The Reader Travels

With all these stories of cannibals in the Caribbean during colonial times, some of it must be true, right? There are disputes about whether it actually happened, or if the colonists were just afraid of the natives to such an extent that they attributed their worst fears to them.

Well, if it’s Robinson Crusoe telling the story, I’m going with the racism angle. Yes, I admit it. I’m about to judge this historical, fictional character by my own, more modern and slightly more liberal standards.  Yes, I think he deserved to be shipwrecked. After all, he was the guy building his plantation in colonial South America, who decided to go pick up some cheap labor across the ocean in Africa to help himself and his neighbors.

Now, just because he’s buying African slaves, does that means he’s a racist, or just an enterprising opportunist? Well, there’s more evidence that he thinks his kind are better than other people. He’s proud to be a Protestant, and he can’t abide the Papists. He certainly wouldn’t go back to England and grab up a bunch of his own kind and force them to work on his plantation. But the Africans, oh, they’re just not the same. He might enslave some Irish, but they’re not nearly as abundant or easy to spot when they try to run.

Now we turn to the canoe-driving inhabitants of his little island. While he’s busy eating grapes and raisins, he’s hiding out from the savages who eat the flesh of other humans. He describes these gruesome scenes of human mutilation and carnage. He sees it all first hand. But what does he really see? How much does his own fear of these people paint the picture before his eyes?

Hannibal Lector prides himself on having exquisite taste in all things, not just food. He loves fine classical music, great art, wines and liqueurs. He buys only the best in cars, knives, perfumes, clothes, cookware. He can afford to be choosy, but he also takes what he wants and manipulates people and situations to his advantage.

He thinks that people taste delicious, but he mostly eats “rude” people because they don’t really deserve to live. I do wonder, though, if non-rude people would taste better than rude people since they don’t have all that negative energy flowing through them. On the other hand, maybe it’s their rudeness that actually makes them more delicious, something about the chemicals flowing through their sweetbreads that makes them extra tasty. Or maybe it’s just the sheer emotional satisfaction of eating people who have such disregard for others.

Hannibal owns a well-loved copy of Alexandre Dumas’s Dictionary Of Cuisine, and he sees fine food in the people he meets. At one point, he met a child whose “neck was only as big around as a pork tenderloin.” Luckily the child wasn’t rude enough to eat.

So as part of my food travel adventures, I found myself reading Hannibal by Thomas Harris. I had seen the movie, so I was all prepared for the whole brain eating episode. I’m not as big on organ meat as Dr. Lector is, but I love chicken hearts, and I suspect that, prepared the right way, brain might be just as tasty.

So, I’m thinking back to Gould’s wasp and comparing it to Hannibal Lector. The wasp does what it does to survive, and Hannibal is most decidedly cruel, both physically and psychologically, and it’s not just because he’s doing it to a another human instead of a beetle.

The image from the original Faces of Death movie, where the people are bashing in the skull of the monkey trapped in their table, is permanently seared into my memory. I try not to judge other cultures upon my own standards, but that’s just not right.

In fact, I think it’s even more cruel than Hannibal keeping a man alive so he can feed him his own brain. Hannibal only eats rude people, after all. And what did that monkey ever do to anybody?

I sometimes think much of the morality we have manufactured over the centuries comes from humans attempting to deny that they are also animals. After all, the “original sin” is sex, something that we must do to procreate, as animals. So then the next thing to moralize about is what we eat, which again, we must do to survive.

Some groups moralize about eating cows, others about horses, dogs and cats, others about eating pigs, lobsters and cheeseburgers. Others moralize about eating any kind of meat, denying once again our animal nature as omnivores.

Should we judge the lion for being a carnivore when he was designed that way? We accept the lion the way he is, but then we can choose not to eat meat because it’s “wrong” to eat meat, and then we can feel all superior over lions.

Stephen Jay Gould has a very popular essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” available in the collection Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, where he talks about this parasitic wasp that would seem cruel by some human standards. So here’s how it works. The mother selects a big juicy insect and injects it with a paralyzing poison. Then she injects her egg into its belly so it can live in the warm body and eat its way out until it’s big enough to survive on its own. The host dies a slow death, and the baby wasp emerges, cracking through the carapace like it’s busting through the shell of an egg.

We can’t call it immoral. It’s just nature. You have to admit, it’s kinda cool too.