Last Updated on October 29, 2019
A new video circulating on Twitter shows a group of Spaniards making and then consuming human blood sausage.
Propaganda promoting entomophagy has been rather ubiquitous in recent months with major publications hailing the practice as an animal meat replacement.
However, the normalization of unpopular–in Western terms–foodstuffs doesn’t end there.
Some individuals in Western countries are fast approaching the final taboo of culinary habits: cannibalism.
Behind The Media’s Obsession With Eating Bugs — And Cannibalism
Last month, a Swedish scientist advocated for eating human flesh as a means to combat climate change.
Many drives to promote alternative living conditions and dietary habits are often in the name of environmentalism or another form of crisis event.
In May last year, Vice Magazine among other publications broke a story about an amputee who served his diced up mangled foot to his friends, in tacos.
'We taste so good' – try human blood sausage from #Spain pic.twitter.com/oAH0QPQsWe
— RT (@RT_com) October 27, 2019
Russia Today, in the above tweet, showcases a 34-second clip with a condensed human blood sausage preparation process from Spain.
The tweet, despite garnering a fair few interactions, wasn’t very well received by commentators who took aim at the unorthodox delicacy.
In 2012, an asexual Japanese chef who had his genitals surgically removed, served his genitals to a dinner party of five guests who paid around $200 a piece for the experience.
Guests said that the genitalia were very rubbery and tasted of very little, CalorieLab.com reported–failing to get their money’s worth.
Would you try human meat if it were ethically, consensually sourced?
— VICE (@VICE) June 15, 2018
Vice Magazine even ran a poll, following the gentleman who served his amputated foot to his friends, to ascertain what percentage of respondents would try ethically-sourced human flesh; more than three-quarters of those who answered declined.
Vice also interviewed an ‘expert’ on cannibalism, Bill Schutt, who explains why there’s such an aversion to the practice:
I’m not so sure it’s innate. It’s deeply ingrained in Western culture. We’ve been reading this memo since the time of the ancient Greeks. From Homer and Herodotus through the Romans and then Shakespeare and Daniel Dafoe and Sigmund Freud, the snowball kept growing. You’re talking over 2,000 years. Cannibalism, to these writers, was the worst taboo. Add that to Christianity and Judaism where it’s important to keep the body intact and you get the knee-jerk reaction to the very mention of the word we have right now.
It has historically been convenient for Westerners to stigmatize cannibalism. If you’re Columbus and you can accuse people of being cannibals, then you can treat them like vermin. They’re not human to you. You can destroy these cultures. But there are other cultures [such as the pre-20th century Wari’ of western Brazil] where they’d be just as mortified to learn we bury our dead as we would be to learn that they eat their loved ones.
So there you have it: it’s perfectly natural for certain cultures to practice cannibalism–and isn’t something necessarily innate.
