Prion diseases. Accumulation of different substances, like mercury, lead, strontium-90, and, a new contender to the list: micro plastics. And you’ll want to have a look at a person’s medication and likely want to make sure they’ve been off of it for a few days before consuming their flesh.
Farm animals are legally allowed to eat actual plastic, not only microplastics. If you’re afraid of microplastics or accumulation of substances maybe don’t eat meat.
Legal limit of plastic in animal feed is 0.15% in the EU
A cow eats 25kg of dry food a day
25/100*0.15 = 0.0375kg = 37.5grams
A plastic bag weighs 6-8grams.
You are legally allowed to feed your cow 5 plastic bags a day (as a snack)
Bioaccumulation concentrates more pollutants the higher up the food chain you go. It is part of why most meat we eat comes from vegetarian animals. The fish we eat are often predatory so common advice is the keep the smaller and younger ones that are still big enough to be worth filleting. You don’t actually want to eat a trophy sized fish because they’ve accumulated more pollutants. Trophy sized fish are better off being realsed, they are often good breeders and help keep healthy population numbers.
Of course, something that eats cows that eat a shitton of plastic, will have even more plastic in it.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to eat an animal that has been fed (assuming they are slaughtered at 3 years, and ignoring the climate impact, the ethics of slaughtering an animal in its youth, etc)…
41 kg of plastic
Honestly all that toxic shit is in our food already. There’s a reason it accumulated in the “victim” too.
The problem is bioaccumulation: taking in substances faster than you can metabolize and excrete them. Eating something that has already accumulated something is worse than accumulating it from the same original sources. That’s why you can do suicide by vitamin A poisoning by eating carnivore livers.
It’s also the case that when you’re eating plant-based foods, unlike meat and dairy products, you’re eating alpha- and beta-carotene and beta-cryptoxanthin, which your body can convert to Vitamin A and which don’t cause hypervitaminosis.
So if you’re just learning “Oh, shit, Vitamin A can poison me”, don’t let that hold you back from squash, yams, carrots etc.
aren’t prion diseases usually just a thing for the brain? though I haven’t considered the medication aspect… I want to eat a human heart some day, any other things I’d need to consider? I guess I’ll just take the risk with the medications.
Misfolded proteins can occur everywhere it’s just more fatal if it happens in the brain.
the funny thing is I’m being entirely serious. I need a heart transplant and if I survive I want to turn my old heart into burgers and share them with my girlfriend and boyfriend.
It’s a prion disease. I’m pretty sure it comes from eating the brain of someone who had it.
“How would you feel if someone ate your body?”
Would I be dead? I wouldn’t care then, how could I? Go ahead, make more use of the body.
In survival situations I don’t see it as that much different than organ donation.
As long as I was already dead when someone decides they want to eat it, I’m fine with that.
Yeah, they’ll probably harvest your organs first so that process should kill you before they start eating.
Dead bodies make for poor meat the longer it rests. Which is why people don’t really eat roadkill. Unless they are looking for brain worms like RFK.
I know several people who will take roadkill if they can confirm the freshness by either witnessing the accident or knowing that the kill recently appeared. I myself almost took a deer once. It was a cold night and the deer wasn’t on the corner at midnight. But it was there at 6am while still cold outside. If I had the time and space id have likely brought it home to at least assess the meat.
Endocannibalism - eating people from your own group -has been practised as a respectful part of funerial traditions by a handful of cultures across the world and may have been more widespread in prehistory.
Tbf, that increases the risk of prion diseases.
Yeah so has ritualistic rape of boys to instill them with manhood. Historical precedent does not infer a normative ethical framework in any direction.
idk man I think the mental gymnastics go the other way around here. You have to make a shit load of assumptions to consume human flesh safely and ethically:
- the person being eaten consents to their body being eaten
- the person has no family or each and every one of their relatives consents and is totally ok with their loved one’s body ending up in a casserole
- the person has no diseases that can be transmitted by consuming some or all parts of their body: prion disease (brain), AIDS, hepatitis and loads other blood-transmitted illnesses, to name a few obvious ones
- there are no drugs or medications in the person’s body that could be absorbed into your system (regurgitated meth, yummy!)
- you have the means to effectively and safely process or cook the body yourself or we set up an entire new industry around mass human body consumption which sounds like the plot of a Stephen King novel tbh
As some have pointed out here, if eating human meat is your only available choice in an extreme life-or-death survival situation, it would have to do, but unless you also have the means to carve up and cook the body, you’re actually going to consume more energy digesting the raw flesh than what you’re getting in return. Humans make for rather poor food overall, that’s a fact. I would back this up with some evidence but I don’t feel like being put on a list for looking up the nutritional contents of human bodies lol
I don’t care for cannibalism but the second bullet doesn’t sit right with me. I always wanted to be composted. My family will hate that, but I don’t think it’s their choice.
Sure, that makes sense, but not everybody leaves a will behind or lets anybody know about their wishes when they die, out of ignorance, sudden death, there are a lot of reasons why you may die and haven’t told anyone what to do. Happens a lot with organ donors, for example.
In lieu of the deceased’s will, the relatives need to make a decision. And, IMHO, this whole cannibalism thing is a lot harder to wrap your head around than having your loved one’s organs harvested to save somebody else’s life, for example.
the person has no family or each and every one of their relatives consents and is totally ok with their loved one’s body ending up in a casserole
Assuming your first condition is already met then nah, a person’s own wishes as regards their own body ought to supersede those of anyone else
