• grue@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I assume there’s a reason the euphemism for human meat is ‘long pork,’ not ‘long beef.’

    • TheSaddestMan@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Humans, pigs and naked mole rats are the only mammals which never have fur. The mole rats are incidentally NOT found in African diets (afaik), but wild boars and (disturbingly) humans (mind you, there is a nuance) have.

      The nuance is the source. Many cultures around the world consumed their dead but are not killers. They had no choice sometimes, every scrap of food had to be conserved.

      Also, it was rare but a few cultures ate those they killed in battle, which is far less understandable, but not the same thing as “savages who eat other people” which is not just insulting but factually wrong. If you want to criticize the many, many peoples of Africa over that kind of awfulness, point to 20th and 21st Century genocides between tribes during the attempts to create modern nations, not to cultures that were - yes - often oppressed by European overlords and vilified to oppress them. We don’t know enough to say that it was voluntary, famines and droughts and poor hunting seasons happened over history across the world.

      The other nuance is, if you ever end up like the Donner Party, DO NOT EAT THEIR BRAIN. That’s how you get Kuru. Nasty stuff, it’s a genetic illness that can be acquired by eating other people’s brains (hence why nobody eats brains except the zombies in memes). Trust me, you’d prefer to starve to death even considering it’s already like Soylent Green in that hypothetical.

      • TheSaddestMan@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        I’m just going to say it, I never implied that cannibalism is commonplace in modern Africa and my point - if hard to convey - is that even something like eating human flesh can be part of a respectable tradition, even if the actual meat should be substituted symbolically with beef or pork for health reasons.

        I’m truly sorry it came across as disrespectful, I was not intending to demonize anyone so much as point out that Africa is an entire continent and many cultures live there. Being strange is not wrong, even if that includes eating the deceased at the funeral. Killing others is, but I fully acknowledge that that is not the same thing and that it is something every culture has done regardless of where in the world you look or what color their skin is.