Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Oh my god, 100% Read a post about it on r/196 a while ago, went something like "It's important to have discussions about things like cannibalism because arguments like «it's just gross/bad/unnatural» have been used to condemn homosexuality and the like"
I'm not saying I would murder someone to try human, but I would go to the store to try longpork
If a person said "I'll kill myself and you can eat me afterwards" and they were eaten, what would be wrong about eating them? We eat animals every day. Humans are animals. What's ethically wrong with eating them?
Of course, if it turned into a capitalistic venture, that would be a completely different discussion: how would you know the human meat were sourced by voluntary deaths? Once there's money involved, things get very tricky.
Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.
Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.
I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.
Prions can exist in any meat and are incredibly difficult to destroy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization
That's a good argument. Many people seem to have a kneejerk response to eating human meat though, which I'm not sure comes from that knowledge.
I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.
You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).
That is an interesting correlation I hadn't thought about. Thank you. You might be onto something there.