So, are we all cannibals in times of necessity? Napoleon’s captains having eaten their corporals at the gates of burned Moscow? The Donner party? Mountainous plane crash survivors?
Is the prohibition on cannibalism solely cultural, or are there evolutionary pressures acting as a human species disincentive (diseases like kuru, etc.)? Can cannibalism be compared with incest on a morality scale? I have much to think about.
Thanks! But there’s 47 of us now.
Donner, party of forty-nine, your table is waiting! 
Self-cannibalism, or autophaghy in the perhaps not so distant future might be an matter of personal preference - if you have a supply of your own tissue growing in a vat somewhere, consuming nothing but synthesised nutrients, you could have it cultured into a reasonably wide range of edible types…
the artificial reconstruction of meat would need an original to copy from, and why not use the cells from your own body rather than inconvenience those of another species?
Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
story
that’s autophagy by the way
FordPrefect
Jomo Mojo:
I think the first board use of the concept was George (HpstrDufuz) who coined the term “Deophagy” on the old AOL board.
[ul]
[sup]Does oral sex count?[/sup][/ul]
Of course it does, if you swallow. For nourishment.
Actually, there’s probably a term for this, since there was a Greek myth about a king who repeatedly sold his daughter into slavery (for some reason she kept escaping and coming back to him), eventually she falls in love with someone and runs off with him, leaving her father for the last time, as he watches her go, he shakes his fist at her, only to notice how meaty it is. He then proceeds gnaw away and eventually all that’s left is a pair of gnashing teeth. No idea of what the names of the central figures in this were. I imagine one of medical or mythological types could provide the answer.
“Does oral sex count?”
When I meet someone & they say they are vegetarians, I always say 'so, no oral sex?"
Boy, some of you people’s idea of oral sex scares the hell outta me.
And I, as a vegetarian say, “Well not with a cow! Yuch!”
How about that guy who sought nourishment in The Grapes Of Wrath?
Well, Joe, he got it didn’t he?
Do high school boys still get titillated at that passage?
Do high school boys still get titillated at that passage?
Not if they stay abreast of the plot.
That was a borrowing of an old, old theme in art and literature: Caritas Romana or “Roman Charity.” Guy de Maupassant also wrote a short story with this theme.
I was speaking to the maitre d’ of a restaurant in MD; I explained to her that I didn’t eat meat, she replied, “why should you, you’re a man?”
(This put me on the back-foot, the idiomatic usage of eat meat was new to me, as the meaning dawned upon me I found it to be such an ickily off-colour comment that I ate somewhere else. Since then I have considered that maybe it was a come-on (the English accent, and all, gets 'em evertime). Damn!)
The OP’s auto-cannibalism is clearly cannibalism technically, if not in spirit. I pulled a thorn from my gf’s finger last week and kissed away the drop of blood that flowed – does that make me a hypocritical vegetarian?
Vegetarians can eat semen, just as they can eat milk and hens’ eggs and other animal secretions. However vegans cannot. Especially not the semen of animals.