Flesh Eaters
Consuming the food of memory
Red wine, soy sauce, and white sugar in equal parts are the only ingredients, aside from chicken, that go into one of the most delectable and astonishingly easy recipes I know. I got this recipe from my parents, who got it from one of my dad’s Chinese teachers in the ‘90s.
My parents studied Mandarin and Tajik for seven years at Xinjiang University. I was there too, but I can’t distinguish between my dad’s various teachers in my memory. One teacher told a story about eating the family dog after its death “so that it would always be a part of them,” and I wonder if it was the same woman who shared her 豉油鸡 recipe.
A human life span is not long enough to study or experience all of Chinese food (take it from Fuchsia Dunlop), but I have studied it a bit, and I am always hungering after the foods of my memory. Recipes for 豉油鸡, (Soy Sauce Chicken in English or See Yao Gai in Cantonese) online typically include other ingredients in addition to wine, soy, and sugar. The red wine I use, as directed on the paper from my parents, is certainly an adaptation since red wine would have been considerably harder to come by in Urumqi at the time my parents got this recipe than Shaoxing wine or the most traditional Chinese rose wine (Mei Gui Lu Jiu).
The summer I turned 16, I spent a month traveling in Eastern and Southern China, away from my parents, but also studying Chinese. I ate dog meat from a street cart, it looked and tasted like a pulled pork sloppy joe. I also ate soup dumplings (without dog meat) in Tianjin that I loved so much that I’ve tried to find the shop on Google Earth more than once in the decades since.
Returning to the scene of memory foods never tastes as good, I don’t know why. One of life’s papercut cruelties, I suppose. Someone else might say that having had that dreamy bowl of soup at all was one of life’s hidden gifts, but I’m not that kind of writer. I’ve tried to revisit or recreate memory foods countless times. I have been countless places, I have cooked countless meals. Memory does not repeat itself in the ways we want.
I’ve had 3 dogs as pets so far in my life. The first was Orly, short for Orlando because I was 12 and Legolas and Will Turner were on the brain. I watched Orly be born, his mom was the yard dog in the converted post office motel we lived at. He looked like a yellow lab and beagle mix, and one of his litter mates that my sister named Rollo after a Redwall character looked like a brown bear. It’s actually possible for one litter of puppies to have multiple fathers, it’s called superfecundation. Superfecundation can occur in humans too, though it is quite rare, and that’s lucky because I can only imagine the judgements.
The old post office was configured similarly to a traditional Chinese home with a gated wall facing the street and the three other wings of living quarters facing an interior open yard. Our neighbors, the Lui family, bludgeoned (so as to preserve the blood in the meat) an unrelated-to-Orly dog to death and hung it up in the courtyard to skin. When we moved away, Orly stayed in the courtyard, but I don’t remember worrying about that goodbye.
My second dog was named Snickers at the shelter in Oxnard, California, next to her sister Skittles. I liked the name Skittles, but maybe we thought it would give our dog a complex if we called her by the name of her sister who we’d ripped her away from. I had my heart set on naming this dog Cleopatra, but there was lack of consensus among my dimwitted siblings, and somehow the dog ended up being named Tori, a shortened form of our own mother’s name! We adopted Tori while on temporary stay in the U.S., with the understanding that she’d go to live with our friends permanently when we returned to China. Tori lived a long life with them.
My current dog is named Foxy. At the shelter she was called Cornelia, alongside her sisters Crumpet and Calamity. I wonder if their tags got switched, because the dog we got is calamitous to the marrow. Foxy has several namesakes, including Pam Grier as Foxy Brown.
We sent our Foxy to behavior camp because of the aforementioned calamitous marrow, and the trainer told us that dogs don’t understand English. Sure enough, she just smiles at us when we mention eating her in a life-and-death situation.
Jonas and I watched La Sociedad de la Nieve (Society of the Snow), the true story of an Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in the ‘70s. We both knew the story already from separate podcasts, so some of the details below may be extracurricular spoilers in addition to the regular kind.
Beyond the other remarkable details of the survival of 17 of the passengers, the sensation of the account is that they ate the bodies of their deceased friends in order to stay alive while stranded in the snow for two months. Jonas and I talked about this movie for two days. It prompts some questions on a level more carnal than we collective viewers usually have occasion to ponder.
Some people are happy to have no occasion in their entire lives to ponder eating human (or dog!) flesh, but there are considerations beyond what you may assume are the obvious ethics.
Even though it’s hard for me to imagine eating a pet or killing a dog on purpose, and in adulthood there are some foods I avoid for ethical reasons, I do not think less of my Chinese friends for what they ate. In Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, “Invitation to a Banquet” (which I’m only part way through because I had to return it to the library), she makes the point that while Euro-American cultures tend to denigrate the variety of meats that Chinese eat, it is typically not out of desperation that these meats are eaten, and traditionally they are of utmost freshness, not “dirty.” There are also multiple minorities in China who don’t eat certain meats for religious reasons. Dunlop’s ethical concern is that many animals considered delicacies are hunted into extinction, which harms the ecosystem as well as the animal kingdom. Definitely grab a copy of her book if you want to explore more of this topic.
Many animals eat their own species or even their own young, but almost all humans find the idea revolting. There is almost never a necessity for us to engage in anthropophagy (a nicer word for cannibalism). Some cultures have utilized anthropophagy ritualistically, either to terrorize their enemies, or, like my dad’s teacher did with her pet, to share in or absorb the spirit of someone loved or venerated.
This National Geographic article is behind a paywall, but it’s about how wealthy Europeans ate mummified and fresh humans as medicine as late as 1909. And not just as heal-the-body medicine, but sometimes with the same belief that connection with the spirit of the deceased body was of importance. An Egyptian tomb was opened by the British for the purpose of consuming the mummies, and I thought I saw a reference to the British eating Chinese mummies as well, but haven’t found confirmation.
I do not poo-poo the idea of spiritual-bodily connection between people, though I am not interested in eating my friends and family. However, we typically don’t bat an eye at blood or body-part transfusions, scattering human ashes into bodies of water, or even religious relics. It’s ironic that the advancement of medicine by which we’ve come to see human bodies as a compilation of scientifically explainable parts and less a spiritual entity is cited as the reason for the decrease in ritualized anthropophagy, and yet our social disgust at eating what we apparently view as just a collection of sciency organs has increased.
Most of us, myself included, find the desecration of graves or other remains offensive. But most of us also believe that there is no personhood left in a dead body, skeleton, or relic. We’re offended by theft. To take a life in order to consume it is theft and I think that extends to non-human life in plenty of circumstances. I don’t feel quite the same about what is already dead, but some people do.
Everyone the Uruguayan rugby team consumed to survive died either in the crash, subsequent avalanches, or from wounds - no one was killed on purpose. The team also endured through weeks of other survival strategies before they started eating the dead bodies. When they finally did, it was as psychologically painful and even revolting to see in cinematic form as it must have been for the team to go through with it. Imagine the turmoil of being hungry for something you’d almost rather die than eat. Whatever the mechanics or beliefs or reasons around rituals with the dead, the currency of feeling is memory.
Memory is the hardest button to button in the highly unlikely event that you or I were to find ourselves in a situation in which we might eat human flesh to survive.
Like in La Sociedad de la Nieve, you’d need to 1) be in a group in which some lived, but some die, 2) be unable to leave your situation but also not die from anything aside from starvation (nothing else edible around), such as wounds, climate, or illness, and 3) have either a lot of bodies dying at intervals or else climate conditions that preserved dead bodies to be eaten at a rate that wouldn’t cause more problems than it fixed. These were the same conditions the Donner party found themselves in, though records of their survival suggested that cannibalism caused irreversible madness. There are some reports of anthropophagy as a result of famine in history too.
The definition of “survival” itself is nuanced. Watching La Sociedad de la Nieve, I kept marveling at the lack of despair of the survivors. Leaving anthropophagy out completely, I think I would accept a death that eased misery or avoided a more painful death by infection way before I put in the extreme effort to maintain a hopeless outcome. Maybe not? I haven’t died yet, but I did begin to die once (by way of blood loss while giving birth) without recognizing that’s what was happening, and I think it was preferable to the demise of the people who survived the plane crash but didn’t make it through the next two months. Not that I would have survived even if I had their incredible will - almost everyone who made it out was a Catholic 20-something athlete, and a buff rugby player with an unshakable faith in God and a sunny disposition, I am not.
I don’t know if the rugby team had ever heard of the Donner party, I can’t imagine why they would have. Apparently most of the crash survivors (maybe all of them?) had never been in snow before their ordeal. I’ve watched enough survival TV to recognize that the odds of surviving when neither you nor the outside world know where you are, the temperature is deadly, and you have no food, are really low. And I’ve listened to my husband recite enough podcasts to know that anthropophagy causes terrible and deadly disease. I would not have eaten a dead body with that information.
Except, it turns out that’s not true. I looked it up because I knew the Uruguayans (some of whom are still living today!) didn’t go insane as a result of eating their dead friends. Turns out, you can contract a prion disease (of which Mad Cow Disease is one), which are deadly and incurable, from eating infected flesh. Human brains in particular can carry prion diseases, and they have been transmitted due to anthropophagy before, but it’s by no means inevitable.
Ruling out 1) the extremely unlikely event of having to decide whether to consume dead humans, 2) the fact that you wouldn’t necessarily die a horrific and painful death because of eating humans, and 3) the assumption that your will to live is exceptionally robust, we’d have to contend with our personal ethics and memories. For many people, this extends to certain kinds of animal meat (or all animal products!) and we develop our attitudes toward meat consumption through beliefs and experiences that vary widely.
Some of La Sociedad de la Nieve’s most moving scenes depict the crash survivors working through the ethics of eating their deceased friends. Most of the survivors were Catholic and concerned about the desecration of dead bodies (not unique to Catholicism), but ultimately they decided it was a greater sin to choose death for themselves (slow suicide) if they had the option of surviving through cannibalism.
Two young men took it upon themselves to be the ones to break down the dead bodies in such a way that the flesh was not recognizable as specific body parts, or of which bodies they came from. In that way, they could spare the others from some of the memories. I don’t know the details of the Donner party story well, but I wonder if their madness was a result of the very thing that scientific knowledge has supposedly sterilized us against: their spirits were effected by the memory of the friends they consumed, whereas the rugby team was able to essentially dehumanize meat. Perhaps a danger of consuming certain meats beside vulnerability to prion diseases is vulnerability to the less-scientifically-understood “disease” of corrupted memory.