Let's eat. Each other.

IRINA SLAV

About a year ago, I came across a website that seemingly promoted the self-donation of dying people to be used for meat after death. It was a really well done website, simple yet elegant and very, very convincing, up to and including in the section about the organisation having obtained all legal documents necessary to conduct its activity.

Taught by life to expect pretty much everything from my fellow human beings I took the website seriously, at first. So did a lot of other people who didn’t take the time to really dig into the website to find it was, in fact, “a conceptual art project”. I can understand why. The idea of eating other humans was too outstandingly horrific to provoke anything other than outrage and disgust.

Of course, the website no longer exists. Or maybe it’s hidden well. In any case, I couldn’t find it but I did find a series of “fact-checks” telling anyone interested that the good people behind the website were only making art with it, nothing more. No calls for cannibalism at all.

In fact, eating humans had nothing to do with the purpose of the art project. The purpose was, to quote the creators, “give an understanding of the importance of accepting any services’ policy and agreements.”

I would happily, without a shred of embarrassment, admit that I do not understand conceptual art. I would also admit, less happily, that when I saw the Human Meat Project website I had a suspicion that what we have here is yet another Overton window opening a crack. I told myself to not be stupid.

Also last year, the BBC published a long and detailed article on what was apparently a satirical programme that, however, somehow managed to mislead a lot of viewers it was real. The topic of the programme? Lab-engineered human meat.

The BBC made an effort to make it as explicitly clear as possible that the programme, although possibly in bad taste (Heh. Heh.), was just a spoof, nothing to worry about, we’re not growing human meat for food. Of course we’re not.

Here’s another such spoof, from the Swedish Food Federation that devised a campaign dubbed “Eat a Swede” to publicise its efforts to make food production in the country more sustainable. Funny, these spoofs. What. A. Pun.

Back to this year, someone posted on X a link to a New Scientist article asking the following question: Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism? Obviously a rhetorical question, the article came out on the same day as another article in the same publication: Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons.

The surprising reasons, per some archeologists who made a discovery of skeletons with evidence on them that they were eaten by fellow humans, appear to be “showing respect and love for the dead.” Okay, I told myself, you may be stupid but this definitely has a certain Overton window feel to it.

Coincidentally, I was in the middle of re-watching a favourite supernatural TV show of mine that featured an episode, in which two people literally ate each other, alive. Yes, I may have some questionable tastes in entertainment. Leaving that aside, the reason they ate each other was that Famine had arrived in town — the one from the Apocalypse.

Also coincidentally, a few hours ago I came across another highly interesting article, this time the job of two people working for something called the Post Carbon Institute. In their article, the authors called for a plan for the transition (admitting that there isn’t one right now to the huge surprise of a total of no one) and laid out the elements of such a plan.

Essentially, the plan was to do away with economic growth and have people learn to live with a lot less in terms of energy and food. We’ve all seen hints and partial or whole admissions to this tune but I found this article particularly open in its approach to painting the picture of tomorrow’s world.

“Whereas the cheap, abundant energy of fossil fuels enabled the development of a consumption-oriented growth economy, renewable energy will likely be unable to sustain such an economy,” the authors wrote.

“It seems wise to channel society’s efforts toward no-regrets strategies—efforts that shift expectations, emphasize quality of life over consumption, and reinforce community resilience,” they also said.

I found the idea that quality of life and consumption could exist independently of each other interesting and not a little questionable, just like the authors’ idea that we need to switch to organic-only agriculture. The less-energy idea is ancient news already.

So, the picture these transition advocates paint is essentially one of no abundance, little energy, and little food — and was that a gentle breeze wafting through the Overton window right there at the end of the wall? Well, it certainly seems like it.

Here’s a quote from that New Scientist article with the rhetorical question for a headline: “Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry?”

Well, I could think of a few reasons that don’t even have to do much with ethics, such as the fact that the body probably died of a serious illness, unless we’re talking about unfortunate bikers. I am told there are quite serious health implications in cannibalism but let’s go back to the ethical ones.

Per the author of the NS article, the tabooing of cannibalism was maybe, you will be shocked to learn, a result of the West’s colonial policies. The moral aversion to eating the same species, the article said, may have arisen from “racist stereotypes of the cannibal”, which “were concocted to justify subjugation.” Of course they did.

Cannibalism is pretty common in nature. Spiders and snakes eat their young as a matter of course. So do fish, I hear. Mammals, too, the fathers, usually. Then there is the kind of cannibalism that, to me, reveals nature in its full glorious cruelty. That’s the kind when a mother eats her cubs or pups in order to survive — and have new cubs or pups.

The logic of this survival mechanism is perfection: if the mother dies from starvation, the cubs or pups will also die. But if the mother eats her young, she has a good chance of surviving, and then procreating again.

This is what cannibalism is about, when you dispense with the “love and compassion” speculation. Nobody goes for their neighbour’s left buttock in times of abundance — well, not unless they have a very specific mental condition. But many of us would go for both of that neighbour’s buttocks if there is absolutely nothing else to eat. It has happened before and it is well documented.

Few of us here, if any, have first-hand experience with starvation. And this is a good thing. We need more people to have never had first-hand experience with starvation. We need more people to never have to consider the idea of eating another human being. What we seem to be getting is a suggestion to the contrary.

Back in 2019, a Swedish academic issued a grim warning, saying we might need to start eating each other — after we’ve eaten our pets, that is — because of the effects of climate change. I don’t know what's in the water in Sweden but the author of “How To Blow Up a Pipeline” is also Swedish. And this from the land that gave us Astrid Lindgren and so many others. Anyway.

The idea that we might want to rethink cannibalism has floated here and there since then, and the frequency with which it floats may be about to intensify. Can’t let that window close, right? Keep it nice and open, and try to widen the crack by applying continual and growing pressure.

Start with jokes, then pose the serious question and tell people it’s okay and that the moral repulsiveness of cannibalism is a remnant from bad old colonial times. Do it long enough, pay several Hollywood stars to sample human steak or salami, and people will start buying it, just like they’re buying mealworms and crickets.

Naturally, all this is wild speculation and nothing more. Yet the idea of human cannibalism has a nice circular economy ring to it if you let yourself think about it. So, let’s meet here again in two years and see if it’s indeed as wild as it seems right now. Which is about as wild as the idea of “minor-attracted individuals” campaigning for the right to be legally minor-attracted seemed just a decade ago to most of us.

Source: Irina Slav on Energy