IT TAKES GUTS TO EAT HERE –
Jan. 22, 2022 – In some cultures, cannibalism involved eating parts of one’s enemies to take on their strength. Elsewhere, the consumption of human flesh had a more ritual significance.
In desperate times, people have also fallen back on cannibalism to survive. For instance, there are reports of cannibalism during the North Korean famine in 2013, the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, and China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and 1960s.
In Europe, from the 12th century up until the early 18th century, people knowingly sold and purchased human body parts as medications, particularly bones, blood, and fat. Even priests and royalty routinely consumed human body products in an effort to stave off anything from headaches to epilepsy and from nosebleeds to gout.
In some cultures, once a person has died, their loved ones consume parts of their body so that they, quite literally, become a part of them. To Western minds, this might seem disturbing, but to those who entertain these rituals, burying your mother in the dirt or leaving her to be entirely consumed by maggots is equally disturbing.
