Is cannibalism paleo?

No carbs, all flesh.

A few weeks ago, I was wolfing down a chicken mole burrito in a Dollar Tree parking lot and I thought to myself: why don’t more people… eat people?

¹

I’m not saying we should, per se—I just think it’s odd that this is where people draw the line.

There’s a lot of weirdos out there. There’s a pretty sizable amount of people who don’t believe in 9/11 or in the Holocaust or that Taylor Swift is actually the reincarnation of Norse explorer and Christopher Columbus’s worst nightmare, Leif Erikson.

Did you know that Exile, featuring Bon Iver, is actually about the three year exile of Swift/Leif’s father, Erik the Red—to the island of Eyxney—for killing Eyjolf the Foul in the year 982?

Call me crazy, but I find it highly unusual that there’s not a bigger bloc of people wanting to grill up some human thigh meat this Fourth of July or to impress the cousins with their spleen and sweet potato casserole this Thanksgiving.

“I hate Thanksgiving. My great uncle Bruce won’t shut up about how global warming is fake news and how we have a constitutional right to consume human flesh.”

And look—my lawyer wants me to make this abundantly clear: I am not a cannibal. I have not knowingly engaged in a behavior that constitutes the material consumption of human-like tissue material.

I. Don’t. Eat. Human. Flesh. I’m just surprised there’s not a bigger cannibal contingency out there. Kyrie Irving believes the earth is flat but won’t eat sautéed adrenal glands?

It’s not like we don’t already play it pretty fast and loose with the human body. Circumcision is still a thing, and I think we can all agree that that’s weird.

“Congratulations on the baby, lemme just chiffonade his penis.” - your doctor

And—some mothers eat their placenta. Now, the Mayo Clinic says that eating your placenta after giving birth can pose harm to both you and your baby, but the Happiest Baby blog says that it helps with milk production and postpartum depression. So… 🤷‍♂️

I wonder if the issue is more in the distribution network. Let’s face it: factory farming is running laps around the human flesh industry. But if we were to raise human thigh meat as efficiently and cheaply as hogs, who knows—we might actually be able to fight back against the meat empires of Tyson Foods and Cargill.

Over the course of my childhood, my mom would turn to me, look me in the eye, and quote that iconic line from The Silence of the Lambs: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. fft fft fftt fftt.”

I’ve never actually seen the film. And I’ve never really discussed this with my mom—the film, the quote, why she would repeat this multiple times to her son over the course of his young life—but apparently that line stuck with my mom, enough to repeat it to her child—and that stuck with me, all these years.

Still need more convincing?

Try this on for size: around the 15th century, Europeans ate powdered human mummies, which they called mumia.

This is true. And—at one point, blood was used to treat epilepsy, filial cannibalism was all the rage, and cannibalistic funerary rites were practiced all through the 20th century.

So where’s my colon burger, Arby’s??

It just seems to me that the “no cannibalism, ever” logic is a bit faulty. We already exploit the human body for things like blood transfusions and kidney transplants. So why can’t we just eat people?

A closed-minded critic: “Well, blood donations and transplants only come from dead people or willing donors.”
We could have the same approach for eating humans—only ethically sourced, fair trade certified human flesh.

“These medical procedures are to save a human life—not for something completely unnecessary, like eating people.”
Ok, then what about elective surgeries? A plastic surgeon can give someone a new nose or a set of absolute chest cannons but I can’t legally eat my dead grandad’s heart?

Just look at how happy this chap is, eating some kind of intestine and corn risotto bowl, probably:

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1. Here’s some homework for you: read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, also known as the essay giving sophomore English teachers an orgasm since 1729.