ShortHand: Cannibalism

**Hannah Maguire** (0:12)
As a species, we've never been short of coloring options. We're omnivores to an extreme degree.
We're just as happy chowing down on nuts, berries, grains, scallops, rabbits, Big Macs, Dubai chocolate, or matcha mochi.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:28)
Do you know where the guy who invented Dubai chocolate's actually from?

**Hannah Maguire** (0:31)
Uh, Barnsley.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:34)
No. Bit more exotic than that. He's from the Philippines.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:37)
Oh, well, there you go. Lovely. So yes, to us, pretty much anything with calories is fair game. And despite being surrounded by options throughout human history, there have been stories of human beings voluntarily eating each other.
Cannibalism has been a staple in folklore across the world. As an act of savagery, an unholy inversion of the normal order of things. So much so that some academics started to argue that no human culture has ever regularly eaten human flesh, that it was all a bunch of colonial smoke and mirrors designed to dehumanize tribal peoples. But cannibalism is very real, and it happened everywhere. And I do have to say, I went to Indonesia and I was very lucky to go to a village like North Sumatra and some of the other little islands that is not as well trodden. And when we were there, we were like, oh, you guys didn't really do cannibalism, did you? And they were like, of course we fucking did. Of course we fucking did. So I think there's this sort of whitewashing of people being like, oh, no, no, no.
Colonial people just made that up. And then the locals are like, no, we fucking did it. We totally fucking did it.

**Suruthi Bala** (1:50)
So what could drive a person to seek out a little cannibalistic Carpaccio?
We're going to talk about families gathering around at a funeral to chow down on a loved one as a mark of respect, about the medieval European craze for drinking liquefied mummified human brains, and of Chinese delicacies involving special fried human children.
And we'll look into the question, what are the real risks of interpersonal dining? And why exactly do we as humans find the idea so very hard to swallow? This is the ShortHand.

**Hannah Maguire** (2:29)
Our history of man-eaters actually starts with the word cannibal, popularized by explorer extraordinaire Mr. Christopher Columbus. Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean in October 1492, and he was a big fan. Apart from its golden sands and crystal clear waters, it had natural resources, farmable land, and people that, quote, ought to make good servants. He wrote to Queen Isabella of Spain that the indigenous Taino people he met were friendly and peaceful. But the Taino told him about another group who were not so hospitable.
They called them the Carabes, and the Taino warned Columbus' men that the Carabes were savage, violent beasts who carried out brutal raids on various islands, kidnapped women, and even cooked and ate their prisoners.
When Word got back to Queen Isabella about this, she was horrified. She sent word that anyone found to be eating human flesh should be captured and enslaved.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:26)
On his second expedition, Columbus rocked up on the Isle of Guadalupe. Where is the one in the Caribbean Guadalupe? Because the French took it in the end.

**Hannah Maguire** (3:35)
I was going to ask you. I don't know. Sometimes it's Guadalupe, sometimes it's Guadalupe.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:40)
I don't know. I think the island in the Caribbean is Guadalupe. But in-

**Hannah Maguire** (3:44)
I trust you.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:45)
There's a bunch of places in Spanish-speaking countries that are called Guadalupe. So maybe it was Guadalupe, and then I think the French took it later and changed it.

**Hannah Maguire** (3:52)
Maybe.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:53)
Because they've got loads of fingers in the Caribbean. Anyway, whatever he decided to call it at the time, all he found were abandoned villages, prisoners saying they had been captured from other islands, and quite a large amount of hacked-off body parts were lying around. So Columbus inferred a few things. A, this was clearly the work of the infamous Carribes, and B, every corpse or dismembered body part was being stored for some kind of celebratory human barbecue to toast their win.
And by this point, the honeymoon phase of Columbus' sun-soaked island adventure was already coming to an end. He hadn't found the gold he wanted. Plus, the indigenous people were starting to become rather difficult about him setting up shop there, enslaving them, taking all their shit. So soon enough, anyone who resisted capture was labeled a Caribe, which by then was a handy Spanish byword for people eater. Back home, the word became Canibe and later, Cannibal.