Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, Search Engine Nation and beyond. February 20th is National Cherry Pie Day as well as National Muffin Day, two widely celebrated, widely observed American holidays with the same message, some foods should be eaten.
In honor of both of these holidays, we're re-airing one of our very favorite episodes, which is about what foods you can eat and can't eat, and a young man with questions about both. Also, if you have a moment, we've been real good and haven't asked this for a while. Please consider reviewing and rating us on Apple Podcasts.
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I'm four and my name is Adam.
And did you just turn four or have you been four for a while?
I turned four like a few days ago. You turned four in May, right?
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Chapter 2: What question about cannibalism does a four-year-old ask?
Yeah, nothing as extreme as the taboo of eating human meat, but the first thing that comes to mind is balut.
What's balut?
It's a Filipino... and they may eat it in other parts of the world. It's a fertilized duck egg. I think it can also be other poultry eggs, meaning unlike an unfertilized egg that you eat with bacon for breakfast, it's been fertilized, so it's like the fetus of a duck.
That sound you're hearing in the background is of a precocious and slightly bored four-year-old figuring out that if you make funny sounds with your mouth, the microphone will pick them up. Anyway, Balut. So when you bite into it, is there like...
You, like, pull out what looks like an embryonic bird.
Wow.
I had it only once many years ago at a Filipino restaurant, but it's very, very popular there. Like, so popular that kids eat it as, like, an after-school snack. And I try to remember that it's, like, everything is so based on what you grew up eating, what was considered normal. So it's, like, for me, yes, I can't quite get over how weird that feels, but I totally can understand how...
Someone could grow up eating that and think it was the most normal thing in the world.
But when you were eating it, the FM radio station in your brain was just broadcasting like, no, no, stop, no.
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Chapter 3: How do cultural taboos shape our understanding of cannibalism?
Did they call it peak mummy? No, they just pretended like they had more mummies and started finding other recently dead people. That sounds... I don't want to go on a limb. That sounds bad. It was bad. So they had recipes to speed up the mummification process of corpses. There's a... I don't know how to pronounce this.
There's a 17th century book called London Pharmacopoeiae, which includes a recipe describing how to do this. I've read about it in Shutt's book, but the recipe recommends that, quote, a mummy be made of the cadaver of a redheaded man, age 24, who'd been hanged.
The corpse is to lie in cold water in the air for 24 hours, after which the flesh was cut in pieces and sprinkled with a powder of myrrh and aloes. This was soaked in the spirit of wine and turpentine for 24 hours, hung up for 12 hours, and again smoked in the spirit mixture for 24 hours, and finally hung up to dry.
Was there a sense about why these people were being hanged? Or was the idea that we're hanging so many people, we can just grab some of the ones that happen to have red hair?
My guess is the latter, although I'm also not sure how you get from... there's something special about an Egyptian mummy to whatever is special about an Egyptian mummy is also special about a red-haired person, except for maybe red-haired people were rare.
But in a non-taboo sense, that seems like a big distinction, right? What do you mean? Are we killing people so we can eat them, or are we doing weird things to corpses?
Yeah, and I have to say, in my whatever internal kind of taboo radar I have inside of me, Killing people so you can eat them feels like way worse than doing weird things to corpses. Like if they were hanging. I mean, as someone who does not want to be killed so he can be eaten, I absolutely agree with that.
And I'll say on your podcast right now, you know, hundreds of years from now, if something happens to what remains of my corpse, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. It seems completely fine. Yeah, so I don't know. Completely fine. You're on the record, PJ. It seems mostly completely fine. They're going to have to bury you in an unmarked location. They can just throw me in the ocean.
Okay, so remembering Otto's question, why can't we eat people? I think what's nice about the carob story is it's kind of like the fact that we have this taboo against cannibalism. We would have the taboo anyway. I feel very confident about that.
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