The Science of Monsters

After eating all their provisions and animals, the Donners and their counterparts faced certain death. The great irony of this blight on American history, is that the people struggling to survive in the Sierra Nevada Mountains were dying from hypothermia, not starvation.

According to Daniel James Brown, author of The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (2009), because there was little knowledge of how hypothermia worked, those trapped in the mountains believed that starvation was the cause of their discomfort. While they were undoubtedly hungry, they were in reality weeks away from starving to death. But their collective weakening bodies led them to believe they had to eat to live. While this was true later in the winter, it was not the case early on.

How the body reacts to change in temperature.

Because of this misunderstanding, it was only days into their journey for help that one band of the settlers chose to eat the dead. In order to lessen the psychological trauma of eating their loved ones, they separated into two groups, assuring that they would eat their friends rather than their family. This natural aversion to eating their own mothers, siblings, and spouses, is more in line with how we understand cannibalism as a society. While Hannibal Lecter would relish the eating of a corpse, those poor humans in the Sierra Nevada Mountains ate flesh only when they thought it absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, eating the bodies did little to help, as it was the brutal cold that killed most of the thirty-nine.

More recently, in 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in a remote section of the Andes Mountains. Twenty-eight survivors, many of them composed of a rugby team, were trapped in a similarly hopeless situation as the Donner Party. This incident was chronicled in the 1993 film Alive. After an avalanche, ice-cold temperatures, and lack of food, only sixteen survived the seventy-two days of frozen torture. They attributed their survival to making the choice to eat those who perished. Survivor Roberto Canessa explained:

Our common goal was to survive. But what we lacked was food. We had long since run out of the meagre pickings we’d found on the plane, and there was no vegetation or animal life to be found. After just a few days we were feeling the sensation of our own bodies consuming themselves just to remain alive. Before long we would become too weak to recover from starvation. We knew the answer, but it was too terrible to contemplate. The bodies of our friends and team-mates, preserved outside in the snow and ice, contained vital, life-giving protein that could help us survive. But could we do it? For a long time, we agonized. I went out in the snow and prayed to God for guidance. Without His consent, I felt I would be violating the memory of my friends; that I would be stealing their souls. We wondered whether we were going mad even to contemplate such a thing. Had we turned into brute savages? Or was this the only sane thing to do? Truly, we were pushing the limits of our fear.⁸

While this shocking reality caused a clamor of judgment when the survivors told their story to the media, once Canessa and the others explained that those who were dying gave permission for their bodies to be used for nutrition, the families of those who died and were ultimately eaten worked to understand the dire circumstances and forgive those who had survived.

This modern example of cannibalism to survive once again demonstrates our inculcated beliefs that cannibalism is one of the worst atrocities to perform on another. Despite the extreme life-and-death circumstances, there was still hesitation from the survivors, as well as judgment by those who were not there.

In an interview with Bill Schutt, author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (2017), Beckett Mufson of VICE asked why we have an “innate” repulsion of human flesh:

I’m not so sure it’s innate. It’s deeply ingrained in Western culture. We’ve been reading this memo since the time of the ancient Greeks. From Homer and Herodotus through the Romans and then Shakespeare and Daniel Dafoe and Sigmund Freud, the snowball kept growing. You’re talking over two thousand years. Cannibalism, to these writers, was the worst taboo. Add that to Christianity and Judaism where it’s important to keep the body intact and you get the knee-jerk reaction to the very mention of the word we have right now. It has historically been convenient for Westerners to stigmatize cannibalism. If you’re Columbus and you can accuse people of being cannibals, then you can treat them like vermin. They’re not human to you. You can destroy these cultures. But there are other cultures where they’d be just as mortified to learn we bury our dead as we would be to learn that they eat their loved ones.⁹