url="http://www.neumu.net/continuity_error/2001/2001-[00005_continuity.shtml"]Tobias Schneebaum was an anthropologist who visited cannibal tribes in Peru in 1955 and was known to have eaten human flesh. He later caused quite a stir when he discussed this as a guest on the Mike Douglas show (daytime talk show) and shocked America with his admission. I heard an audio clip from the show on the radio, and he said it tastes like pork. I cannot find an actual quote or sound clip online, however.
I haven’t read or seen Schneebaum’s Keep The River on Your Right about his experiences, but I did find an article at salon by Douglas Cruickshank on Michael Krieger’s Conversations With the Cannibals: The End of the Old South Pacific. In the article(page 2):
Perhaps this is the most democratic answer.
Yes, Sauron, I read Cecil’s column, “Is there really such a thing as cannibalism?” I don’t like to blaspheme, but it didn’t satisfy. How could he not discuss the Jivaros? The Aztecs? That African legislator who supposedly went on a fact-finding tour in the hinterlands and was eaten by his constituents?
I saw Keep The River On Your Right, and Schneebaum did indeed say that the small piece of human flesh he ate tasted like pork. However, IIRC, he also said that he didn’t remember what the person he partook of tasted like. Regarding the talk show Schneebaum went on, it seemed to me that people were more upset over the fact that he would have sex with another man than the fact that he once ate part of one. That’s how I remember it, anyway. Not that exciting a movie, really, but it had some interesting stuff in it here and there. In my area this movie can be found for rent at Hastings Entertainment.
G. Gordon Liddy related one time on his radio show about a covert OP mission in Africa where supposedly members of the team were being killed and eaten by cannibals, except for the Italians. Someone managed to interrogate one of the cannibals as to why they weren’t eating the Italians. The cannibal pointed out that all the Italians smoked, and that they’d try to eat the meat of a smoker, but found it tasted horrible, so they only went after the non-smokers. After that, every member of the team began smoking furiously according to Liddy. Have no idea if it’s true or not, but it’s a damned funny story to hear him tell it.
Actually, the column does touch on the Aztecs, though not by name
I happened to specifically reread Arens discussion (p55-80) of the Aztecs this morning and this is pretty much a fair summary of it in a column of this length. He argues at some length about the initial accounts of the conquest of Mexico. Apparently, the few places where Cortes touches on cannibalism in the letters are less than helpful. Indeed, one of these is the natives suspecting the Spaniards of being cannibals. The other early accounts are similar. What you do get are presumptions of cannibalism in the accounts written by conquistadors late in life. For instance, it’s fairly commonly refered to by Bernal Diaz. But none of these references are obviously to eyewitness incidents. Arens suggestion is that once the effects of Spanish rule on the Mexicans became obvious in the generation or so that followed, this destructiveness was justified after the fact by the belief at the natives were cannibals. Diaz was thus projecting this prejudice back onto the memories of his youth, without altering what he’d actually seen.
I find this maybe a bit of a stretch, but my impression is that archaeologists these days tend to minimise Aztec cannibalism anyway. For instance, in his The Aztecs (Blackwell, 1996), Michael Smith sees it as entirely ceremonial, with only a little of a sacrificed captive being eaten by the warrior who caught them. He’s dismissive of the whole protein deficiency argument, describing the available diet in some detail. By contrast, he doesn’t marginalise the bloodiness of Aztec society generally. And another obvious recent survey, the catalogue of the Royal Academy Aztecs exhibition (RA, 2003), doesn’t seem to mention cannibalism at all.