Could you do it?

I can say right now, where I sit, hell no, I couldn't! But that's me here and now, warm in my cubicle at work, full from lunch, and drinking a Diet Coke!

The majority of human beings are civilized. We no longer have to hunt for survival, if we don't choose to. Most of us are fortunate enough to dwell in a home with electricity and heat, and have every modern convenience, as well as the luxury of living within walking distance of a convenience store, restaurant or grocery store chock full of any food we could imagine, or, are fortunate enough to live in a country that provides food if we have none. We don't have to worry about eating our family or friends or even our pets if we are hungry. This is the result of many thousands of years of human evolution and development. Human flesh never became a regular part of our daily menu thankfully because, depending what part of the world you live in, there has always been a wide array of other food sources. However, in some cultures, the eating of human flesh was commonplace, and over time became a symbolic ritual than that of survival.

Now, lets say you've crashed in what may as well have been categorized as the Moon. Your life as you knew it just got knocked back to the caveman days. Fire was a luxury, if there were anything combustable to burn, and all you've got to eat are a few crumbs that survived the crash and a bunch of dead bodies. What do you do when the crumbs run out?

Wild animals have always eaten their own kind in extreme conditions. I remember reading a news article about some crazy old woman who had a house full of cats. She had passed away, and when the authorities found her some time later, they found the woman had been partially eaten by the cats, after they ran out of food. Her own pets ate her! Humans are no different. Despite what we may think, deep down, we're animals like everything else on this planet. Maybe not on the surface, but there's a primal side to us all.

Did they come to this decision lightly? By all accounts, no. They were a religious group, and only when they all agreed that God would find the greater sin would be to die than stay alive did they give in to their hunger. Some held off from eating the meat as long as they could. I believe one died of starvation after becoming too weak to go on, mere weeks before rescue. With the radio down, these guys had the unfortunate inconvenience of crashing about 15 years before cell phones and GPS were widely available to the average consumer. They could get radio stations on a tiny transistor radio rigged with a homemade antenna. I would imagine they might have been able to get a signal with a cell phone...maybe.

Could I eat my own family? No. I can say that right now, no I couldn't! That's probably why Nando told the others that his mom and sister were off limits, and why Javier Methol said the same of his wife Liliana. I believe only the Strauch cousins handled the cutting of meat for everyone, and were most likely the only ones who really "knew" who they were eating. Everyone on that plane knew each other in some way, except maybe the pilots. That being said, the only comfort I would get from eating the meat, aside from staving off hunger, is not knowing whose body it was from.

The part where I think I'd rather starve was when the meat supply started to get low, and they had to eat other internal parts of the bodies in order to "conserve" the supply. This being the kidneys, livers, and the hearts! In Nando's book, he revealed how eventually they moved on to things they couldn't stomach before, such as the lungs. And then, the worse yet..."splitting the skulls to get at the brains"! ARRGH!

Piers Paul Reads' book "Alive" expanded upon this a bit, to the extent that I was really bothered. Canessa apparently was the first one to slice the forehead of one corpse, and mash the skull in to get the brains. The brains were edible, as long as they weren't rotten. Thus, they could be used for "sauce" so pieces of the other meat could be added. Like SOUP! And with there being a lack of anything to use as a bowl, some of the survivors used the top halves of the skulls as a bowl. Wouldn't any of this seem a bit disturbing to you? At what point do you get USED to this? How could you go back to normal life after this?

They did this, in part, to help make it as palatable as possible, but also to break up the monotony. Rotted meat, it was said, had a distinct "cheese" flavor to it. They even ate the blood clots that formed in the heart because they craved salt.

OK...I can understand eating the meat to stay alive...but who said it had to TASTE GOOD or have flavor? I wasn't under the impression they savored it that much. At first, when the meat was cut into tiny pieces and dried on top of the plane, they tried not to chew it, as in, get pleasure from it, but to get it into their stomachs for their bodies to absorb and stay alive.

I don't blame them for doing what they had to do. I wasn't there. But I'm not so sure I could have waited as long as these guys did to find a way out. Being on that mountain at that height took a murderous toll on their bodies, so they had to get strong before they could even try. But if it comes down to me having to use somebody's head as an ice cream bucket to eat out of, let me at the mountain. I might only make it 5 feet, but at least I died trying!


Living in the penthouse must be nice, but it's a shorter fall from the basement. -Florida Evans

Human beings are animals. Humans eat animals. Once the body and mind is dead, it is an empty husk of palatable flesh. If you have no problem eating animals, you're a hypocrite if you've a problem eating human flesh. It may seem sick to the rediculous notions of man made ethics, but you are animals through and through. I'd rather eat non-human meat myself, but in that predicament, I'd have no problem whatsoever eating the dead. People who say they wouldn't do so are fooling themselves. When you starve for long enough, your body goes into feral mode, and you will eat whatever is edible near you, be it plant, animal, or human. This had been documented as fact. So please people, stop acting high and mighty and lying to yourselves and others. You're animals, get over it.