Andrushka

Watching The Daily Show tonight, I was fascinated by the segment on Hufu™, a new tofu meat analog. The stated goal of its invention was to let anthropology students experience cannibalism legally. That's right. Hufu™ is human-flavored tofu. How did they do product testing? Did they just make it taste like chicken? (Actually, it's supposed to be more like a sweet beef.) I'd love to see a Folger's Crystals™-style commercial for Hufu™: "We secretly switched these Cannibals' meal of ceremonially-sacrificed human flesh with our own textured vegetable protein to see if they notice . . ." But I digress. Recently, Serhiy asked me about my opinion on cannibalism. He brings these topics up out of left field fairly consistently and I'm becoming used to it. He had been reading a Russian news source about a restaurant in China that serves aborted fetuses. Since Russian reporters are incapable of being critical of their own society, they like to criticize other societies. It was a fnord article. Even worse, it is a hoax that feeds on virulent orientalism (links: 1,2). For that matter, "cannibalism always turns out to have been suppressed shortly before the observer's arrival, or is imputed by his informants to other people" (Bitterli 9), which makes me suspect any report of it. The falsehood that inspired the question does not, however, negate the question. I, being a materialist and existentialist, said, "Waste not, want not." My feeling is that it's better to be useful in death than taking up space in a medical waste dump or a cemetery (and don't even get me started about how irrational the American cemetery system is). Serhiy brought up the compelling comeback, "but they're human." Not anymore. Now they are CHON like any other biological matter. I've seen Soylent Green. I disagreed with their society, but being useful after death is fine. Fight Club's use of human fat to make soap was disgusting to watch (and even more so to read about when you realize the first batch of soap used Marla's mother)—but I've got no problem with the concept itself. I think lard is disgusting too, no matter how Ukrainians dress it. To bring it out of the realm of fiction, I can't understand why anyone objects to stem cell research. Just let me add the important caveat that the person must be dead already and this postmortem utility did not facilitate the death in anyway. Even if you believe in the existence of an ethereal, non-corporal soul (unlike us materialist Adventists) I still don't understand the objection to postmortem utilization of humans. I mean, in that cosmogony, the body is nothing without the soul. Mainstream Christianity emphasizes the sinfulness and dirtiness of the flesh but somehow after death it's supposed to be sacred? How can people hold so many conflicting beliefs at one time? (Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency discusses this phenomenon in depth.) Personally, I want to be used as fertilizer, and though Brett has decided not to farm, I hope he's still up to his promise to disc me under in a field. I don't understand why people who eat pigs or dogs, animals with genomes remarkably similar to humans and therefore efficient disease vectors, would have problems with human flesh. When Serhiy asked me if I would ever eat a person, the answer was a simple negative. Why? Well, it's certainly not because I think corpses should enjoy involate sanctity. It's simply because I'm vegetarian and even if I weren't, I would follow the Biblical clean and unclean guidelines. But now with Hufu™, maybe I'll get the chance to experience human meat analogue. I don't think I want to pay for such expensive veggie food right now, but if you're interested, you can order some and find some traditional human-based recipes.

Posted by Scott on 28 October 2005 at 10/28/2005 01:49:00 AM | Permalink