Editing Cannibalism (section)

==History & Biology==
Multiple cultures throughout history have practiced cannibalism, more for mystic/cultural reasons than out of necessity.  The most common notion behind ritual cannibalism is that by consuming an enemy's flesh, a person would gain their strength.  That being said, the practice was near-universally banned by nearly every group that had enough food (specifically protein) to go around, for fairly obvious ethical, moral and hygienic reasons.  

Eating your own species is a '''really''' great way to spread disease, and not a very polite thing to do to a stranger. While we do also get diseases from animal meat, a lot of them are rendered moot by cooking and the fact that they're incompatible with a human's complex physiology, so they just get digested and pass through the body. That isn't so much the case with eating someone else of your own specie. Its also not very pragmatic either. Human meat, even under the best conditions, has poor calorific content, meaning you're not getting a lot of energy from consuming it compared to the ones you'd get from eating livestock or game. So really there's no good reason for people to eat other people, save for some very, ''very'', dire circumstances where things like morality, health, and nutritional  needs are becoming more of a suggestion than rule.

A prominent example of a disease spread by cannibalism is Kuru, a prion-based neurodegenerative disease which affected the Fore people of Papua New Guinea through their tradition of consuming their dead as part of the funeral rite (it was thought to free the spirit of the deceased), or specifically any infected nervous tissue like the brain. Symptoms include muscle tremors, loss of coordination leading to the inability to walk or even sit without support, emotional instability, and certain death. Things like this probably helped lead to the idea of ghouls and other such degraded man eaters.

More common is cannibalism by desperation. If fields burned before harvest lie under snow, storehouses plundered by passing armies, what little escaped pillage is either locked away in hordes or rationed out in sub-subsistence portions by those remaining power, game (including sparrows and rats) is running thin and people will kill each other for a sack of turnips, turning the remains of a dead enemy patrol into warrior-burgers and knight-steaks so you might make it to till the land and reap again beats an otherwise assured miserable death. Same goes if you're in a siege and you've emptied the larders and granaries, butchered the horses and finished off the cats, rats and songbirds leaving only fallen comrades. This sort of thing, while still undeniably unpleasant, is not so much evil as tragic.

Further, cannibalism was enough of an occasional feature of nautical life (almost always in fairly extreme circumstances involving a lack of food) to be somewhat regularly discussed when the subject came up. This side of the subject is probably beyond the nature of this article, save to note that it kept "civilized" people from being ''too'' high-and-mighty about the practice.

There is a point in which the term no longer applies. Eating a tomato grown in soil fertilized with the ashes of a dead guy is not cannibalism, even though it's the same molecules that was once old Steve.

Also of particular interest, as it gets cited in /tg/ related discussions of the subject: the mating habits of certain insects, the females of which may eat the males after mating--although, by most biologists' accounts, many such species do so only rarely, except when in captivity.

[[Category:History]]