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Cannibalism

consuming another individual of the same species as food

Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. Human cannibalism is also well documented across history, both in ancient and in recent times.

Gastronomes of the old school.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Quotes

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Early history

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  • Pharaoh is he who eats men and lives on gods ...
    Their big ones are for his morning meal,
    their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal,
    their little ones are for his night meal,
    their old men and their old women are for his incense-burning.

First millennium

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  • He then cut up the body into pieces, amputated the prominent parts from the shoulder, and the fleshy portions from the arms, from the ligamentous attachments, which connected them with the body, with unshaken nerves! He strips off the flesh from the various limbs, and chops up the different bones,—he keeps back the heads, however, and those very hands, which had once signalized their confidence in him!
  • Why should I speak of other nations when I myself, a youth on a visit to Gaul, heard that the Atticoti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and that although they find herds of swine, and droves of large or small cattle in the woods, it is their custom to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women, and to regard them as the greatest delicacies?
  • Cannibalism was another last resort for surviving famines. In the win­ter of 618–619 the army of a warlord, some 200,000 troops in all, sur­rounded a district south of Luoyang and exhausted all the stores of millet there ... Famine broke out, so the natives began to devour each other. The rebel soldiers were also starving, so they took to abducting children, whom they steamed and ate. That led the warlord to conclude, "Of all the delicious things to eat, none surpasses human flesh. As long as there are people in neighboring districts we have nothing to fear from famine." He had a large bronze bell with a capacity of 200 bushels [7 cubic metres] inverted, stewed the flesh of children and women in it, divided the meat, and gave it to his officers.
    • Benn, Charles (2004). China's Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 123–124. ISBN 0-19-517665-0. 

Middle Ages

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North America and Caribbean

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  • On that island we seized twelve beautiful and very fat females, aged between fifteen and sixteen, with two boys of the same age whose genital members had been cut away clean to the belly. We figured that they had done it to keep them from mixing with their women or perhaps to fatten them up and eat them later. These boys and girls had been captured by the Cannibals; we sent them to Spain as an exhibit for the king.
  • The Cannibals, when they capture some Indians, eat them like we eat young goats, and they say that the flesh of a boy is much better than that of a female.
    • From a letter by Michele da Cuneo, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, on what they found and heard when visiting Guadeloupe in late 1493
    • Cited in Geoffrey Symcox and Luciano Formisano (eds.), Italian Reports on America, 1493–1522: Accounts by Contemporary Observers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002) , pp. 51, 57
  • Peter Margarita, a Spaniard whose word cannot be impugned, went out to the Orient with the Admiral, attracted by the prospect of visiting the new lands. He says that with his own eyes he saw here a large number of Indians fixed on spits and roasted over hot coals to tickle the debauched palates of these people, while many bodies lay in heaps, minus head and limbs. The cannibals do not deny this but openly affirm that they eat human flesh.
  • The Caribs ... sail to the neighboring islands, making their way by paddling to people who differ greatly in manners and character. Sometimes they go greater distances, even as far as thousand miles, in search of plunder. They customarily castrate their infant captives and boy slaves and fatten them like capons. The thin and the emaciated are carefully nurtured, like wethers. Soon, when plump and fat, they are devoured all the more avidly. They hand over the female captives as slaves to their womenfolk, or make use of them to satisfy their lust. Children borne by the captured women are eaten like the captives.
    • From a letter by Nicolò Syllacio, who translated or summarized information he received from participants in Columbus's second voyage (1493–1496)
    • Cited in Samuel Eliot Morison (ed.), Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), pp. 235–236

Europe and Europeans

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  • Such suffering from hunger grew up around these cities that the Christians, in the face of the scarcity about which you have heard, did not fear to eat – wicked to say, much less to do – the bodies, cooked in fire, not only of the Saracens or Turks they had killed, but also of the dogs that they had caught.

Africa

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  • They went further, and reached the stage of eating little children. It was not unusual to find people [selling] little children, roasted or boiled.
  • When the poor first began to eat human flesh, the horror and astonishment that such extraordinary meals aroused were such that these crimes formed the topic of every conversation ... But eventually people grew accustomed, and some conceived such a taste for these detestable meats that they made them their ordinary provender, eating them for enjoyment and ... [thinking] up a variety of preparation methods ... The horror people had felt at first vanished entirely; one spoke of it, and heard it spoken of, as a matter of everyday indifference.
  • Nothing was more common than this kind of thing, and it would be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Egypt ... anyone who has not been eye-witness to such atrocities.
  • A merchant friend of mine ... had seen five children's heads in a single cauldron, cooked with the choicest spices.
  • I presented to the king of this place ... a quantity of salt which he accepted and he sent to me two most comely slave girls. A few days later I was in his presence and he said to me: "I sent those girls to you, so slaughter and eat them! Their flesh is the best thing we have to eat. For what reason have you not slaughtered them?" I replied: "This is not lawful for us."
    • Report by a 14th-century Syrian visitor to today's Mali
    • Cited in Levtzion, N.; Hopkins, J. F. P., eds (1981). Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 273. 

Asia

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  • In time, the Chinese developed a taste for human meat.... T'ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yüan dynasty [1271–1368], remarked on the taste of human meat (hsiang jou) in his Cho Keng Lu (Records of Stopping Cultivation), in which he said that children's meat was the best food of all in taste, and next to this were women and men. Chuang Ch'ao, a Sung [960–1279] writer, was more specific about the taste of human meat in his Chi Lieh Pien (Chicken Rib Section) in which he referred to children's meat as well-boiled bone (...), which means that because of their superior tastiness children could be eaten whole, including their bones, when they were well-boiled. He also characterized women's meat as more delicious than mutton (...). Men's meat was less so, and was referred to as "jao pa huo" — the least tasty of all human meat. Generally, he referred to men and women as two-legged sheep (liang-chao yang), but he believed that both young children and beautiful women were particularly good for mutton soup (...).
    • Key Ray Chong, Cannibalism in China (Wakefield, NH: Longwood, 1990), p. 137 (the ellipses in parentheses mark omitted Chinese terms)
 
A page of Marco Polo's Travels in MS. BnF fr. 2810 (detail)
  • You should know that they eat all manner of foul things and any kind of meat, including human flesh, which they devour with great relish. They will not touch someone who has died of natural causes, but if he has been stabbed to death or otherwise killed they eat him all up and consider it a great delicacy.

16th and 17th centuries

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North America and Caribbean

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  • The inhabitants of Hispaniola, who are a mild people, complained that they were exposed to frequent attacks from the cannibals who landed amongst them and pursued them through the forests like hunters chasing wild beasts. The cannibals captured children, whom they castrated, just as we do chickens and pigs we wish to fatten for the table, and when they were grown and become fat they ate them. Older persons, who fell into their power, were killed and cut into pieces for food; they also ate the intestines and the extremities, which they salted, just as we do hams. They did not eat women, as this would be considered a crime and an infamy. If they captured any women, they kept them and cared for them, in order that they might produce children; just as we do with hens, sheep, mares, and other animals. Old women, when captured, were made slaves.
  • Birds were boiling in their pots, also geese mixed with bits of human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting. Upon searching another house the Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside.
  • Most ferocious are those new anthropophagi, who live on human flesh, Caribs or cannibals as they are called.
    • Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, The Third Decade, book 3
  • Nay, so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbes; and one amongst the rest did kill his wife, and powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved: now, whether she was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado'd, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.

South America

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  • As to the children, either boys or girls, they will live according to their fancy. If they are pleasant of countenance, they may expect a hard domestic service, yet they stay alive, but if they captured many children, a few are killed to be cooked for eating.
    • Dutch traveller Adriaan van Berkel on the treatment of war captives among the Arawak in today's Guyana (1695)
    • Adriaan van Berkel, The Voyages of Adriaan van Berkel to Guiana: Amerindian-Dutch Relationships in 17th-Century Guyana, edited by Martijn van den Bel, Lodewijk Hulsman, and Lodewijk Wagenaar (Leiden: Sidestone, 2014), p. 106
  • (after seeing how a prisoner was killed and dismembered) The cut-off flesh, once boiled, is put into the pepperpot and eaten as good food. I have spoken to two Christians who had tried it and declared it tasted very nice.
    • Adriaan van Berkel, The Voyages of Adriaan van Berkel to Guiana, p. 107

Africa

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  • They have shambles for human flesh as we have of animals, even eating the enemies they have killed in battle, and selling their slaves if they can get a good price for them; if not, they give them to the butcher, who cuts them in pieces, and then sells them to be roasted or boiled. It is a remarkable fact in the history of this people, that any who are tired of life, or wish to prove themselves brave and courageous, esteem it great honor to expose themselves to death by an act which shall show their contempt for life. Thus they offer themselves for slaughter, and as the faithful vassals of princes, wishing to do them service, not only give themselves to be eaten, but their slaves also, when fattened, are killed and eaten. It is true many nations eat human flesh, as in the East Indies, Brazil, and elsewhere, but to devour the flesh of their own enemies, friends, subjects, and even relations, is a thing without example, except amongst the Anzichi tribes.

Asia

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  • During the Ch'ing period, Chi Hsiao-lan, a great Confucian scholar, in his Yüeh Wei Ts'ao T'ang Pi Chi (Diary at the Small Thatched-roof House), described stories of famine and cannibalism in the northwestern parts of China (Shensi Province). The sale of human meat at open markets and its consumption among the people in this region were so common that the government officially sanctioned this inhumane transaction to stave off food shortage. Those who dealt in this business were known as people cooking human meat (ts'ai-jen); their profession was to kill people and sell their meat for food. The most famous story is about a traveler and a woman. A traveler heard a screaming voice from inside a restaurant. He went in and found a woman, totally naked, who was being washed and put on the board to be butchered for food. He was shocked at the scene, and he decided to save her life because she was so young and beautiful. So he tried to buy her from the butcher; he offered to pay double the price, hoping to make her his wife. Knowing of his motive, she declined the offer with thanks because she was already married to another man. She said, however, that she was willing to work for him as a slave servant for the rest of her life. In short, she could not compromise morality for life. Finally, she was butchered and her meat was cooked and sold for food.

Nonfiction

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  • I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive, then to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and tear him ... (as we have not only read, but seen very lately ..., not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of piety and religion) then to roast and tear him after he is dead.
  • The Cannibals and savage people do not so much offend me with roasting and eating of dead bodies, as those which torment and persecute the living.
    • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, translated by John Florio, book 2, ch. 11: Of Crueltie

Plays

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  • ... The barbarous Scythian,
    Or he that makes his generation messes
    To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
    Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd,
    As thou my sometime daughter.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), act 1, sc. 1
  • If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
    Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
    It will come:
    Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
    Like monsters of the deep.
    • William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, sc. 2

18th century

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Europe

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  • A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.

Oceania

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  • When Great Britain was first visited by the Phoenicians, the inhabitants were painted savages, much less civilized than those of Tongataboo, or Ota-heite; and it is not impossible, but that our late voyages may, in process of time, spread the blessings of civilization amongst the numerous islanders of the South Pacific Ocean, and be the means of abolishing their abominable repasts, and almost equally abominable sacrifices.
    • James Cook and James King, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)
    • Reported in Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p. xv

Satire

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  • I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
  • A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
  • As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
  • Pigs, too frequent at our table ... are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast, or any other publick entertainment.

Fiction

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  • I was surprised one morning early, with seeing no less than five canoes all on shore together, on my side the island.... I observed, by the help of my perspective glass, that they were no less than thirty in number; that they had a fire kindled, and that they had had meat dressed; how they cooked it, that I knew not, or what it was; but they were all dancing in I know not how many barbarous gestures and figures, their own way, round the fire.
    When I was thus looking on them, I perceived by my perspective two miserable wretches dragged from the boats, where, it seems, they were laid by, and were now brought out for the slaughter: I perceived one of them immediately fall, being knocked down, I suppose, with a club or wooden sword, for that was their way; and two or three others were at work immediately, cutting him open for their cookery, while the other victim was left standing by himself, till they should be ready for him.
  • Je ne me nourris que de chair humaine; j'espère que vous serez contens du régal que je compte vous en faire, et l'on a tué pour notre souper un jeune garçon de quinze ans, que je foutis hier, et qui doit être délicieux.
  • Comme je mange ce que je fouts, cela m'évite la peine d'avoir un boucher.
    • I eat no other sort of meat [except human]; I trust you shall enjoy tonight's feast, there will be a fifteen-year-old boy on the table. I fucked him yesterday, he should be delicious.
    • As I eat what I fuck, that spares me the wages of a butcher.
    • Minski, a Muscovite with a giant stature and deadly tastes in Sade's novel Juliette (1797)
    • Translated by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), part 3
  • And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on the spit and eat him with relish.
    "Oh, how mistaken they are", the Hungarian observed, "to disdain this meat, there's nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise savages understand who have such a predilection for it."
    "That", said Voldomir, "is simply another of your European absurdities: after having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being ..."
    • Brisatesta, another of Sade's protagonists, describing the rape and consumption of a teenage boy
    • Juliette, translated by Austryn Wainhouse, part 5

Nonfiction

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  • Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

19th century

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North America

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  • Many's the poor devil I've killed, at one time or another – and the time has been that I've been obliged to feed on some of 'em.

Africa

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  • I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke ..., but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old at the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward, and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell. Until the last moment, I could not believe that they were in earnest ... that it was anything save a ruse to get money out of me ... When I went home I tried to make some small sketches of the scene while still fresh in my memory, not that it is ever likely to fade from it. No one here seemed to be in the least astonished at it.
  • A woman [is sold for the price of two goats]. A man [brings the price of three goats], or four if he is plenty large ... If there is as much to eat on a man as on three goats, he brings the price of three goats ... as the point of view of the final purchaser determines the price, and the consumers are cannibals, the price of a man is generally determined by the amount of meat on him.
  • A young Basongo chief came to our Commandant while at dinner in his tent and asked for the loan of his knife, which, without thinking, the Commandant gave him. He immediately disappeared behind the tent and cut the throat of a little slave-girl belonging to him, and was in the act of cooking her when one of our soldiers saw him.... This cannibal was put in irons, but [shortly after his liberation] he was brought in by some of our Hausa soldiers, who said that he was eating the children in and about our cantonments. He had a bag slung round his neck, which on examining we found contained an arm and a leg of a young child.

Asia

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  • The Shanxi poet Wang Xilun ... describ[ed] in an essay how children whose starving parents had abandoned them in ditches were slaughtered and eaten by other famine victims as though they were sheep or pigs.
  • Killing people is as easy as killing pigs. Children cry out for help but no one answers them. They are killed with a knife since meat has become more valuable than human life.
    • Another contemporary author describing the situation during the famine, cited in Edgerton-Tarpley (2008), p. 219.

Oceania

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  • One of the latest cannibal feasts of consequence was held at Ohariu, near Wellington, when 150 of the Muaupoko tribe went into the ovens. When the Maoris overcame the gentle Morioris of the Chatham Islands, not only did they keep the captives penned up like live-stock waiting to be killed and eaten, but one of the leading chiefs of the invaders ordered a meal of six children at once to be cooked to regale his friends.
  • A Maori relating an account of an expedition said, incidentally. "On the way I was speaking to a red-haired girl who had just been caught out in the open.... As we came back, I saw the head of the red-haired girl lying in the ferns by the side of the track. Further on, we overtook one of the Waihou men carrying a back-load of the flesh, which he was taking to our camp to cook for food. The arms of the girl were round his neck, whilst the body was on his back." If one can mentally picture the scene, with the man striding along, carrying the headless, disembowelled trunk of the naked girl, enough of this kind of horror will have been evoked.
  • Fiji, cannibal Fiji! Pity, O pity, cannibal Fiji!
    • Reverend James Watkin, "Pity Poor Fiji" (1838)
    • Reported in Thomas Williams and James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, rev. ed. (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1871), p. 246
  • Early on Sunday morning the cooked human flesh was carried past the Mission house in a canoe.... Truly the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.
    • Reverend David Cargill, journal entry (28 August 1839); cp. Psalm 74:20
  • This morning we witnessed a shocking spectacle. 20 dead bodies of men, women, & children were brought to Rewa as a present to Tui Dreketi from Tanoa. They were distributed among the people to be cooked and eaten.... The children amused themselves by ... mutilating the body of a little girl.... Human entrails were floating down the river in front of the mission premises, mutilated limbs, heads and trunks of the bodies of human beings have been floating about, & scenes of disgust and horror have been presented to our view in every direction.
    • Reverend David Cargill, letter to the Wesleyan Missionary Society (31 October 1839)
    • The Diaries and Correspondence of David Cargill, ed. A. J. Schütz (Canberra: ANU Press, 1977), pp. 148, 158. See also Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (2011), ch. 1.
  • You foreigners have salt beef to eat when you sail about; we have no beef, and therefore make use of human flesh.
  • Cannibalism is a luxury, not an ordinary practice; but Buckley mentions a tribe called the Pallidurgbarrans, who eat human flesh whenever they get a chance, and employ human kidney fat, not as a charmed unguent for the increase of their valour, but as a sort of Dundee marmalade, viz., "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast." These gentlemen are the colour of "light copper, their bodies having tremendously large and protruding bellies." They ate so many natives at last that war was declared, and some inglorious Pelissier drove a few hundred of them into a cave, and setting fire to the surrounding bush, suffocated them with great success.
  • This village (Kuras) is the place where they were cooking a man a few yards distant from the place where I was sitting on my first visit here.
  • It will give some idea of the state of these people if I give a story which was told me on April 3 in the most matter-of-fact way, as though it was something of quite ordinary occurrence. It was reported without any feeling of reprobation on the part of my informant. He said that some time ago a poor man drifted to this island in a canoe. The chief saw him outside, and went off and rescued him. He was in a very deplorable state from starvation and exposure; but the chief took him to his home, gave him food, and, some time afterwards, when he was recovered, took him to the place where the dances were usually held, and where one was being carried on at the time. As the people were dancing the poor castaway asked one of them, "Why is this dancing? Is there some pig to be eaten?" "Oh no," they replied, "there is no pig, but we are going to eat you after the dance." And they did so that same day!
    • George Brown, Pioneer-Missionary and Explorer, p. 201
  • I stopped to gratify my curiosity, there being a fleshy smell rising from an oven. I opened the latter, and there saw a female child half roasted. The skull had been stove in, the whole of the inside cleaned out and refilled with red hot stones. The hideous habit of murdering, and eating, the little girls is carried on far more in these jungles than in any other part of the colonies, which accounts for the female children being so scarce. One of the Mourilyan aborigines informed me that they catch the unsuspecting child by the legs and bash its head against a tree; also that a piccaninny makes quite a delicious meal – he had assisted in eating many.
  • The expression "long pig" is not a joke, not a phrase invented by Europeans, but one frequently used by the Fijians, who looked upon a corpse as ordinary butcher's meat, and call a human body puaku balava, "long pig", in contradistinction to puaka dina, or "real pig". The flesh was never eaten raw, but was either baked whole in the ovens, or cut up and stewed in the large earthen pots that they use for cooking.... If a man was to be cooked whole, they would paint and decorate his face as though he were alive, and ... the corpse ... was placed in a sitting position, and ... handed over to the cooks, who prepared it and placed it in the oven, filling the inside of the body with hot stones, so that he would be well cooked all through.
  • Sometimes even the victim was not killed, but was placed bound and alive in the oven; and their fiendish revenge, not being satisfied by the mere death of its object, tortures too horrible to describe were often inflicted – frequently a living man having to eat part of his own body before death was allowed to end his sufferings.... Women were not allowed to partake of the awful banquet, yet women were considered better for cooking than men, and the thighs and arms the best portions. So delicious was human flesh considered, that the highest praise that they could give to other food was to say, "It is as good as bakolo."
  • They made no secret of their relish for human flesh. At one place of call where we were landing ..., the savages brought down quite a quantity of the flesh of a young woman whom they had just cooked. In offering parts for sale, they said that if we white men did not like to eat it possibly some of our native boatmen would enjoy it.
    • Australian government agent Douglas Rannie describing a visit to New Ireland in the 1880s
    • Douglas Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals: An Account of the Experiences and Adventures of a Government Official among the Natives of Oceania (London: Seeley, Service, 1912), pp. 275–276
  • Mr. Gillan, the missionary at Uripiv, told me that he knew of a vendetta between two villages which had been closed, not as is usual by the payment of pigs, but by the sending of a small boy as sacrifice; and who, he concluded, was afterwards eaten.
 
"The girls were no doubt aware that their last hour was soon to come." Photograph by Rodolphe Festetics de Tolna.
  • He showed me, locked up in a house, a group of young girls who had been caught on another island and who were kept and fattened for the next cannibal feast. It had just been decided that this feast would take place the same day on the occasion of our presence in Malaita. The girls were no doubt aware that their last hour was soon to come.... They seemed to accept the situation with great resignation.

Fiction

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  • He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month.
  • Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
  • "But why does Tararo frown and look so angry?" said I.
    "Because the girl's somewhat obstinate, like most o' the sex, an' won't marry the man he wants her to. It seems that a chief of some other island came on a visit to Tararo and took a fancy to her, but she wouldn't have him on no account, bein' already in love, and engaged to a young chief whom Tararo hates, and she kicked up a desperate shindy; so, as he was going on a war expedition in his canoe, he left her to think about it, sayin' he'd be back in six months or so, when he hoped she wouldn't be so obstropolous. This happened just a week ago; an' Tararo says that if she's not ready to go, when the chief returns, as his bride, she'll be sent to him as a long pig."
    "As a long pig!" I exclaimed in surprise; "why what does he mean by that?"
    "He means somethin' very unpleasant", answered Bill with a frown. "You see these blackguards eat men an' women just as readily as they eat pigs; and, as baked pigs and baked men are very like each other in appearance, they call men long pigs. If Avatea goes to this fellow as a long pig, it's all up with her, poor thing."

Nonfiction

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  • I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

20th century

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North America

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  • In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone.
    At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to $3 a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price.
    John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh.
  • First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could of [sic] had I wished. She died a virgin.
  • I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.
    Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy.
    In about two hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.

South America

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Europe

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  • Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: "In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children." ... People ate their own relatives – often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet ... Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh.
  • It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.
  • My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire.

Africa

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I can feel the shudder and feeling of horror that came over me as we looked at them, and saw the agonised look of the poor fellow, who seemed dazed with grief, and said they were the hand and foot of his little girl.
  • Mr. Harris has already intimated to you in a letter of his that while he was down at Jikau, ... a horrible case of murder and cannibalism on the part of rubber sentries occurred in this district. It was of a shocking nature, and has greatly distressed us. On Sunday morning, May 15, just after eight o'clock, I had gone across to Mr. Harris's house, ... when two boys rushed breathlessly in, and said that some sentries had killed a number of people, and that two men had gone by to tell the rubber white men, and that they also had some hands to show him, in case he did not believe them ... Shortly afterwards the two men came along the path, and we heard the boys calling to them to come and show us; but they seemed afraid, and so we went out quickly and overtook them, and asked them where the hands were. Thereupon one of them opened a parcel of leaves, and showed us the hand and foot of a small child, who could not have been more than five years old. They were fresh and clean cut. It was an awful sight, and even now, as I write, I can feel the shudder and feeling of horror that came over me as we looked at them, and saw the agonised look of the poor fellow, who seemed dazed with grief, and said they were the hand and foot of his little girl. I can never forget the sight of that horror-stricken father. We asked them to come into the house and tell us about the affair, which they did, and the following is the story they told us—
    "The father of the little girl said his name was Nsala, and he was a native of Wala, which is a section of the Nsongo District ... On the previous day, although it was three days before they were due to take in the rubber, fifteen sentries came from Lifinda, all except two being armed with Albini rifles, and they were accompanied by followers. They began making prisoners and shooting, and killed Bongingangoa, his wife; Boali, his little daughter of about five years of age; and Esanga, a boy of about ten years. These they at once cut up, and afterwards cooked in pots, putting in salt which they had brought with them, and then ate them."
  • Only twice in the course of my trip have I had conversation with a man who actually admitted having eaten human flesh, though I have spoken to many who have seen it done, and both of them spoke of the present prohibition [of cannibalism] with regret and utterly without shame or real consciousness of wrongdoing, as one speaks of the "drink" prohibition of the United States! One of them, an old man whom I fell into conversation with later, on the road between Wei and Tappi ... told me that among his people, the Jocquellehs, a woman's flesh was highly esteemed and that in the old days it had been the custom to give the upper part of the body to the crowd but that the thighs were reserved for the Chief.
  • As recently as 1950, a Belgian administrator was served a meal of "porcupine meat" that he found remarkably delicious. Not until he had finished was he told that the meat came from a young girl.
    • Robert B. Edgerton, The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo (New York: St. Martin's Press), p. 109, on the slow disappearance of cannibal customs in the Belgian Congo
  • In 1961 in Uganda, a man offered to sell me human fingers that had been smoked. When I declined in horror, he offered to return with a smoked slab of a young woman's buttocks, a truly "choice cut", as he put it.
    • Edgerton, The Troubled Heart of Africa, p. 255, describing a commercial invitation to cannibalism he received himself

Asia

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  • Qiaoxian town officials treated me to lunch. On that day, the main course was sautéed pig's liver. I tried very hard not to vomit as I swallowed two pieces. I then quickly turned away from the table.... During the previous few days, I had encountered nothing but stories about the cutting out of human livers, boiling human livers, consuming human livers, and barbecuing human livers. My tolerance had reached its limit.
  • When people do not respect our [traditions], they become enemies, and we don't consider our enemies to be human any more. They become animals in our eyes. And the Dayaks eat animals.

Oceania

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  • It was considered a great triumph among the Marquesans to eat the body of a dead man. They treated their captives with great cruelty. They broke their legs to prevent them from attempting to escape before being eaten, but kept them alive so that they could brood over their impending fate.
    Their arms were broken so that they could not retaliate in any way against their maltreatment. The Marquesans threw them on the ground and leaped on their chests so that their ribs were broken and pierced their lungs, so that they could not even voice their protests against the cruelty to which they were submitted. Rough poles were thrust up through the natural orifices of their bodies and slowly turned in their intestines. Finally, when the hour had come for them to be prepared for the feast, they were spitted on long poles that entered between their legs and emerged from their mouths, and dragged thus at the stern of the war canoes to the place where the feast was to be held.
    With this tribe, as with many others, the bodies of women were in great demand.
    • Anthropologist A. P. Rice in The American Antiquarian xxxii (1910)
    • Cited in William D. Rubinstein, Genocide: A History (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 18
  • One morning very early, the news came that Nyan-ngauera had left the camp, taking a fire-stick and accompanied by her little girl. No one would follow her or help to track her. For twelve miles I followed the track unsuccessfully, but Nyan-ngauera doubled many times and gave birth to a child a mile west of my camp, where she killed and ate the baby, sharing the food with the little daughter. Later, with the help of her sons and grandsons, the spot was found, nothing to be seen there save the ashes of a fire. "The bones are under the fire", the boys told me, and digging with the digging-stick we came upon the broken skull, and one or two charred bones, which I later sent to the Adelaide Museum.
  • When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.
    • Géza Róheim, Children of the Desert: The Western Tribes of Central Australia, vol. I (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 71

Satire

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Nonfiction

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  • Man came into being through cannibalism – intelligence can be eaten.
    • Oscar Kiss Maerth, The Beginning Was the End (London: Sphere, 1974), epigraph
    • Translated by Judith Hayward; originally published in German in 1971
    • In this pseudo-scientific book Maerth claimed that humans had evolved out of apes that had systematically consumed the brains of other apes, becoming more intelligent in the process

Fiction and movies

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  • In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: "Virtue and Morality". Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words – "Eat people".
  • "But if you eat this chap who's God", said Llewelyn stoutly, "how can it be horrible? If it's all right to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?"
    "Because", said Dymphna reasonably, "if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished. You silly clot", she added and then went on cutting holly leaves.
  • "... Now, in my opinion, you can't find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck [boy] tempered [castrated] not older than six, then hung at twice that age."
    "No one asked your opinion", Memtok answered. "Their Charity's opinion is the only one that counts. They think that sluts [young women] are more tender."
  • Hugh tried to keep his eyes [off] the contents of the meat storage room.
    Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find – human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident....
    Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. "That's what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?"
  • "I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner.... Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of [14-year-old] Kitten."
    "But— But— Hugh, I ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have— I must have—"
    "Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you."
    "Honey... you better stop the car. I'm going to be sick."
    • Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold, ch. 22
  • The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
  • Soylent Green is people!
  • The harvest had yielded no grain. Gradually, even tree bark and plant stalks had grown scarce. Soon, markets selling human flesh had begun to appear ...
    The two men were tearing off the little girl's clothes ... The girl looked like she was somewhere around ten years of age ... It soon became evident that most of the customers were interested in the little girl, because many complained that the older woman's flesh was no longer quite so fresh as the girl's ...
    [Stabbed in the chest with a knife, t]he little girl gasped. Her screams gave way to a lingering sigh ... He ... rapidly sliced apart her body with the help of the cashier before handing the pieces one by one to the people waiting outside the shed ...
    The little girl had already been completely dismembered, and the proprietor was leading the woman from the corner of the shack over to the stump. Not daring to watch any more, Willow turned and made his way down an alley. But he was pursued by the dull sound of the proprietor's ax cutting into the woman's flesh, by the woman's lacerating shriek. He shook uncontrollably, and it was only when he had rushed out of the alley and into another part of town that the sounds began to recede behind him. But, try as he might, he was unable to expel the scene he had just witnessed from his mind.
    • Yu Hua, "Classical Love" (1988), a short story set in Imperial China
    • The Past and the Punishments; translated by Andrew F. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996), pp. 35–38

21st century

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Africa

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  • Members of the civilian population, including those captured by the militia, had to witness acts of anthropophagy, mutilation, amputation and decapitation.... Thus, in the tshiota [initiation house], in front of the civilian population often forced to watch, they cut off the penises of many men, including village chiefs they considered traitors, who had just been beheaded, and sometimes then held a ceremony to eat them after preparing them, which, according to their belief, gives them power, or threw them into the fire.... In another case, a woman at the tshiota witnessed militiamen eating the abdominal part of her son, who had just been decapitated.
  • A boy captured in Kamonia territory, Kasaï province, in December 2016 by the militia and forcibly assigned to chores explains: "They sometimes brought us human thighs that we had to cook, and cans of blood." ... Finally, a 14-year-old girl forcibly integrated into the Kamuina Nsapu militia in May 2017 in the province of Kasaï Oriental explains: "The militiamen cut off the genitals of soldiers who had been killed, but it was more often the genitals of senior soldiers that they cut off. Then the genitals were grilled and eaten. The boys cut off the genitals and gave them to the girls. The victims' blood was drunk...".
  • Some witnesses described seeing people cutting, even cooking and then eating human flesh, including penises cut from living men and corpses, notably of FARDC members, and drinking human blood.

Fiction, TV, and music

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  • They'd taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.
  • He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who's beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: "I serve my family special food, it's the same meat as always, but tastier." The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name "special meat". Instead of just "meat", now there's "special tenderloin", "special cutlets", "special kidneys".
    He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food.
  • The smell of barbecue is in the air. They go to the rest area, where the farmhands are roasting a rack of meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they've been preparing it since eight in the morning, "So it melts in your mouth", and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. "It's the most tender kind of meat, there's only just a little, because a kid doesn't weigh as much as a calf. We're celebrating because one of them became a father", he explains. "Want a sandwich?"
    • Tender Is the Flesh, part 1, ch. 3
  • Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la provençale, the cuts of tri-tip and the kidneys. The label read "Special Meat", but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was "Upper Extremity", strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label "Lower Extremity", and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles and a sign that said "Spanel's Delicacies".
    Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.
    • Tender Is the Flesh, part 1, ch. 6
  • Well, Lucy MacLean, it ain't all canned peaches and marmalade left up here, sweetheart. Sometimes a fella's got to eat a fella.... I'll bet your daddy was first in line at the cookout. I bet he had a bib with a drawing of his neighbor's ass on there.... Why the fuck am I doing all the work? Now come on, vaultie. Ass jerky don't make itself.
    • Fallout, season 1, episode 4, "The Ghouls" (2024)

See also

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