me, that's the crime, right? Is the actual killing. - Right. - And what happens later, you know, we have laws about desecrating a corpse or something and there are those other laws, but, you know, mainly to the extent which it's outrageous, the murder is the outrage, even though the other part, the cannibal part is what makes us all think about it and the reason we know about it. - Right. - Yeah, but it's not obvious to me that that revulsion that most of us have with the idea of cannibalism. It's not obvious to me that that's wrong, right? Like, that might be a moral intuition we should learn from and respect and one way to respect a moral intuition is to have laws against it. - So, okay, so on the one hand, it's like you're saying once you're dead, if some future society eats your corpse, it's like not the biggest deal in the world, but you're also saying that like, if we have a feeling like a moral intuition that cannibalism is wrong, we should probably follow that feeling and create laws around it. Like, where you're both sides in cannibalism. - I am a little bit, 'cause I'm having a double reaction to the existence of a taboo, right? And so, my first reaction is to be like, oh, there's a taboo here where we're being guided by something besides our rational sense of consent and not harming people, right? Part of this reaction is like a little bit superstitious. So, my first reaction is to kind of like, try to identify the superstition, but my second reaction is to be like, well, there is something to be said for superstition in that sense. There is something to be said for taboo. And when I think about it, just because I acknowledge that it is a taboo, doesn't mean I wanna get rid of that taboo or get rid of all taboos. - And I think the reason I like thinking about cannibalism as a taboo, even though maybe it's silly, is because it's the one where I'm actually most convinced that it might be like natural. Like, I think Columbus informed the language we use for cannibalism and like the cartoon images in our head we use for cannibalism. But like, I think it's a rule that as many different human societies as a confloresh and as many ways they could construct themselves. Like, most of them, when they wrote down their taboos, which they wouldn't, but if they did, cannibalism was one of them. So, I think I just like thinking about it because it almost feels hardwired, but then you can also see where it's culturally transmitted. - Yeah, and this is a heuristic that can lead you astray, right? Like, you can say like, I've grown up in a world where, you know, slavery is considered okay. And I'm looking at other societies and it seems like there's slavery all over the world and there's a long history of slavery. So, this must be a natural feeling, right? - All right. - That's a way of thinking that can lead you astray, but obviously the point is, there's no way to be sure, right? This is what philosophers talk about. This is right, the idea of like, which of these things that seem really obvious to me are actually kind of wrong. And there's no way to be sure that the things that feel obvious to you are not in fact wrong. - I feel pretty sure about camels and camels. A lot of people have felt pretty sure about a lot of things over the years. - After the break, a mystery and pop a new guinea, that might make us question some of the things we're pretty sure we're pretty sure about. The story of the foray. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome back to the show. We've reached our third and final story here, The Funeral. Calva, I'm just going to read you, might not short introduction to this one. I'm ready to hear it. - Okay. On the island of Papua New Guinea, there's this small group of people called the foray. The foray are a group in the tens of thousands, who for years had been almost entirely uncontacted by outsiders. They live in the remote eastern highlands, picture a dense landscape of greenhouse. The foray have few encounters with the Western world. There's a run-in with an Australian gold prospector in the 1930s. In the 40s, apparently, one world were two fighter plane crashes near them, which must have been an insane experience. But they're mainly left alone until the 1950s, when anthropologists start to really get curious about how the foray live. And as the anthropologists arrive with their questions, they learn the foray I have one of their own. The foray tell the anthropologists that their people are dying in large numbers, and in this very scary way. There's a mysterious phenomenon called Kuru. The foray I think it's a curse. The anthropologists think it's a disease. The Western media outlets hear about it, and they start calling it laughing sickness. Kuru mostly affects children and women. Something like only 2% of cases were found in adult males. When you get Kuru, the first stage that you begin to walk in a wobbly way. You struggle to pronounce some familiar words. It sounds to me a little bit like being too drunk at a wedding. The next phase is where it begins to get scary. You shake, you shiver, you have goosebumps. And you start to laugh. Not because anything's funny, these are spasms. Huge uncontrollable bouts of laughter that come out of nowhere and which you cannot stop. At this point, you know you have Kuru, and you know that that means you're going to die. How much time you have left ranges, some people live with a disease for two months, some people as long as three years. But no one recovers. Everyone arrives at the final stage. In the final stage, you struggle even to set up. You may not be able to talk. You're conscious, but you don't seem to be present. One of the last things you lose is your ability to swallow. Food, water. This is the point where if you're foray, the people who love you will smother you to death, out of mercy, so that you don't starve. But if Kuru was a. disease, it didn't function like any disease anyone had ever seen. It didn't seem to be contagious, you could sit with a person dying of kuru and not catch it yourself. But when the foray moved in with other groups living near them, sometimes kuru came with them. In the 50s, westerners were guessing that kuru might be genetic. If so, it was a recent mutation. Because the foray told them this phenomenon was relatively new. It may have only been happening since the 1910s. There had been one explanation that had been sort of a rumor that no one seemed to want to commit to writing. In the late 60s, two papers were published hypothesizing that the foray may be contracting kuru through cannibalism. The foray ate their dead. Not always. Not all the time. But in the same way that you tell your partner whether you want to be buried or cremated. In foray society, you would tell your partner if you wanted to be buried, left out in the forest, or consumed by your family. This is from a paper by an anthropologist named Jerome T. Whitfield about what happened to a foray person who chose to be consumed. "The head of the deceased was placed over a fire to burn off the hair, and then it was deflashed with a bamboo knife. A hole was made in the top of the skull using a stone, and the brain was gradually removed by one of the older women, whose hand would be wrapped in ferns. The tissue was then mixed with ferns and placed in bamboo tubes, normally two or three, and cooked." End quote. "For the foray who were eaten, the head and the brains were typically reserved for women, but women would sometimes bring their children to the funeral and share food with them." There's something beautiful about that. That's what surprises me. It's really, you know, it's, you compare it to other rights on the one hand to eating the placenta, right, which is a tradition that some people are reviving, or even to something like a wake, where if you've never been to an open casket wake, it's a little bit strange. But yes, this seems like an incredibly respectful way of honoring a body, right? It's not treating a body as meat." No, and it's funny. My assumption is that any society that's practicing cannibalism, it's because of a lack of respect for the body, but this seems like it comes from a place of utmost respect for a body. And from the forays perspective, if you love someone, first of all, it would be better to be consumed by the people who love you than by worms and maggots, which is like what's gonna happen if you're in the ground or left out. But also, they felt that by consuming the person, they might be consuming like not parts like body parts, but like aspects of the person's personality might transfer them, or their soul might be protected in some way. It feels like they have a sense of protecting life and it's causing them to do this thing that in our culture is associated with a deep disrespect for life. Yeah, I mean, at the base of the cannibalism taboo is this idea that as human beings, we don't look at each other as food. And this, in a way, honors that, right? This isn't like, oh, this person died, they're gonna be delicious, right? This is like, yeah, we don't look at each other as food, and we're gonna do this ritualistic thing to honor the life, maybe. Yeah. So, so what's interesting about like where this forays story ends is these anthropologists generally knew there was some debate, but the sort of weight of evidence was on the side of the idea that the forays were eating their dead because they knew that what they were able to figure out is that when they ate their dead, sometimes what was happening is they were spreading kuru. It's a prion disease, which was a relatively not understood kind of disease, but it's like an infection of brain protein. And so when they ate brain tissue from a dead foray, they were getting this disease, the strange thing about kuru is it doesn't show up right away. You can carry it for something like as long as 40 years before the time mom explodes. And so it wasn't person dies. We hold a funeral for them the next week, everyone's ill. It was like person dies, we hold a funeral for them, maybe many years later someone's ill. But the actual ending of the story was the foray decided to change the rules around cannibalism. But it wasn't because cannibalism was wrong or gross, it was just like we're dying from it. You know, there is this idea that a lot of food taboos traditionally, you think of kosher and halal systems had to do partly with health and had to do partly with safety and ways of consuming meat that wouldn't put you at risk. And so it's not surprising to learn that there might be some element of that in the taboo against human cannibalism. This would be interesting if the cannibalism taboo, which we assume is about protecting others, might turn out to be also about protecting ourselves. But hypothetically, what if there was a safe way for us to consume people? This is something that had come up in conversation with Hannah too. Statically created human meat. Would you eat lab grown human meat? I can tell you what I want to say I would do and I can tell you what I know is real. Like I want to say like of course I tried, I'm a curious person, I wanted to have every single experience, I'm afraid of nothing, blah, blah. Somebody took me on a date once, this restaurant in Toronto where you could eat just like the brains of animals and I threw up right away. And there was nothing about the food that was bad, which is like the idea that I was eating a brain and people have brains and you're not supposed to eat brains because people have brains like cause me to have a physical reaction where I vomit it. So I don't think I would eat. Would you eat human grown lab meat? Lab grown human meat. Human grown lab meat would be a scientist who was murdered in his lab, but working late one night. I think I would eat lab grown human meat. I mean, it doesn't seem like we're necessarily too far away from a time when you can grow all different kinds of flesh in a lab. Yeah. And so in that sense, what it would mean for it to be quote unquote human, I guess would have something to do with the DNA and I don't know, but it gets a little abstract. But what about the argument that you've made which is that if you create that world which we can eat synthetic human meat and have like PJ sandwiches or whatever, you are reducing, you're lowering the strength of this natural taboo against the sacredness of our bodies and then like perhaps creating a society that you don't want to live in. Yeah. And I mean, you know, that's part of what modernization is, right? It's like various taboos get considered superstitious and they kind of fall away and then the question is, can we hold the line against other kinds of behavior we think is bad? Even as these taboos get weakened. Sometimes we need to develop new taboos or new rules, right? We're living in a world where like sex leads to pregnancy and then all these birth control technologies come in and then you've got to refigure out your rules and your taboos around sex, which were, you know, still in the process of doing. Yeah. In this case, would it be possible to still respect people's bodies and not eat people's bodies even if we're eating lab-grown meat that sort of tastes the way someone's body would taste? I suspect, mate, this is a cop out. Can I give you a cop out? Yes, sir. Yeah. So, one cop out answer is maybe we didn't evolve to find the taste of humans that delicious and so that when we're comparing different kinds of lab meat, we're going to be drawn to things that are a little bit more like the kinds of things that humans have traditionally eaten. I will tell you, unfortunately, so these, these people, this is going to be a version of the New Yorker cartoon where the doctor says to the pig, it's your ribs, I'm afraid they're delicious. Basically, yeah, yeah, the anthropologist who wrote this paper on the fore, the part that I found kind of most like, oh, shit, I would carry you one more quote from the paper. So the way, they talk about the type of cannibalism that the fore practice as endocannibalism, endocannibalism is you're eating members of your group, exocannibalism is eating members of the out group. So they're explaining like why they did it. Their works have explained the role of endocannibalism in the epidemiology of kuru, and emphasize that the body was eaten out of love, like grief love, as well as for gastroenomic appreciation, which was not the intended purpose of the practice, but its result. Hmm, what does that mean, the intended purpose of the practice? It means that while they were eating their dead to communicate all these things about life and love and grief, the side effect was that they were discovering that people are actually really tasty. Oh, but it's hard to separate tastiness from the stories we tell us, right? Just like the label on a bottle of wine is going to affect the way it tastes to people, right? If you have this, all this build up and all this ritual and all this symbolic meaning, maybe the human body starts to taste delicious the same way a communion wafer might taste delicious to a believer. I also think that, you know, there's reason to imagine that we might have evolved not to find humans tasty, in general. Right. Right. Right. I like the idea that you'd respond to this kid with this question, the way we often respond to kids, which is by telling them something that's sort of mainly true. Trubot incomplete. Yes. I think Trubot incomplete is like the way out of answering this without having to like horrifying with a bunch of stories about like, German cannibals, even like I think he should have a uncomplicated version of celebrating what he probably knows as indigenous peoples day. Like, I think the right answer for auto is you shouldn't eat people because it can make you really sick. Yes. That's Kelifasame. taboo critic but sometimes a taboo supporter. He writes about all sorts of things with the New Yorker. This week, as we were wrapping the episode, I briefly spoke with Hannah, Otto's mom. She said in a couple of months since we first spoke, Otto keeps changing the way four-year-olds do. She says these days, they play a game where, when he goes to bed, he's allowed to ask his parents a certain amount of questions before he falls asleep. This week, she said Otto has not been wondering about cannibalism. His mind had moved on to another question, which frankly, I don't have the answer to. What are rocks made out of? Maybe that's next week, on Search Engine. After the break, the most anxiety-inducing command in the English language. [MUSIC] Check, check, check. Oh, there we go. It's an hour of life. Hot, hot, hot. Hello, hello, hello. OK. I'm here in the studio with Search Engine producer Greg Graham. It's great to be here. And we're here because it's time for us to do recommendations. I feel like this week, we have, like, it's a little bit of a show and tell. It's a show and tell. I feel like we're making one of those TV morning shows because there's on the studio table here, there's two plates with little paper towel napkins and silver on them because we both brought food recommendations for each other. It's like, what fuck has to we making now? We're just keeping with the organization of the episode. We're just throwing a second dessert on it. It's like when you're about to leave the restaurant, they're like, the kitchen's friendly with you. And they're like, we brought you one more thing. Precisely. Who goes first? Let's go P history first. So I brought some pastures. I do want to set them up briefly though, which is that a couple of weeks ago, you plugged a sandwich shop. A sandwich shop. A sandwich shop. A local Brooklyn sandwich in pastry shop where I approved both the way they ran their business and the quality of their food. And I was like, is it okay that this is such a New York specific recommendation? We decided that it was okay. We're doubling down a little bit. But also, we're doubling down specifically because my competitive juices started flowing a little bit. You were really hyping up sea and soil. You were wearing some sea and soil paraphernalia around the hatch office. Yes. I am in love with a pastry shop in my neighborhood. So I brought some pastries for us to sample. Oh, these are gorgeous. Okay, so there are three options. Okay. You get to pick. I brought a ham and cheese croissant, which they sneak a little stone ground mustard inside of. Wow. A sesame cunamon. I've never been confident saying that word. I'm not going to start now. I'm not confident, I have to correct. A cunamon, cunamon. And then I brought a sun-choke mushroom cheesy Danish. Oh, wow. Which is a bit of a curveball. I gotta be honest. A savory pastry. A savory pastry. So you get to draft first. I'm going to try the savory pastry. Savor pastry. Okay, here we go. So where are these pastries from? So these pastries are from bakery in my neighborhood. It's called Atway. You've been talking about Atway a lot. Like a lot. It's O-T-W-A-Y. And also there was a listener who tried it. And it was like you have to try Atway. Which at that point, I was like, okay, clearly, something's going on with this pastry place. It's magnificent. I feel like I've been a weird position. Now though, we're like, if I don't like this pastry, I'm just-- - You can't tell me. - Well, also, we're just like, crapping on some pastry shop on an, like, international buck. (laughing) - Pressure's kind of on for you and for Atway. - There's this quote. I'm not sure it's true. But somebody told me that the philosopher at Jijek said the most anxiety-producing command that you can get in the English language is enjoy. Which is how I feel holding this pastry. - Huh. - It's really good. (laughing) - It's like flaky. - Oh, ma'am, hon. That's amazing. - It's almost like eating like a croissant pizza. - Wow. - Okay, I would recommend Atway. I think if you're visiting Zimin Hatten. - It's in Brooklyn. - It's in Brooklyn in the, like, Cleanson Hill bedstye kind of area. - Is this eventually just for me to podcast where we review pastries in Brooklyn? - Yes, that's season two. - Is there a business model for that? (laughing) - We'll have to hear from our listeners. - Oh, also we should establish. - Then while the podcast industry is doing very poorly, this is not a paid segment. We're not, the way we're funding this podcast is not by shaking out coffee shops and it drives their pastries. - This is just, this is a passion project. - This is a passion project. Okay, this is my recommendation, which is not local to Brooklyn, which might be a relief for some listeners. So my friend Chris Crawford runs this company called Tarte Vinegar. It's like she makes her own vinegar in a very, very, very small factory in Brooklyn. - What's this vinegar? - This one is salad and soup vinegar. And the thing she started doing recently, which is really helpful, is like, 'cause I always, basically this holiday season, I just buy everybody Chris's vinegar, but everybody appreciates it. And then sometimes they don't know what to do with it. And with this, now she has recipes on the side. But do you just want to try a straight vinegar? - I, you sure. - Okay, here's a spoonful of vinegar. (laughing) - Vinegar and pastry is classic Thanksgiving fare. - Yes. - What do you think? - Oh, it's really nice. If you hadn't told me it was vinegar, I don't think I would have said vinegar. - What would you have thought? - It just tastes like kind of a tasty drink. - Yeah, I actually drink this. I'll like mix this with salsa and just like drink it at my home. I think there are people who believe there are health benefits. I just like it. - It tastes like for vinegars. - Right. - Okay, so my recommendation is tart vinegar, which you can get on the internet. Your recommendation is at-way bakery. Neither of these companies have paid us to endorse their products. (laughing) - I'll pay them to endorse their products. I pay them every morning when I'm in a coffee or a pastry. - Yes, you, you have your pastures. I pay for vinegar. (laughing) (upbeat music) - Sturgeon is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by P.J. Vod and Shruti Pinemennati. And it's produced by me, Garrett Graham, and Noah John. Theme original composition and mixing by Armand Bizarrean, fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Special thanks this week to David Cho. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Bermann and Leo Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is over in Rosenbaum at UTA and our social media is by the team at public opinion NYC. Follow and listen to Search Engine with P.J. Vod now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, as we said at the top, if you would like to become a paid subscriber, head over to pjvod.com. There's a link in the show notes. Or the other way you can help our show is to head over to Apple Podcasts and rate and review. Okay, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. We're off next week, but we will see you back here on the Super First. (upbeat music)