Search: Search Help. Allen, Gary. 1999. What is the Flavor of Human Flesh? Presented at the Symposium Cultural and Historical Aspects of Foods Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR. to Top

WHAT IS THE FLAVOR OF HUMAN FLESH? Gary Allen

Culinary Institute of America

433 Albany Post Rd. Hyde Park, NY 12538

gallen@mhv.net Given the complexity of the tasting experience, how do we deal with describing the flavor of things we have not tasted, or indeed, things we have been forbidden to taste? Do you remember what you, as a child, imagined the flavor of coffee to be? What gustatory bliss was suggested by its delicious aroma? Or the smell of vanilla extract, that begged to be tasted, despite (or because of) the warnings from your mother? Can you recall thinking about the flavor of a food that you have only heard about, one that you have never seen or smelled? The brain immediately tries to provide the missing sensory details, drawing on all kinds of associations. The accuracy of the projected description of the flavor varies widely, depending on the breadth and sophistication of the taster's experience. Still, we are surprised when we actually experience the food. There is no way our imaginations can predict all the nuances that actually make up a flavor. On the other hand, we can summon up very precise recollections of particularly significant flavors we have experienced. These key flavor experiences endure, unchanging, for a lifetime. So how do we deal with the idea of a flavor that we have never tasted, that we are unlikely ever to experience? The description of flavors is always subjective, and usually depends upon comparison with other known flavors -- consequently we generally resort to metaphorical terms. There seems to be a great deal of speculation about the flavor of human flesh. Writers as far back as Petronius have asserted that human flesh has a distinctive quality that makes it difficult for civilized people to stomach. In The Satyricon, Eumolpus makes a will that requires his heirs to eat his flesh if they want to get their hands on his money. He advises, "Just close your eyes and imagine that, instead of human flesh, you're munching a million. If that isn't enough, we'll concoct some gravy that will take the taste away. As you know, no meat is really very tasty anyway: it all has to be sauced and seasoned with great care before the reluctant stomach will keep it down."[1] Anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy described the taste of human flesh -- based not upon his own experience, mind you, but upon the testimony of some of the natives of the New Hebrides islands of the South Pacific: "From all accounts, human meat is very sweet, in Vanuatu, they say that the flesh of a black man is sweet, whereas the flesh of a white man is really quite salty and stringy, they say it's not so nice."[2] Derek, a member of the Dani tribe in Irian Jaya reminisced about the taste of human flesh in an article in the Baltimore Morning Sun, in May 1992: "Deliciouiversity, Corvallis, OR. .Old ones are tough. Young men and women taste better. And babies taste like fish. The flesh is very soft.["3]< This, superficially, sounds like a reponse to our question -- but there is a vagueness, a reliance upon allusions to unspecified attributes of other meats, that ultimately fails to provide a satisfactory answer. In the New Guinea highlands, Gimi women, who used to eat the decomposing bodies of their menfolk did so for good endocannibalistic reasons: they wanted to keep the essence of the deceased from being wasted, to prevent the last vestiges of the memories and awareness of the dearly departed from being lost to what we might call entropy. However, "Older women remember that human flesh had a uniquely delectable sweetness"[4] The advanced state of decomposition of the Gimi's flesh adds an unsavory element that only confuses the issue at hand. If someone asked us to describe the flavor of milk, but the only form of milk we had ever tasted was ripe Gorgonzola -- our response would probably be of little utility. The Gimi woman's description of the flavor of over-ripe man is, therefore, useless to us. But there are other questions: Are the descriptions we've just heard accurate? How can we find out? Before we can hope to come up with an answer to the question, "what does it taste like?" we need to have a clearer idea of the meaning of the word "taste." Because our sensation of taste is so transient, so difficult to quantify, we think of it as too subjective for clear description. Taste is a remarkably elusive quarry to try to capture verbally. While all languages are similarly challenged, English is especially imprecise when it comes to matters of taste. Everyone has run into the problem of distinguishing between "hot, burning" when referring to the temperature of foods and the physico-chemical effect of chile peppers. English speakers can resolve this confusion, but only through some hasty and somewhat childish explanations.[5] The difficulty in describing taste experience is compounded by the nature of our tasting apparatus. Our tongue actually tastes only sweetness, sourness, saltiness and bitterness. It, together with the lips, can also feel both kinds of hotness, as well as coldness, a large range of textures and the odd numbing sensation provided by Szechuan Peppercorns and some other spices. (The Japanese add a fifth taste, "umami," that refers to the flavor of monosodium glutamate. There is, obviously, no exact translation, but it is sometimes approximated by the term "savory." Recent research in this country indicates that there are specific sensors on the tongue for umami, so there is good reason for thinking of taste as one or more of but five sensations.) The nose, however, is capable of distinguishing between thousands, possibly millions of scents. What we commonly think of as "taste" is actually a fusion of one or more of the four (or five) "tastes" listed above with one or more smells, with one or more mouth-feels, or touch sensations. In addition, we are almost incapable of "tasting" without considering the input of our other senses: the sound of sizzling meat, the glowing color of a ripe fruit, the slightly oily crunch of a potato chip, the soft yielding flesh of a perfect avocado, its color blending seamlessly from jade to chartreuse. This assemblage of sensations is then modified by our memories and imaginations. When we taste, we remember and compare other "tastes," other experiences and expectations, implicit and explicit. We automatically engage this entire sensory battery whenever we pop a morsel into our mouths. Proust was able to instantly recapture large portions of departed memories with a taste of a madeleine dipped in linden tea, but we are incapable of tasting (or indeed, even thinking about tasting) a madeleine without summoning all we know of Proust. That is quite an extensive range of sensations for one little cake-like cookie. The result of all these instantaneous analyses is not mere "taste," but a more complex experience that is better described by the word "flavor." To avoid confusion, the word "taste" should be reserved for the limited range of sensations produced by the four (or five) basic tastes described above. Our search, then, is for information about the flavor, not the taste, of human flesh. In Italo Calvino's story Under the Jaguar Sun," the narrator and his lover are visiting Mexico. The food they encounter is, of course, wonderfully seductive. The Aztec ruins they visit gradually entangle them in a discussion of the cannibalism practiced by the ancients. Once these two aspects of Mexican culture (diet and history) are combined in their minds, they are drawn into speculation about the culinary properties of humankind. Olivia, the narrator's lover, is especially caught up in the search for gastronomic understanding. She repeatedly tries to engage people in discussions on the topic, asking for example: "But this flesh - in order to eat it... The way it was cooked, the sacred cuisine, the seasoning -- is anything known about that?"[6] The Mexicans that she interviewed were understandably reluctant to get too involved with this crazy gringa. However, Olivia is persistent enough to eke out the following, somewhat abridged, dialog: Olivia: "flesh that couldn't be eaten just for the sake of eating, like any ordinary food. And the flavor they say it isn't good to eat?" Salustiano (her Mexican guide): "A strange flavor, they say." Olivia: "It must have required seasoning -- strong stuff." Salustiano: "Perhaps that flavor had to be hidden. All the other flavors had to be brought together, to hide that flavor."[7] Olivia continued her speculations with the narrator afterwards. They were thinking about eating the wonderfully exotic foods of Mexico, but their words were concerned with the nature of cannibalism and its influence on modern Mexican cuisine. Olivia: "We who tear one another apart, pretending not to know it, pretending not to taste flavors anymore." Narrator: "You mean that here -- that they need stronger flavors here because they know, because they ate . . ." Olivia: "The same as at home, even now. Only we no longer know it, no longer dare look, the way they did."[8] Olivia has hit upon the issue of the avoidance of knowledge, of the culpability for the death of the eaten, that Visser wrote about in Much Depends on Dinner. "We generally avoid actually killing what we eat ourselves, and do everything we can to prevent ourselves from realizing that a death has occured at all."[9] Olivia guessed that Aztec diners were not compromised by our modern taste for self-deception. Olivia: "For them there was no mystification: the horror was right there, in front of their eyes. They ate as long as there was a bone to pick clean, that's why the flavors . . ." Narrator:"To hide the flavor?" Olivia: "Perhaps it couldn't be hidden. Shouldn't be. Otherwise, it was not like eating what they were really eating. Perhaps the other flavors served to enhance that flavor, to give it a worthy background, to honor it."[10] Calvino has done an admirable job in describing the process of imagining the flavor of human flesh, the application of ideas about culture, and religious responsibility to make an educated guess about an unknown foodstuff. Like any speculation of this sort, we know that the results are bound to offer little more than philosophical interest. How can we really know more about the flavor of this forbidden fruit? There are (or have been) people from other cultures who have tasted human flesh. We can ask them -- either directly or by reading accounts of other peoples' interviews with cannibals. There are two obstacles to our understanding when using this approach. The latter method depends upon previous investigators having asked pertinent questions. In most cases, anthropologists and explorers have had concerns that did not include wanting to know about the flavor of human flesh. Aside from using the mere existence of cannibalism as something to be exploited, these investigators didn't really want to know about the subject in quite so much depth. Both methods -- reading through existing documentation and direct interviews -- suffer from another impediment to understanding. If a cannibal was asked about the flavor of the meat, and the quality of the translation of the question and answer were adequate, the probability is still great that the cannibal would not be able to describe it well. We know how difficult it is for us to describe well the ethereal nature of a flavor, why should we expect the process to be easier for our cannibal acquaintance? Even if his description was full of insights into all the things a gastronome wants to know, what cultural assumptions would cause gaps in the record, gaps the existence of which are invisible to us? At an even more fundamental level, anthropologists need to know that the people being studied have not altered their lifestyles in response to the outside world. Again and again, interviewers have found an understandable reluctance to speak openly about cannibalism among groups who have contact with the modern world. Margaret Mead expressed the delicacy of the problem, she wrote, "[when an anthropologist] is interested in warfare, headhunting or cannibalism, he must be ahead of full pacification by government. He must, in fact, catch a culture trembling on the edge of change, but hopefully not yet altered by the knowledge that change is on the way."[11] She was well-qualified to give this advice, for the research for her own book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies had been hampered by such "pacification" of the Mundugumor: "the second chapter is called'The Pace of Life in a Cannibal Tribe' The small print in the footnote informs the reader that the former practice of cannibalism was outlawed by the Australian authorities three years before Mead's arrival."[12] Likewise, the Danish explorer Jens Bjerre, in 1957, described a small village in the valley of Menyamya in the New Guinea highlands: "The purpose of the outpost was to serve as a base for surveying and pacifying the district, and from it to contact the natives and endeavor to put down their tribal warfare and cannibal orgies."[13] William Arens's book, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy asserted that cannibalism -- other than for survival, during such life-threatening situations as famine or shipwreck -- has never existed. However, reports, such as those of Mead and Bjerre, suggest that there must have been some reason for the authorities to enact such laws. Most laws are written in response to something -- if there was no cannibalism among Kukukuku of Menyamya, or among the Mundugumor, why go to the trouble of legislating it out of existence? Arens would have us believe that the charge of cannibalism has usually been made by colonial powers in an attempt to justify their own acquisitive natures. The mere fact that some unscrupulous individuals may have yelled "Fire!" in crowded theaters does not constitute proof that fire has never existed.[14]