Back in the cab I explained myself to Sandy as best I could. I apologized for putting her through this. She laughed. We both laughed. We laughed so hard that the cab driver demanded to know what we were laughing about, and he laughed too. The cab driver had grown up in Haikou, but he hadn’t heard the story of the Guang brothers. Neither, it later turned out, had any of Sandy’s friends. We had the driver let us off at the Haikou public library to look for the original article. As it turns out, no paper named the Hainan Special Zone Daily exists, only the Hainan Special Zone Times, which is a weekly. Sandy looked through the papers for the week of March 23, 1991, but there was no mention of the human dumplings. She also checked old phone books for the White Temple Restaurant and found nothing.
There wasn’t much more to do in Haikou, so I took the bus south to Sanya, where the beaches are beautiful and the weather is fine and there is, I found out, another crematorium. (Sandy called the director and received a similarly indignant reply.) On the beach that afternoon, I spread my towel a few feet away from a wooden sign that advised beach-goers, “Do not spit at the beach.” Unless, I thought to myself, the beach suffers from nightmares, ulcers, ophthalmia, or fetid perspiration.
Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics. While there existed, I am told, cultures in Central America that actually ranched humans—kept enemy soldiers captive for a while to fatten them up—it was not practical to do so, because you had to give up more food to feed them than you’d gain in the end by eating them. Carnivores and omnivores, in other words, make lousy livestock. “Humans are very inefficient in converting calories into body composition,” said Stanley Garn, a retired anthropologist with the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. I had called him because he wrote an American Anthropologist paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. “Your cows,” he said, “are much more efficient.”
But I am not so much interested in cultures’ eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures’ eating their own dead: the practical, why-not model of cannibalism—eating the meat of fresh corpses because it’s there and it’s a nice change from taro root. If you’re not going out and capturing people and/or going to the trouble of fattening them up, then the nutritional economics begin to make more sense.
I found an American Anthropologist article—a reply to Garn’s— stating that there are in fact instances of groups of humans who will eat not only enemies they have killed, but members of their own group who have died of natural causes. Though in every case, the author, University of California, San Diego, anthropologist Stanley Walens, said, the cannibalism was couched in ritual. No culture, as far as he knew, simply carved up dead tribe members to distribute as meat.
Garn seemed to disagree. “Lots of cultures ate their dead,” he said, though I couldn’t get any specifics out of him. He added that many groups—too many, he said, to specify—would eat infants as a means of population control when food was scarce. Did they kill them or were they already dead, I wanted to know.
“Well,” he replied, “they were dead by the time they ate them.” This is how conversations with Stanley Garn seem to go. Somehow, midway through our chat, he steered the conversation from nutritional cannibalism to the history of landfill—a pretty sharp turn—and there it more or less remained. “You should write a book about that,” he said, and I think he meant it.
I had called Stanley Garn because I was looking for an anthropologist who had done a nutritional analysis of human flesh and/or organ meats.
Just, you know, curious. Garn hadn’t exactly done this, but he had worked out the lean/fat percentage of human flesh. He estimates that humans have more or less the same body composition as veal. To arrive at the figure, Garn extrapolated from average human body fat percentages. “There’s information of that sort on people in most countries now,” he said. “So you can see who you want for dinner.” I wondered how far the beef/human analogy carried. Was it true of human flesh, as of beef, that a cut with more fat is considered more flavorful? Yup, said Garn. And, as with livestock, the better nourished the individuals, the higher the protein content. “The little people of the world,” said Garn—and I had to assume he was referring to the malnourished denizens of the third world and not dwarfs—“are hardly worth eating.”
To my knowledge there is only one group of individuals today whose daily diet may contain significant amounts of their own dead, and that is the California canine. In 1989, while researching a story on a ridiculous and racist law aimed at preventing Asian immigrants from eating their neighbors’ dogs (which was already illegal because it’s illegal to steal a dog), I learned that, owing to California Clean Air Act regulations, humane societies had switched from cremating euthanized pets to what one official called “the rendering situation.” I called up a rendering plant to learn into what the dogs were being rendered. “We grind ’em up and turn ’em into bone meal,” the plant manager had said. Bone meal is a common ingredient in fertilizers and animal feed—including many commercial dog foods.
Of course, no humans are made into fertilizer after they’re dead. Or not, anyway, unless they wish to be.
11. OUT OF THE FIRE, INTO THE COMPOST BIN
And Other New Ways to End Up
When a cow dies on a visit to the hospital, it does not go to a morgue. It goes to a walk-in refrigerator, such as the one at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, in Fort Collins. Like most things in walk-in refrigerators, the bodies here are arranged to maximize space. Against one wall, sheep are stacked like sandbags against a flood.
Cows hang from ceiling hooks, effecting the familiar side-of-beef silhouette. A horse, bisected mid-torso, lies in halves on the floor, a vaudeville costume after the show.
The death of a farm animal is death reduced to the physical and the practicaclass="underline" a matter of waste disposal and little more. With no soul to be ushered onward, no mourners to attend to, death’s overseers are free to pursue more practical approaches. Is there a more economical way to dispose of the body? A more environmentally friendly way? Could something useful be done with the remains? With our own deaths, the disposal of the body was for centuries incorporated into the ritual of memorial and farewell. Mourners are present at the lowering of the coffin and, until more recently, the measured, remote-control conveyance of the casket into the cremation furnace. With the majority of cremations now done out of view of the mourners, the memorial has begun to be separated from the process of disposal. Does this free us to explore new possibilities?
Kevin McCabe, owner of McCabe Funeral Homes in Farmington Hills, Michigan, is one man who thinks that the answer is yes. One day soon, he plans to do to dead people what Colorado State University is doing to dead sheep and horses. The process—called “tissue digestion” when you speak to the livestock people and “water reduction” when you speak to McCabe—was invented by a retired pathology professor named Gordon Kaye and a retired professor of biochemistry named Bruce Weber.