Why cannibalism=bad

Don’t be mistaken, I’ve never been pro-cannibalism or anything (though I’ve driven through the Donner pass in a storm and can see why they were driven to eat each other). But I was fascinated to discover that there is a deep-seated, survivalist reason why humans are naturally averse to cannibalism. My educational journey into taboo dietary practices started innocently enough with a morning show puff piece about a book by DT Max called The Family That Couldn’t Sleep. Members of an Italian family have a rare disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia where they cannot sleep and after a year of no sleep their bodies give out and they die.

Being as fascinated by bizarre maladies that have no impact on my life as any other train wreck loving American, I checked the book out from the library. Before I knew it, I was hop scotching from Italian insomnia to British Mad Cow Disease to Papua New Guinean cannibalism. Zounds!

Granted, I wasn’t too up on what Mad Cow was all about in the first place (I’ve always confused it with West Nile). But I suddenly realized why it was freaking everyone out. What binds all these diseases together is a small little thing called a PRION. A prion is a protein gone bad. And once one protein goes bad it turns all the other proteins it comes in contact with bad as well. Prions can be transmitted in several ways. 1. You can get the genetics for mutated prions from your parents. 2. Your proteins could naturally and randomly mutate 3. You can get it through eating meat from a carrier of a mutated prion.

Fatal Familial Insomnia spreads genetically through this Italian family. Mad Cow disease spread because humans were forcing cows to be cannibals by feeding them food mixed with hamburger to boost their protein intake.

The scary thing about this is that a protein is not alive. Conventional wisdom always said that for something to be infectious it must be alive. If it’s alive, we can potentially kill it. So far, nothing has been able to kill a prion (so cooking your hamburger is not gonna help).

The only reason that ¾ of Britain isn’t dead from Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely hard for a disease to cross between species. It has occurred and people have died from Mad Cow disease, but not at the frequency as it would have if we were, say, cannibals.

When Westerners first ventured deep into Papua New Guinea, they discovered a tribe that was dying from a mysterious disease. They ritualistically ate their dead as part of funeral ceremonies. Once convinced to stop the practice, the deaths slowly stopped as the generation that practiced cannibalism died off. Turns out they were passing a prion disease via cannibalism throughout their community.

Archeology has shown that in the distant past cannibalism was not unusual. Genetics research has shown that in the distant past humanity suffered a mass extinction of a majority of the population because of a prion outbreak. Perhaps this is why we have a natural repugnancy to the idea of eating the meat of our own species. To eat our own species is to open ourselves up to a cadre of diseases already tailored for destroying the human body. So much for a future of eating Soilent Green, eh?