Next step: sustainable human steak?
They don’t mention the “sustainable” word, but you know they want to. Right from the start they’re selling it to us: Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry?
Why can’t we feed our bodies to the homeless indeed, apart from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, prions, parasites, heavy metals? And if cannibalism pops up on the menu often enough, who knows what other problem will pop up on the radar? Things at the top of the food chain (and we are at the top) tend to accumulate all kinds of unwanted chemicals, like lead, PCBs, and pollutants.
Not to mention the spiritual questions and the mental health issues. Who knows? Relatives might feel a bit miffed if Aunty Betty was carved up for canapes and offered up to the crowd at the local alcoholics’ shelter.
Welcome to dystopia. We can devalue human lives, but think of the cows we’ll save!
And the CultureWar continues
Tut. Tut. Tut. New Scientist gently chides us for being the sort of modern prejudiced people who think cannibalism is taboo. It’s just your colonial roots that do that to you, right?
If you don’t like cannibals you are just a racist:
Our aversion has been explained in various ways. Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation. These came to represent the “other” to Western societies – and revulsion towards cannibalism became a tenet of their moral conscience.
Once human bodies are reduced to being meat to feed the poor, euthanasia is almost a gift to the world, really. And science is just, well, one of many ideologies, not something special.
The New Scientist output is just another article chipping away at the pillars of Western Civilization. The fact they don’t even consider pollutants and diseases, nor the soul-sapping mental health issues is just embarrassing for a supposedly “scientific” magazine.
For whatever it’s worth, after half a billion years of evolution, predators almost never eat other predators, and most species don’t eat their own kind. Perhaps there is a reason…
This article originally appeared at JoNova
