cannibalism

"As to the children, either boys or girls, they will live according to their fancy. If they are pleasant of countenance, they may expect a hard domestic service, yet they stay alive, but if they captured many children, a few are killed to be cooked for eating."

"Since he never fed the ten or twenty thousand impressed natives in his army, he gave them leave to eat the prisoners they took, thus setting the royal seal of approval on the establishment, in his camp, of a human abattoir where he himself would preside over the slaughter and grilling of children and where grown men were butchered for the sake of their hands and feet which were generally held to be the best cuts."

"Nay, so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbes; and one amongst the rest did kill his wife, and powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved: now, whether she was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado'd, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of."

"Most ferocious are those new anthropophagi, who live on human flesh, Caribs or cannibals as they are called."

"Birds were boiling in their pots, also geese mixed with bits of human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting. Upon searching another house the Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside."

"The inhabitants of Hispaniola, who are a mild people, complained that they were exposed to frequent attacks from the cannibals who landed amongst them and pursued them through the forests like hunters chasing wild beasts. The cannibals captured children, whom they castrated, just as we do chickens and pigs we wish to fatten for the table, and when they were grown and become fat they ate them. Older persons, who fell into their power, were killed and cut into pieces for food; they also ate the intestines and the extremities, which they salted, just as we do hams. They did not eat women, as this would be considered a crime and an infamy. If they captured any women, they kept them and cared for them, in order that they might produce children; just as we do with hens, sheep, mares, and other animals. Old women, when captured, were made slaves."

"They eat man's flesh there just as we eat beef here. Yet the country in itself is excellent, and hath great store of flesh-meats, and of wheat and of rice... And merchants come to this island from far, bringing children with them to sell like cattle to those infidels, who buy them and slaughter them in the shambles and eat them."

"You should know that they eat all manner of foul things and any kind of meat, including human flesh, which they devour with great relish. They will not touch someone who has died of natural causes, but if he has been stabbed to death or otherwise killed they eat him all up and consider it a great delicacy."

"In time, the Chinese developed a taste for human meat.... T'ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yüan dynasty [1271–1368], remarked on the taste of human meat (hsiang jou) in his Cho Keng Lu (Records of Stopping Cultivation), in which he said that children's meat was the best food of all in taste, and next to this were women and men. Chuang Ch'ao, a Sung [960–1279] writer, was more specific about the taste of human meat in his Chi Lieh Pien (Chicken Rib Section) in which he referred to children's meat as well-boiled bone (...), which means that because of their superior tastiness children could be eaten whole, including their bones, when they were well-boiled. He also characterized women's meat as more delicious than mutton (...). Men's meat was less so, and was referred to as "jao pa huo" — the least tasty of all human meat. Generally, he referred to men and women as two-legged sheep (liang-chao yang), but he believed that both young children and beautiful women were particularly good for mutton soup (...)."

"I presented to the king of this place... a quantity of salt which he accepted and he sent to me two most comely slave girls. A few days later I was in his presence and he said to me: "I sent those girls to you, so slaughter and eat them! Their flesh is the best thing we have to eat. For what reason have you not slaughtered them?" I replied: "This is not lawful for us.""

"A merchant friend of mine... had seen five children's heads in a single cauldron, cooked with the choicest spices."

"Nothing was more common than this kind of thing, and it would be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Egypt... anyone who has not been eye-witness to such atrocities."

"When the poor first began to eat human flesh, the horror and astonishment that such extraordinary meals aroused were such that these crimes formed the topic of every conversation... But eventually people grew accustomed, and some conceived such a taste for these detestable meats that they made them their ordinary provender, eating them for enjoyment and... [thinking] up a variety of preparation methods... The horror people had felt at first vanished entirely; one spoke of it, and heard it spoken of, as a matter of everyday indifference."

"They went further, and reached the stage of eating little children. It was not unusual to find people [selling] little children, roasted or boiled."

"Such suffering from hunger grew up around these cities that the Christians, in the face of the scarcity about which you have heard, did not fear to eat – wicked to say, much less to do – the bodies, cooked in fire, not only of the Saracens or Turks they had killed, but also of the dogs that they had caught."

"The Caribs ... sail to the neighboring islands, making their way by paddling to people who differ greatly in manners and character. Sometimes they go greater distances, even as far as thousand miles, in search of plunder. They customarily castrate their infant captives and boy slaves and fatten them like capons. The thin and the emaciated are carefully nurtured, like wethers. Soon, when plump and fat, they are devoured all the more avidly. They hand over the female captives as slaves to their womenfolk, or make use of them to satisfy their lust. Children borne by the captured women are eaten like the captives."

"Peter Margarita, a Spaniard whose word cannot be impugned, went out to the Orient with the Admiral, attracted by the prospect of visiting the new lands. He says that with his own eyes he saw here a large number of Indians fixed on spits and roasted over hot coals to tickle the debauched palates of these people, while many bodies lay in heaps, minus head and limbs. The cannibals do not deny this but openly affirm that they eat human flesh."

"The Cannibals, when they capture some Indians, eat them like we eat young goats, and they say that the flesh of a boy is much better than that of a female."

"On that island we seized twelve beautiful and very fat females, aged between fifteen and sixteen, with two boys of the same age whose genital members had been cut away clean to the belly. We figured that they had done it to keep them from mixing with their women or perhaps to fatten them up and eat them later. These boys and girls had been captured by the Cannibals; we sent them to Spain as an exhibit for the king."

"Cannibalism was another last resort for surviving famines. In the win­ter of 618–619 the army of a warlord, some 200,000 troops in all, sur­rounded a district south of Luoyang and exhausted all the stores of millet there... Famine broke out, so the natives began to devour each other. The rebel soldiers were also starving, so they took to abducting children, whom they steamed and ate. That led the warlord to conclude, "Of all the delicious things to eat, none surpasses human flesh. As long as there are people in neighboring districts we have nothing to fear from famine." He had a large bronze bell with a capacity of 200 bushels [7 cubic metres] inverted, stewed the flesh of children and women in it, divided the meat, and gave it to his officers."

"Why should I speak of other nations when I myself, a youth on a visit to Gaul, heard that the Atticoti, a British tribe, eat human flesh, and that although they find herds of swine, and droves of large or small cattle in the woods, it is their custom to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds and the breasts of their women, and to regard them as the greatest delicacies?"

"Pharaoh is he who eats men and lives on gods... Their big ones are for his morning meal, their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal, their little ones are for his night meal, their old men and their old women are for his incense-burning."

"He then cut up the body into pieces, amputated the prominent parts from the shoulder, and the fleshy portions from the arms, from the ligamentous attachments, which connected them with the body, with unshaken nerves! He strips off the flesh from the various limbs, and chops up the different bones,—he keeps back the heads, however, and those very hands, which had once signalized their confidence in him!"

"Well, Lucy MacLean, it ain't all canned peaches and marmalade left up here, sweetheart. Sometimes a fella's got to eat a fella.... I'll bet your daddy was first in line at the cookout. I bet he had a bib with a drawing of his neighbor's ass on there.... Why the fuck am I doing all the work? Now come on, vaultie. Ass jerky don't make itself."

"Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la provençale, the cuts of tri-tip and the kidneys. The label read "Special Meat", but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was "Upper Extremity", strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label "Lower Extremity", and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles and a sign that said "Spanel's Delicacies". Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror."

"The smell of barbecue is in the air. They go to the rest area, where the farmhands are roasting a rack of meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they've been preparing it since eight in the morning, "So it melts in your mouth", and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. "It's the most tender kind of meat, there's only just a little, because a kid doesn't weigh as much as a calf. We're celebrating because one of them became a father", he explains. "Want a sandwich?""

"He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who's beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: "I serve my family special food, it's the same meat as always, but tastier." The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name "special meat". Instead of just "meat", now there's "special tenderloin", "special cutlets", "special kidneys". He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food."

"They'd taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry."

"But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten."

"Some witnesses described seeing people cutting, even cooking and then eating human flesh, including penises cut from living men and corpses, notably of FARDC members, and drinking human blood."

"A boy captured in Kamonia territory, Kasaï province, in December 2016 by the militia and forcibly assigned to chores explains: "They sometimes brought us human thighs that we had to cook, and cans of blood." ... Finally, a 14-year-old girl forcibly integrated into the Kamuina Nsapu militia in May 2017 in the province of Kasaï Oriental explains: "The militiamen cut off the genitals of soldiers who had been killed, but it was more often the genitals of senior soldiers that they cut off. Then the genitals were grilled and eaten. The boys cut off the genitals and gave them to the girls. The victims' blood was drunk..."."

"Members of the civilian population, including those captured by the militia, had to witness acts of anthropophagy, mutilation, amputation and decapitation.... Thus, in the tshiota [initiation house], in front of the civilian population often forced to watch, they cut off the penises of many men, including village chiefs they considered traitors, who had just been beheaded, and sometimes then held a ceremony to eat them after preparing them, which, according to their belief, gives them power, or threw them into the fire.... In another case, a woman at the tshiota witnessed militiamen eating the abdominal part of her son, who had just been decapitated."

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. [Slurps]"