Where to start eating a human corpse if you have no other choice to survive

Surprisingly, science has studied this topic and has something to say about it.

Let’s start with the bad news: It doesn’t take a plane crash in the middle of the Andes for life to put us in a situation where eating human flesh is the only thing standing between us and certain death. And even if this is not true, the hypothesis (bright and painful) is interesting.

After all, with 650 muscles, 206 bones and a variety of internal organs… the human body has a lot to choose from.

How nutritious is the human body? In 2017, University of Brighton professor James Cole observed that episodes of cannibalism identified during the Paleolithic era were often identified in the literature as “nutritive” in nature. In general, archaeologists differentiate between “ritual” and “nutritional” based on what is found in the bones.

Too much is visible. Sometimes there are almost random marks on the bones, in others there are clear signs that the meat has been processed (and with great benefit): from traces of filleting of body parts to very precise cuts in the joints or scraped bones. that every piece of meat was cleaned.

Researching. However, Cole realized that no matter how much he searched and searched, he could not find a single empirical work analyzing the nutritional value of the human body. It has been said that no matter how obvious the nutritional benefits of human flesh may seem to us, we need something to support it. And then he started doing it himself.

This was not an easy project. After all, these days you can’t happily butcher someone at a British university and invite your colleagues to a tasting. However, in the 1940s, ethical standards were much more relaxed.

During his investigation, Cole found a study by a research group from that time that analyzed four male subjects between the ages of 35 and 60. All of them died earlier and for reasons not related to the experiment, it is worth clarifying. But the data they obtained helped Cole restore the real content (water, proteins, fats) of each part of the body.

One gram of protein is four calories; one fat, nine. Using this data, a bit of statistical anatomy and math, Cole put together a very detailed table of which foods contain the most meat. And no, there aren’t many surprises. An adult’s fat tissue alone contains about 50,000 calories. To this we would have to add 25,000 from the skeleton, 13,000 from the hips and about 10,000 from the skin.

We don’t eat for something. This alone rules out habitual consumption by humans in prehistoric times (except in extreme situations). By comparison, Cole said, a horse had 200,000 calories and a bison had a million without even breaking a sweat. But, one way or another, today we are not analyzing the behavior of our ancestors, but rather trying to determine where we should start eating if we get into trouble.

And the answer is clear. The first step is to use the thick “pads” of the corpse. They are generally accessible and relatively easy to remove. Subsequently, it is advisable to start eating thighs, arms and meat from the torso and head. It seems important to avoid organ meats (not only because they have low nutritional value, but also because they accumulate many substances that can be dangerous, especially if we do not know the dietary history of the subject in question).

On the other hand, if we have kitchen utensils, it is not stupid to use bones to make a good broth. The skin has a good caloric value, but may be more difficult to use. However, I suppose at this point the temptation to make some torreznos will be inevitable.

Of course, there are some problems. Eating human flesh, in addition to being ethically outrageous to most cultures of the world; This is dangerous to your health. Especially when we’re talking about neural tissue: there are a number of prion diseases (the ones that caused the mad cow disease crisis) historically associated with ritual practices including cannibalism at funerals – something very typical in Papua New Guinea, for example.

Image | Netflix

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