Tag: autocannibalism

Auto-cannibalism: EAT (Jimmy Weber, 2014)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal filmsLeave a comment

Hollywood, they say, will eat you alive, and stories of those who try to succeed (and fail) are often accompanied by metaphors of incorporation. If the city doesn’t eat you, the people will, or if they don’t, you’ll end up eating yourself. That’s what happens to Novella (Meggie Maddock) in this powerful movie about a struggling actress who just can’t get a break.

No wonder she develops some nervous habits. The one revealed here is auto-cannibalism. She eats herself.

Novella has lost control of her life. She hasn’t won a part for three years. Intending to be a famous movie star, she instead finds herself auditioning for porn movies to make ends meet, and then comes home to find an eviction notice on her door. Her life is out of control, and she tries to reclaim it by auto-cannibalism—eating her own flesh. An illness, an addiction or an obsession is often described as “all-consuming” and Eat takes this to its logical conclusion.

The film explores the desperation and isolation that is so much a part of modern cultures, and the extreme reactions to the feeling of failure. What better way to explore the darkness inside us than by opening ourselves up and looking, feeling and tasting it? As the movie reminds us,

This is the debut feature from Jimmy Weber (Incubator), and he demonstrates a rare talent for showing people things that really turn their stomachs. This is what horror should do—while so many entries that once caused people to pass out or vomit in cinemas have become stale and unremarkable, people eating their own flesh still manages to make the gorge rise for many otherwise hardened reviewers of gore movies. It takes us into our deepest fears and lets them out to play in the (relatively) safe world of the cinema.

Andy Warhol made an underground movie called Eat in 1964 which featured a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes. This Eat is a lot more graphic, although the French got here first with Marina de Van’s extraordinary 2002 film In My Skin. In that film, the protagonist feels the same appetite for her own flesh as so many people seem to feel when they smell bacon.

If you’re not a gore hound, you probably may not like this film. The special effects are excruciatingly realistic, and reinforced by sound effects of biting and slurping that offer a sometimes exaggerated realism. But although it is a disturbing film, it is beautifully made and makes its point about the human tendency to consume, like the ouroboros, the very environment that sustains us.

Cannibalism, or any kind of carnivory, is ultimately about control. Humans seek to control nature by killing and eating others—usually other species, but sometimes, even often, other humans. There is no greater control of another than taking their life and converting their flesh into food and then into faeces. But doing it to ourselves? That is more an enquiry, an interrogation of the usually unquestioned human/animal binary. Reddit reports that a guy who calls himself Incrediblyshinyshart served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg, just to see what we taste like. A Spanish influencer ate part of her knee which had been removed surgically, just because it was her property and she could (much the same argument people use to justify eating other animals). Then there’s the vegan who made meringues out of his own blood, because, he said, it is,

“the only ethical source of animal products, because I can give my consent to myself in a way that a sheep can’t.”

Once we look inside our skin, that large sensory organ which identifies us to the world and ourselves, we find meat, the same red meat we find inside other mammals. The only difference between the cannibal who consumes his own flesh and the gourmand who eats that of a pig, cow or sheep is one of consent.

Vegan eats his own blood as a meringue

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal documentaries2 Comments

I don’t usually put warnings about graphic images in my blogs; I figure if you are reading a blog called “thecannibalguy.com” that you are probably not expecting unicorns and fairies. But this short clip has its own trigger warning, so I’ll just reproduce it here.

Vegans are often told by caring or sanctimonious friends and relatives that they need animal protein or they will get sick and die. This can be a bit wearisome, particularly for long-term vegans. Now here’s a novel solution.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete (I wonder who his parents’ favourite film star was?) has been vegan or vegetarian for almost 20 years (and clearly has not died yet). After years of carnivorous peer-pressure, he’s decided to consume animal products from what he calls the only truly ethical source: himself.

Jamie seeks advice from “Blood for Food” activist, Laura Schälchli, about her recipes, which are made with blood from other animals. He follows her recipe for blood meringues, substituting his own blood for whatever unfortunate animal is usually slaughtered and bled.

And eats the results.

He starts by whisking the blood, because blood tends to clot, which even he describes as “disgusting”. But,

“I find the thought of it less gross than if I were eating the blood of an animal.”

Jamie is perhaps using shorthand, or forgetting that we are all animals?

The protein albumin comprises about fifty percent of human blood plasma, and is similar to egg whites, so the obvious choice for Jamie was to make a meringue, which is usually made from the whites of chicken eggs or, far less often, in the recipe he has chosen, the blood of goats or cows.

“I was expecting a sugary bowl of gore, but this looks like it could be real food.”

So look, autocannibalism is not an appetising prospect, but most vegans would say the same about dishes made from the organs, muscles or blood of an animal who was unwillingly slaughtered for the purpose.

 “I think I probably enjoyed this more than if I had made it using animal blood, because there was no death involved. I am really the only ethical source of animal products, because I can give my consent to myself in a way that a sheep can’t.”

Here are some of the comments from YouTube:

Some suggested that Jamie would end up a cannibal, a common thread through the literature – if you eat human flesh (or blood I guess), you will become addicted, because we are somehow irresistible. It is absolute nonsense of course. Others felt like it had made the point: eating any animal product, including from the ape known as Homo sapiens, is a bit disgusting. I have seen people flinch as they pull a piece of meat out of the fridge and pour out the blood that pools under it.

As Jamie says, if you must eat animal protein, use the nearest animal, and the only one that is able to consent, although the occasional cannibal like Armin Meiwes manages to find a willing third party to sate his cannibalistic desires. Remember the scene from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when the “dish of the day” offers them his shoulder to eat, braised in a little white wine sauce, saying “naturally mine, sir, nobody else’s in mine to offer!”

Jamie is not unique in this – remember Gwen van der Zwan, who made blood sausages out of her own blood, commenting, “Why is my idea considered disgusting, but doing the same thing with pigs’ blood isn’t?”

Jamie has the final summation, commenting perhaps on the flesh and blood of himself, and every other sentient being:

“It’s like eating a little baked nightmare.”

Spanish influencer “practiced cannibalism”: eats part of her own knee

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment
@paulagonu

no me dio poderes

♬ sonido original – Paulagonu

Cannibalism is usually defined as eating the flesh of another animal of the same species. In the case of humans, this of course means eating the flesh of another human. But sometimes people eat their own flesh. Is this still cannibalism, and is there anything wrong with it?

The answers usually given seem to be yes and yes. I agree that eating your own flesh is, by definition, a form of cannibalism, but I really cannot see what all the fuss is about. What about people that chew their fingernails, called onychophagia, or (oww!) their cuticles? Or perhaps more extreme is the fashion of eating placentas after childbirth – some women take them home and cook them, or there are companies that offer to sterilise and morcelise placentas and make pills from them. There is not, unfortunately, universal agreement on the supposed health benefits.

British social anthropologist Alfred Gell reported that in the 1970s he was conducting fieldwork among the Umeda people of West Sepik in Papua New Guinea, when he accidentally cut his finger and, as people often do, put it in his mouth to suck the wound. The locals were horrified and considered him a cannibal:

“the shocked countenances and expressions of disgust evinced by my Umeda companions told me soon enough…”

If Gell was thought a cannibal for sucking his own blood, what would the Umeda think of Spanish ‘influencer’ Paula Gonu, who announced that she ate some cartilage that was removed from her knee during surgery? In an interview with the Club 113 podcast, Gonu, who had opted for local anaesthesia, spoke of watching the doctor operate on her knee in real-time on a screen. After the doctor finished the procedure, the influencer said he asked her if she wanted to keep the part of her meniscus that he had removed. Gonu said yes and the doctor put the piece of cartilage in a small bottle filled with preservative.

Gonu explained that she had to undergo surgery to remove her meniscus (cartilage in the knee joint) following an injury. A week after the surgery, Gonu decided she wanted to eat the cartilage.

“I was talking with the boyfriend I had at the time, and I told him, ‘I want to eat it. It’s mine and I have to reinsert it into my body’. He asked, ‘But why do you want to eat it?’ I answered, ‘Why not? It’s not going to hurt me.’ So, then I made a Bolognese sauce, I added it in, and I ate it.”

Gonu previously shared the story in a viral TikTok last November, which has been viewed more than 4.3 million times, with the caption: “It didn’t give me super powers.” However, after Gonu retold the story on the Club 113 podcast, it entered the news cycle again.

Spanish media was quick to trumpet Gonu’s cannibalism. “Paula Gonu practiced cannibalism: She ate her own meniscus,” read one headline. Another headline from November, when the influencer originally shared the story, stated: “The rich eat meniscus.”

One Twitter user  called it “Bizarre”. This was one of the more moderate comments.

Autocannibalism or autosarcophagy is in a sense universal, in that we all consume dead cells from our tongue and cheeks all the time. But autocannibalism is not always voluntary. The Hungarian noblewoman Erzsébet Báthory (the one who allegedly used to bathe in the blood of virgins in the early 17th century) is supposed to have forced some of her servants to eat their own flesh. In 1934, Claude Neal, a 23-year-old African-American, was brutally lynched by a group of white men who had stormed the county jail in Brewton, Alabama where he was being held after confessing to the murder of a 20-year-old white woman in Greenwood, Florida. One member of the mob told an NAACP investigator that during the lynching, which lasted ten-to-twelve hours, the men cut off Neal’s penis and testicles and forced him to eat them. Other incidents of coerced autocannibalism were reported in the years following the 1991 Haitian coup d’état. and in the 1990s, young people in Sudan were forced to eat their own ears.

As for the other kind, voluntary autocannibalism, there are many cases documented, well before Paula Gonu thought of the idea. A recent one was the case of Incrediblyshinyshart who told Vice that he had served his friends tacos, made from his own amputated leg.

So Gonu’s idea was far from original. But nor is there much wrong with it. Cannibalism is frowned upon when it involves disturbing a corpse, and definitely disapproved when it involves killing someone as prey. But Gonu did none of that – she merely ate a part of herself, with her own full consent, instead of throwing it away. You could almost say she was into recycling.