— The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
The word taboo has a Polynesian origin, and the English explorer and navigator Captain James Cook reported that its use by the South Sea islanders related to the prohibition of an array of behaviors—from eating certain foods to coming into physical contact with tribal leaders. Unfortunately for Cook, the first official link between the terms taboo and cannibalism may have been based on his crew’s initial, though evidently mistaken, fear that Cook himself had been cannibalized.
On February 14, 1779, after what turned out to be a serious misunderstanding, Cook was clubbed to death by Hawaiian islanders, who then cooked and deboned his body before divvying it up among local chiefs as a way as of incorporating him into their aristocracy. Since it was only right that Cook’s own people got their share of the body, a charred section of it was returned to Lieutenant James King, who asked the Hawaiians if they had eaten the rest of it. According to King, “They immediately shewed [sic] as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” So while the islanders had murdered, cooked, and filleted the explorer, they hadn’t eaten him, though the latter point is often misrepresented in accounts of the incident.
Reay Tannahill, a British historian who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, was perhaps best known for her books Food in History and Sex in History. In 1975 she wrote Flesh and Blood, the first scholarly study of cannibalism accessible to the general public. In it, Tannahill proposed that Judeo-Christian customs related to the treatment of the dead contributed to the strongly held belief that eating people was wrong. Specifically, she referred to the “belief that a man needed his body after death, so that his soul might be reunited with it on Judgment Day.” Since cannibalism involved dismemberment as well as other procedures familiar to those in the butchery profession, it was no surprise that these practices induced in Christians and Jews alike “an unprecedented and almost pathological horror of cannibalism.”
Decades later, others, like journalist and author Maggie Kilgore, addressed questions related to the prevalence of cannibalism taboos. They suggested that in addition to wanting the bodies of the dead to stick around intact until Judgment Day, our picky rituals concerning what foods could or couldn’t be eaten (e.g., the Jewish ban on eating pork) were just as important.
To Kilgore, the term “you are what you eat” is a reflection of the importance of food as a “symbolic system used to define personal, national and even sexual differences.” Outsiders and foreigners, according to Kilgore, are often “defined in terms of how and, especially, what they eat, and denounced on the grounds that they either have disgusting table manners or eat disgusting things.” For example, the derogatory term “frogs” for French people is based on their consumption of frogs’ legs—something the British (who coined the term) would presumably never do. Likewise, and once again echoing anthropologist Bill Arens’s stance, calling someone a cannibal becomes a means of using dietary practices (whether real or imagined) to define a particular culture as savage or primitive.
Of course this idea leads to the question of whether cannibalism might be more frequent or more readily acceptable in cultures that don’t hold Judeo-Christian beliefs about the afterlife or whose adherents follow diets with fewer religious or culturally imposed restrictions. First, though, let’s investigate how the Western cannibalism taboo became so widespread—a phenomenon that began with an ancient civilization whose early writings would go on to influence both Christian and Semitic cultures.