The Reader Travels

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?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under food travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.