One of my husband’s high school friends had a human placenta in his freezer. Neatly wrapped and labelled in a Ziploc plastic bag, it lay in among the chicken thighs and ice-cream cartons. The placenta was his mother’s, or rather his younger brother’s – I am not sure what the etiquette is for attributing ownership of a placenta – and the kids would go down to the basement to root it out, hold it up and laugh: “Watch out next time Eric’s mom serves up beef casserole!”
In fact, Eric’s parents had no intention of cooking up the placenta. They had meant to plant it under a tree in the garden to commemorate their youngest son’s birth but never got around to it. Which rather neatly sums up the history of cannibalism: it’s an irresistible story, all the more horrific because eating human flesh is something any of us might, in extremis, be forced to do, or could, in theory, do without even realising; but the stories have long been more compelling than the actual evidence.
In 1979 the social anthropologist William Arens wrote, in The Man-Eating Myth, that when it came to culturally sanctioned cannibalism: “Rumours, suspicions, fears and accusations abound, but no satisfactory first-hand accounts.” He had a point – cannibalism has too often been invoked to describe the supposed savagery of non-industrial people in the absence of any convincing evidence for the practice – but there are nonetheless a few well-documented instances of “anthropophagy” (a word preferred by academics today for its less evocative connotations), and on this subject Bill Schutt proves a genial guide.
Schutt does not shy away from the ambiguities in the existing evidence, nor does he linger unnecessarily on those stories that have little substance: he does not need to, for there is plenty to intrigue and entertain here.
Schutt is a zoologist, and he begins with cannibalism in the animal kingdom (although many of these cases also prove to be as much fiction as fact, including the dining habits of the praying mantis, polar bears and dinosaurs). Few people are likely to buy this book eager to learn about mouthbrooding fish or Mormon crickets, but Schutt whisks us along for the ride and shows us that there are logical evolutionary reasons for members of the same species to eat one another.
When it comes to humans, overcrowding and food shortage top the list of contributory factors, and in these instances cannibalism is widely accepted as a “biologically and behaviourally predictable response to specific and unusual forms of stress”. The history of humans eating each other is too often a tragic tale of desperate and deranged people trying to survive starvation.
Schutt hikes into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains to learn about the survivors of the Donner Party, who spent months trapped by snow in the winter of 1846-47, and eventually succumbed to eating their dead companions. He also weighs the evidence relating to cannibalism during the Siege of Leningrad in the winter of 1941, another story of “normal people driven by impossible conditions to commit unspeakable acts”.
Equally sobering, the history of medicinal anthropophagy in Europe shows that convention can dispel revulsion, and harness its power, closer to home. For hundreds of years (even, very occasionally, in the early 20th century) Europeans consumed human blood, fat, bones and other body parts for their alleged healing properties.
More recently, in 1985, human growth-hormone drugs derived from the pituitary glands of human cadavers were removed from the market in the UK, US and elsewhere because of possible contamination with the viral pathogen that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Schutt does not mention this particular instance of “anthropophagy” in his discussion of the connections between cannibalism and the neurodegenerative disorders CJD, BSE and Kuru (a brain disease prevalent among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in the 1950s and 60s), presumably because the drug in question was injected rather than swallowed.
Surprisingly, given our readiness to attribute other cultures with a taste for human flesh, placentophagy is a tradition confined to a small section of contemporary middle-class America. It’s no coincidence that my husband and his friend Eric grew up in Boulder, Colorado, home to a higher than average number of hippies.
There is, of course, a crucial difference between eating the products of human bodies (fingernails, mucus and breast milk come to mind) and eating a dead human body, but the continuities are instructive. So Schutt steels himself to try human placenta at the home of Claire Rembis, founder of Your Placenta, which provides “placenta encapsulation services” and other placenta-derived health products in Plano, Texas. It is, like his book, an admirable exercise in blurring the boundaries between “us” and “them”, and it is a credit to Schutt that he ends his book by asking, not only, how could we?, but also, why wouldn’t we? Even for a topic as distasteful as cannibalism, “culture is king”.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson is published by Granta (£9.99).
• Eat Me by Bill Schutt is published by Profile (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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