beXnlog

Strange Endings

I just finished watching a 2 hour show entitled "Cannibals" on the History Channel. I love watching all those documentary shows anyways, but this one was especially interesting. It feels slightly strange sitting here, wanting to blog about my good food weekend when i just watched a show about eating people. Sure our culture abhors the act, but if faced with cannibalism or death i'm sure it's not so easy to completely dismiss the idea. What i found particularly interesting was the body's response to starvation: first your fat and muscle mass are depleted, then your non-essential organs shut down (liver, stomach, intestines) leaving only your heart, lungs and brain functioning; finally the cerebral cortex (the large frontal lobes of the brain) shuts down, leaving only a very simple part of the brain working. It's this process that not only makes a person crazed, but drives you to do anything, even eat another person, to survive.

Apparently anthropologists and archaeologists all over the world are in hotly contested debates about cannibalism - not if it's moral or not, but whether it's "imprinted in our bones" as either a survival instinct or as the deepest taboo (hence, diseases from prion disorders). Faced with an extreme dire situation, i would never intentionally kill someone for food... shit, i don't even eat animal meat! but i don't think anyone can know what they would or would not do, without being in that life or death situation. I'm just looking at it from a logical standpoint.

posted by beXn @ 3:27 AM