Trapped In the Snow With That Brother-In-Law Who Won't Stop Talking? Consider the Cannibal Lifestyle

Apparently there is some upside beyond even the blissful tranquility of silence.
From our 2010 post "Bite Me: An evolutionary case for cannibalism":

While strolling last month through one of the dimly lit backrooms in a wing of the National Galleries of Scotland, my inner eye still tingling with thousands of Impressionistic afterimages, pudgy Rubensian cherubs, and gothic quadrangles, one irreverent painting leapt out at me in a very contemporary sort of way. It was part of an early-16^th-century triptych showing what appeared to be a solemn, middle-aged clergyman in gilded ecclesiastical robes commanding three naked adolescent boys before him in a bathtub.

Now, I must say, my first thought on seeing this salacious image was that the Catholic Church has been a hebephilic haven for far longer than anyone realized. But my uneasiness was put to rest once I leaned in to read the caption, which stated that the Dutch artist Gerard David, a prolific religious iconographer based in Bruges, Belgium, was merely painting a scene of starvation cannibalism. Phew! What a relief it was only an innocent case of anthropophagy (the eating of human flesh by humans) and nothing more sinister than that. The boys had been killed by a butcher, you see, and their carcasses were salting in a makeshift vat awaiting ingestion by famished townspeople. Fortunately, that most notorious child-lover himself, St. Nicholas, just happened to be passing through town when he caught wind of the boy-eating scandal and resurrected the lads in the tub.

In any event, my time in Edinburgh offered plenty of food for thought on the subject of human meat. From the art gallery, my partner, Juan, and I galloped over to the Surgeons' Hall Museum, where we wandered through aisles packed floor-to-ceiling with pickled gangrenous feet, hairy severed arms of Industrial Age elderly women, trephined heads and a sundry of sickly genitals. Also on display was an elegant leather notebook, composed of a substance resembling cowhide but, in fact, made of the skin of the famous corpse supplier-cum-murderer William Burke.

All of this got me thinking about the logistics of cannibalism. The slick commercialization of the food industry has changed things dramatically, but there were, at one time, relatively frequent conditions—crop failures, habitat depletion, famine—in which cannibalism would have had lifesaving adaptive utility for our species. One pair of anthropologists, for example, actually crunched the numbers, concluding that the average human adult provides 66 pounds of edible food, including fat, connective tissue, muscle, organs, blood, and skin. Protein-rich blood clots and marrow are said (by the rare connoisseur) to be special treats. And indeed, at least one prominent evolutionary theorist, Lewis Petrinovich from the University of California, Riverside, has argued that cannibalism is a genuine biological adaptation common to all human beings—including those of you dry-heaving as you're reading this.

Anthropophagy routinely emerges, says Petrinovich, under predictable starvation conditions, and such examples of human cannibalism are not as rare as many people believe. "The point is that cannibalism is in the human behavioral repertoire," writes Petrinovich in his 2000 book The Cannibal Within:

… and probably is exhibited for a number of reasons—a common one being severe and chronic nutritional deprivation. A behavior might be exhibited only under extreme circumstances and still be part of our biological inheritance, and the fact that its course follows a systematic pattern argues against the hypothesis that it is psychotic in character.

Petrinovich wends his way through a human history littered with the gnawed-on bones of our cannibalized ancestors, revealing that—contrary to critiques arguing that man-eating is a myth conjured up by Westerners to demonize "primitives"—we really have been gobbling each other up for a very, very long time. We're just one of 1,300 species for which "intraspecific predation" has been observed. Among primates, cannibalism can usually be accounted for by nutritional and environmental stress, or it appears as a reproductive strategy in which mothers, for example, consume their unhealthy infants to make way for more viable offspring....MORE

There's a line you don't see every day:

"...a human history littered with the gnawed-on bones of our cannibalized ancestors"

Here's another (with variant):

 "Damn you, Alferd Packer! There were seven Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!"

An alternate version of the judge's outburst is

"Packer, you depraved Republican son of a bitch! There were only five Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate them all!"

That of course is from the popular version of the story of Colorado cannibal Alferd Packer, last seen in these environs in a 2007 post and now immortalized as the namesake of the University of Colorado-Boulder student center's Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill.