Good Eating

      More Letters From Paradise
            Good Eating

The Sunday New York Times (February 26, 2017) carried a story I thought you readers of my blog would enjoy. "Cannilbalism, A Perfectly Natural History," by Bill Schutt.

His research has revealed that people have long been eating other people. And it  is often whom you choose to eat.

I am sure that some of you remember the story of the ill-fated Donner party, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains for five months in 1846. And after eating the family dogs,hides and twigs,resorted to cannibalism.

In more recent times there was the case of the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains, and they too were forced to cannibalism in order to survive.

The author who is a biologist, drew upon ancient texts,interviews with anthropologists, and scholarly journals to provide him with fact that cannibalism has long been practiced and accepted.

In China during the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1271-1368), royalty and upper-class citizens dined on people. So much so that the various methods of preparing human flesh-baking, roasting, broiling and smoke drying are careful noted. Children were considered the tastiest, followed by women and men.

Here in Hawaii it is a  well-known fact that the English Captain Cook was killed and eaten by the Hawaiians. The event took place on Kealakekua Bay on February 14, 1779, on the Big Island of Hawaii. A parcel was returned to his ship" Resolution," contain  a portion of partly burned flesh from one of Cook's hips.

Now skipping many years, back to China again during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's, when the practice was widespread.

Hawaiians today no longer eat people, and the practice of cremation followed by scattering of ashes in the sea, is much more common.
 
     Aloha
     Grant