Last night on the True Stories movie channel they aired “Alive“, the movie made a while back about the South American soccer team whose plane crashed in the snow-covered Andes Mountain, leaving them stranded for just over two months living off their dead. Kind of a morbid tale, but a fascinating one nonetheless. Even though I’ve seen the movie a few times I flipped between that and “American Idol”.
As the movie ended (16 survivors out of the original 40), I then saw that A&E was airing a special on the flight and interviewing the survivors, so I flipped over to that and saw actual footage from when a couple of the athletes were rescued – too thin, extremely weak, and devastated by the experience. Some claimed they were cannibals and accused them of killing survivors to eat, but it all came out that in fact they had not killed but rather, ate passengers that had died in the crash or died from the cold afterwards.
Then I remembered a book I read a few months ago, a true story about a whaling ship in the late 1800s that was struck by a whale and sank. The survivors of the wreck floated in rafts for weeks and weeks, starving away before finally deciding to kill each other one at a time for food. Sailors on one raft even threw lots to determined who would die. Now that’s macabre!
I asked myself then, “If I were stranded somewhere with no food and little chance for survival, would I eat dead friends?”
Absolutely. I wouldn’t even think twice. So chew on that.
I would never eat a person. No way. I’m checking out way before I get to that point. You have trouble killing flies, how are you going to eat human?
If you’d dine on dead friends, I shudder to think what you’d do to dead enemies.
Though I hear they go great with (like you didn’t see this coming a mile away) Faba beans 😉
Let me stress that I would only eat my dead friends if I was plane-crashed in the Andes, floating on a liferaft for weeks wasting away, or some other dreadful method of eventual death. I certainly wouldn’t pull a Hannibal Lector and invite my pals over to the house for a “surprise” dinner (“I know the basement is dark, but don’t worry – there’s nothing dangerous down there…”).