Alright, this just sounds really off the wall, but I guy I was recently chatting with sent me all kinds of news articles about a new trend in China that involved eating unborn fetus;… yeah tasty… There are some mysterious images on rotten.com that were anonymously sent to them that keeps getting tacked onto the various news articles floating around.
I honestly don’t believe it, I think it’s crap- but I wanted to ask the masses what they’ve heard. So anyone know if this is another sensationalized scam?
From the title of the OP, this could also refer to a gang of rapacious toddlers ravaging villages in China.
But that wouldn’t make sense. The babies would just be hungry again an hour later.
I know of placenta’s being made into Chinese medicine and taken orally. That said, eating human foetus’ is culturally abhorrent in Chinese culture and I’m sure highly illegal.
Any chance that your friend just got back from a foreign film festival? One of my coworkers was at one the other week here in SF and one of the films (title withheld so as not to spoil the surprise) was about exactly this. To hear my friend tell it, the entire audience was disgusted (some people had to leave the theatre) and a lot of people were pretty ticked (it was taken as a slur against mainland Chinese). Same friend just came back from a month-long trip to the mainland and while he is extremely adventurous culinarily speaking he never mentioned anything like this.
Come to think of it the pictures that you saw might even have been captures from that movie. I haven’t seen the movie and have no intention of going to rotten.com (I just ate dinner) so I’m guessing but the timing is interesting.
The one I saw, I read was some Chinese artist, a shock-artist commentary on the one-child-policy and all that. Some of the photos show a real expired fetus being handled, but the ones of him eating it are a doll–it doesn’t look like the same fetus.
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Although I have no doubt that the Chinese no longer eat babies, was there a point in time where they did? I ask because Albert Fish, the only man convicted of cannibalism in the US, said he developed a taste for human flesh after being convinced by a friend to try it when said friend had been stranded in China during a great famine.
There are many allegations of cannibalism throughout Chinese history. In my limited reading, the allegations do not differ much from Western cannibalism, fact and fiction: the Donner parties and famines, Sweeney Todds and serial killers, Christian infants eaten by Jews and mixed into witches’s brews, etc.