'Bon apetite' was Re: [extropy-chat] wretched journalists strike again

[Brett Paatsch]

Adrian Tymes wrote:

> --- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>> BTW: I probably should apologise for my comments about eating
>> Americans
>> - very poor taste that :-)
> 
> Poor health consequences aren't the only reason cannibalism isn't
> practiced widely.  For some, human meat and many other unhealthy
> foods just (literally) taste yucky.  ;)

Yes, as the pickled herring says "eat the wagon wheel, eat the wagon
wheel !"  (an obscure incidental reference to an advertisement that
appeared on Australian television). 

I'm curious and slightly sceptical about that "tasting yucky". I think we
have touched on this before here. I wonder if there is in fact any good
data or science behind it. I understand that tribes that ate the brains of
their recently dearly departed family tended to get nasty prion type 
diseases perhaps like 'mad cows' or 'cruishanks jakobs' but I'm inclined
to think they probably just didn't cook 'the meal' very well and that is
generally a dangerous practice regardless of what form of  animal one
eats. 

(One of the biggest arguments made for the safety of GM by GM 
supporters is that dna gets broken down in the stomach, indeed there 
is a famous experiment that was done to substantiate that notion of 
dna not getting past the stomach at one time -not sure how that can
gel with the dangers of ingesting prions and viruses which are going
to be made of nucleotide sequences).

I suspect that the real health prohibitions against eating people are 
more to do cultural, conventional, taboo and nowadays politics than
with the purely nutritional aspects. 

I'm sure that there would be a physiological biochemical basis to taste
so it would be possible to explore the idea that people taste bad without
actually tasting them I suspect. 

Brett Paatsch