I don't know. Like others have said, if I was crashed in the Andes with only the dead bodies of my teammates to keep me alive then maybe, but I really couldn't say until I was actually in that situation. Intellectually it'd be an easy choice, but emotionally it'd be difficult. However, my friend Leon and I used to play a game when we'd ride the train home from work together: Which celebrity would you eat and how would you cook them. I seem to recall Denzel Washington being BBQ...
I would only eat Human flesh if trapped and starving with no immediate hope of rescue, or if it were packaged as nutritious green wafers.
Obviously wouldn't kill anyone, so I would starve under those circs. However the Andes situation I think everyone would have done the same thing.
These are all good suggestions. But on a more serious note--I'm trying to think of a situation in which cannibalism would be acceptable, outside of being adrift in the ocean or stranded in the mountains with no hope of rescue. Personally, I have no objection to the act of eating human flesh, per se. That's just a food taboo, and as scotpens put it: meat is meat. (And since there seems to be no word for human meat in English, I suggest we follow precedent, and call it "homm," from the French homme.) The problem is: how do I go about obtaining the ground homm for my manwich, without violating someone's rights? The only acceptable way of obtaining this meat would seem to be a system of voluntary bequests: people could will their bodies to the meat-packing industry, the way they will them to science. That's not completely outside the realm of possibility. It only became socially acceptable to will your body to science over the past hundred years or so. But on the one hand, the fact that meat-packing is a for-profit industry would make me leery about just taking their word for the fact that their homm had been obtained by bequest. And it's hard to imagine any meat-packer being willing to handle homm, until the taboo against eating it had declined markedly. It's also hard to imagine people donating their bodies to be eaten in sufficient numbers to make it economical for any business to sell it. Though I suppose it would be possible to run some kind of boutique internet-based human butcher shop for the wealthy--homm.com?--which offered cash incentives in exchange for bequests. But any system of cash incentives would invite abuses. One reason why we moved to a system of voluntary bequests of bodies for medical education was because the old system of paying body snatchers for digging up corpses led to murder for dissection. Finally, given the way most people die in our society, I doubt their homm would be palatable.
Just slice off a bit of your leg if you are so keen to try it. You don't need a whole meal to get the flavor. Slice it off, put it in the fridge to keep and attend to your wound. Then cook it up.
I like my legs the way they are, thanks. A friend of mine recently fractured her foot: this drove home to me just how difficult life can be without two fully-functional legs. If I'm ever paralyzed, however, I will definitely keep your suggestion in mind.
No. I'd sooner be someone's elses meal. I'm so sqeamish though I'd have a hard enough time killing any creature, let alone handling it's body.
I believe there was a similar situation not too long ago where somebody sold a limb to a wealthy eccentric who had a hankering for homm steak. All things considered, it wouldn't surprise me if that were not the only time it happened. But, more interesting, especially as a recipe for a meaty SF tale, would be the question of what happens when it becomes possible to clone Human flesh and muscle. This technology is being developed as a means of creating auto-transplants, but there may be other commercial applications. With no victim, there is no crime-- but imagine the controversy!
I guess that most of us like to think (or would like to think) that we'd never eat a human corpse, but hunger is a great motivator and some might say that the persistent lack of a food source might tear away the veneer of civilised behaviour that separates us from the beasts. I'm a #2.
Well.. it's beyond disgusting but at the end of the day it's just flesh, like cow flesh. I refuse to eat lamb brains which are sold in some butchers here but if I was starving I would. Of course I might eat them if I was extremely hungry as well whereas it would have to be a survival issue to eat human meat.
But do you eat regular cuts of lamb (or beef or pork, for that matter)? The only difference is what part of the animal it comes from. The only reason (other than taste) that I would tend to avoid organ meats is that they’re high in cholesterol. Interesting how so many folks here — among Trek fans, who are generally considered to be an open-minded lot — are disgusted by the very idea of eating human meat and would do so only under the direst of circumstances. Now, mind you, I probably wouldn’t want to make it part of my everyday diet. But honestly, no bullshit, I’d like to taste “hairless goat” just once. Properly cooked, of course, not raw. I’m not a savage. Although I’d probably rather be left in the dark about who I was eating.
I think RJD is right: we aspiring cannibals will have to wait until human meat can be cloned before we can indulge our unnatural tastes. Which makes me wonder: do people eat replicated homm in Star Trek? If not--why not? What happens to food taboos when food can be replicated?