Farmer To Fork

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. When it comes to cannibalism, Freud said that as a society, we must forbid the practice of eating each other. Because deep down, way deep, we have a primitive urge to do just that. And when it comes to art, well, Freud basically said that it's an unsatisfied libido that leads a person to either creativity or perversion. This guy, am I right? But what if you're an artist with a taste for human flesh, or a human who dreams of being chewed, swallowed and transformed into art?

In April 2018, a new story broke in the Venezuelan state of It read like the plot of a horror movie. A man named Luis Alfredo Gonzalez Hernandez confessed to the authorities that he had murdered a farmer, quartered the man's flesh, ate a good bit of it, then burned the remains and use the victim's blood and ashes to create a piece of art. And here's the really shocking part. Hernandez coolly informed police that none of it was his idea. Hernandez said that the farmer had hired him to do it, that the entire twisted plot had actually been the victim's idea. You've heard of farm to fork cuisine. How about farmer to fork to canvas cuisine? Looks like the Venezuelan police just weren't foodies or big patrons of the arts, because they seemed unwilling to buy any part of that story. Hernandez was arrested by agents from Venezuela's scientific penal and criminal investigative body, the CICPC, which sounds like something right out of the Marvel universe. It was the director of CICPC, Douglas Rico, who first posted a photo of the suspect on social media. Now you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover and all. But let me offer a little bit of free advice. If your thing is murdering people, eating them, and then painting with their blood, try to maybe brush your hair and not glare into the camera with eyes that are like two dark pools of pure raging insanity. And also, maybe quit acting like a demon. Because what was found at that crime scene was some kind of demon level darkness, like a sheet pan holding burnt human remains, a charred vertebra, splintered bone, a random knuckle, not to mention the kind of blood evidence that even the tidiest type A murderous cannibal can't help but leave behind. Because the average adult human has somewhere between a gallon and a gallon a half of blood in their body, which might not sound like so much until it's running everywhere. Think about the last time you spilled a glass of wine or your kid knocked over a cup of milk. All it takes is six or eight ounces of spill to make a mess right? Now, empty a fully grown man. Just try to clean that up. And the artwork that Hernandez made with the blood and singed bone and ashes of what was left of his victim. It's not what you might expect. At the scene investigators found a painting of apples next to a picture full of tulips. The kind of thing your sister in law might do at one of those drink wine and paint places. There was a painting that looked a little bit like stained glass meets Paisley and a kind of primitive portrait done in mostly blues on a rough piece of wood. Nothing you would look at and go, wait, is that blood? I'm not an artist or an art critic. I can't tell you if Hernandez has real talent.

His work doesn't appeal to me. But again, there's nothing in it that makes you wonder if he dipped his paintbrush into the cooling remains of a dead body or whatever. It's just okay, that's a painting. Even investigators weren't sure of what they were seeing. Is that rusty red a smear of dried blood? Or is it paint? Maybe cinnabar or vermilion? Every piece was carted off to a forensics lab for testing.

So cannibal art is a thing, but it's usually art about cannibalism, not art made by cannibals. A person can go their whole life not even knowing this exists. And it's not some weird French thing either. Like for example, the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya might have gotten his start in 1786 as a painter in the Spanish court. You know, portraits of aristocrats and the nobility and whatnot. But he went on to revolutionize the art world and inspire generations of artists right up till today. Maybe you've seen a Goya masterpiece called Saturn devouring his son. No. Okay. Picture an old man a giant with wild eyes, long matted hair and beard, gnarled hands clutching a bloody headless human body. Mouth stretched wide as he tears into the figures right arm and shoulder. The Saturn in this painting is the Roman God, not the planet with the cool rings. And he was all worked up over a prophecy that foretold the end of his reign at the hands of his own child. Under the circumstances, what could he do but wolf down each and every one of his offspring as soon as they were born. Another famous Goya painting is called cannibal savoring human remains. Yes, from the looks of it, they are certainly doing some savoring. The cannibals are all naked. The dominant figure is holding a bloody decapitated head aloft.

In his other hand is a severed arm. It's a painting about human brutality. Can you even imagine how shocking this had to be back in 1800? But I think my current favorite cannibal painting is one called diners drive-ins and fava beans and Chianti. It's by the artist Mike Vanderhoof. And it depicts Hannibal Lecter with his scalpel, a man's head on a platter brain freshly exposed the promise fava beans and a nice Chianti. And jumping into the shot with his trademark shock of bleached hair, goatee, manic grin and bowling shirt is Food Network star Guy Fieri.

Here's the sack that contains the brain. I would really like some more. That smells great. Yeah. I would really like some. It's good. Flavortown truly a masterpiece of cannibal themed art. You can see it and the Goya paintings right now at true weird stuff.com. So cannibalism, it's an ancient human behavior. Ancient. Back in June 2023, researchers from the National Museum of Natural History published their latest findings on people eating people and what they found surprised even them. Turns out that our very distant ancestors were munching on each other as far back as 1.45 million years ago.

How do we know? How can we know? Well, the answer is a little bit unsettling. paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner was studying a fossilized human shinbone with a regular old handheld magnifying glass. What she was looking for was bite marks from the long extinct animals who preyed upon our ancestors. What she found instead, were cut marks, the kind of marks left by stone tools, the kind of marks that signaled butchery. After multiple tests and scans and repeated analysis, the finding was confirmed. This human shinbone had been on a very human menu. And just for funsies, let me add that the shinbone had other marks, which were revealed to be the bite of a big, big cat, a cat the size of a lion with a lion's powerful jaws. Of course, there were at least three kinds of saber tooth cats prowling the neighborhood where the shinbones former owner once lived. So it's hard to say exactly what kind of cat took that bite. And if you're thinking and hoping that the cat and not the cannibal was the culprit in shinbones demise, I've got news. The stone tool butcher marks on that bone were in the exact spot where the calf muscle attaches to the bone. That calf muscle was neat, that nice piece of it. Plus, all the cut marks were lined up in the same direction, which is something you see on animal bones after the carcass is processed for its meat. What are the chances a prehistoric cat could use tools? Come on. The only thing that we can't say for certain is that other humans ate the calf meat, though, why else slice it off the bone. And this is frustrating. But who knows what really happened to poor Mr. Miss shinbone? Was he or she taken down by a big cat?

And then the other folks were like, well, it's a waste. So they ate their former comrade, or was shinbone sacrificed in some sort of ritual. And then the big cat came along and snacked on whatever was left. I know a lot of things stuck right now. I know. But all of us are probably going to make it till bedtime without being eaten by either a lion or a neighbor. So at least there's that to feel good about. Now, here's a wild fact. People are not all that nutritious. If you have to eat one, definitely go for the thighs. In a human male, those thighs are worth a tasty 13,000 plus calories. The upper arms are good for about 7000 calories. And if you like liver, an adult male liver yields about 2500 calories, while the human heart is a measly 650 calories. I'll calculate it by archaeologists named James Cole. And it all might sound like a waste, except when you take into account the average caloric needs of a grown human. If you go with the standard 2400 calories per day, one anatomically complete modern human, that's you can give a population of 25 other humans about half their daily calories. That's it. Now rock it back in time to when our Neanderthal cousins roamed the earth. Not one of them had a sedentary desk job, and their calorie needs just to survive were even higher. A group of 25 Neanderthals would need to eat three people a day. At that rate, it wouldn't take long for everyone to get eaten up. And then what? See the problem? How can any community sustain itself while also eating itself? And also, why go to the bother of eating a person when there were giant bison or woolly mammoths to be had so much more meat on those animals, and none of the awkwardness of turning a fellow hunter into steaks. But let's say you're just so curious. And there's a plate full of grilled man thigh right in front of you. If you do give in to the impulse to take a nutritious or not. Human meat is described as tasting like a mix of pork and veal. The infamous convicted murderer and cannibal Armin Meiwes allegedly said the flesh tastes like pork a little bit more bitter, stronger. It tastes quite good. Why not?

After all, people are made up out of lots of the same proteins and fats as the other large mammals that we like to marinate and toss on the charcoal. Delicious as we might be. We now know that people meat is a super impractical resource. This is one reason why experts believe that cannibalism in the past was about ritual, not about hunger. Though of course, hunger has driven even modern people to the extreme step of eating their own kind. Famine, despair, circumstances that would be unsurvivable without turning to the consumption of human flesh.

Circumstances like what befell the Donner Party back in 1846. Some folks have the incorrect idea that the Donner Party set out ill prepared and kind of clueless about what it would take to make the journey west in covered wagons. The true story is more complicated. Yes, the Donner Party did begin their too late in the spring, about a month behind the other wagon trains. But the real tragedy, the decision that steered them into doom was their turn into the Hastings Cutoff, a route that would take them across the Great Salt Lake Desert, adding miles but shortening the time to arrival in California by as much as a month. Remember that late start? The shortcut sounded too be true. And we know now it was exactly that. It took wagon trains about 123 days or so to travel the distance between Independence, Missouri, the usual jump off spot in California. Weather was always a factor. But other things like the growing season for grasses had to be considered. Grasses were like gas stations to teams pulled by horses and trailed by livestock. Miscalculate any of these variables, you might find yourself stranded in near Arctic conditions. And no, the Donner Party was not equipped to withstand winter and mountains so hostile to human survival. Misled by an unreliable guide, the pioneers took what had promised to be this incredible shortcut to California, only to find themselves snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains. blizzards, subzero temperatures, no plant life, wild game out of reach. Their food soon ran out and starvation set in. A few survivors of the doomed wagon train resorted to eating the flesh of their dead companions whose bodies were stacked into snow banks. Of the 81 souls who embarked on that journey, only 45 survived, 32 of them children.

It was those survivors who shared the harrowing and horrifying truth of what had happened to the Donner Party during that long, terrible winter in the Hastings Pass. And much more recently, in October 1972, a flight carrying an amateur rugby team from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the Andes Mountains. 12 people were killed, 33 more survived, some with significant injuries. The crash site could not have been more remote. With winter closing in fast, snow and ice made it all but impossible for searchers to pick their way through the forbidding terrain. The survivors held out hope of being found. What else could they do? And then on day 10, through the crackle and hiss and static of the airplane's transistor radio, the survivors learned that all rescue attempts had been called off. To the authorities, the grieving families and the watching world, it seemed all but impossible for anyone to have survived the impact of the crash. And now, whatever hope still lingered, was buried beneath the heavy snow, scoured by roaring winds, and lost to the frigid reality of winter in the Andes. The survivors, abandoned and desperate, soon began starving. They had carefully rationed and shared what food could be salvaged from the wreckage. It didn't take long to go through that meager supply of mostly candy and wine.

Hunger, real hunger. It's a terrible thing. A person in starvation can't even think clearly. Problem solving, concentration, casualties of starvation. Facing certain death, the survivors came to the most unthinkable decision. The choice so few of us would willingly make. They agreed to eat the flesh of the dead passengers.

There are seven bodies in the snow. They can provide us with enough protein to survive for a month. We each must decide if we live or die. That's from the iconic 1976 movie, Survive, based on this true and terrible story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. Sidebar, as a Gen Xer, having to resort to cannibalism was, along with quicksand and scorpions, something I fully expected to have to deal with a lot as an adult. All of us were so busy figuring out how to dodge those hazards, that we didn't really learn how credit cards work. And that was kind of a mistake. Oh well. But before we leave the passengers of Flight 571, stranded in the icy remote forests of the Andes, grimly carving off strips of the frozen flesh of their former companions, you should know that this story has a happier ending than anyone could dare to hope for. And by happy, I mean, as happy as it can be given the circumstances, horrific plane crash, frostbite, hypothermia, and of course, cannibalism.

So there were 33 survivors of the crash. Six died in the weeks that followed. Eight more died when the fuselage of the plane, shabby and inadequate shelter that it was, was buried by an avalanche. Ultimately, only 16 people survived Flight 571. And their rescue only happened because three of them left the wreckage and set out to find help. On December 22nd and 23rd, 1972, the remaining survivors were rescued by helicopter. They had against all odds, managed to keep themselves alive for 70 days. It was a miracle. They even called it the miracle of the Andes. The survivors were greeted with shock and wonder and joy and relief. And because people can be such judging assholes, no small amount of outrage and revulsion at the news that they had consumed human flesh. Thank God the internet hadn't been invented yet. Can you even imagine the keyboard warriors weighing in on this story? So yeah, as a species, we do have a history of people eating people, ritual, desperation, insanity, pick your reason. And our man in Venezuela, making art out of what was left of his victim, the farmer, not the first or only instance of human remains or bodily fluids being transformed into art. Ever heard of the performance artist Rick Gibson? He's got a delightful little piece on the subject of cannibalism on his website, rickgibson.net. I was given a bottle of preserved human tonsils by a friend of mine in London. He was hoping that I would make a pair of earrings out of them. Instead, I decided to eat them preserved in alcohol, they made a wonderful canapé. By eating these hors d'oeuvres at 1.30pm on 19 July 1988, at the corner of Erskine Road, and the high street in Walthamstow market, I became the first cannibal in British history to legally eat human meat in public. A year later, I publicly ate a slice of human testicle next to the Lewisham clock tower. England is a marvelous country because it has no laws against cannibalism. And there's Arthur Berzincz, a Latvian artist who created some controversy when he live streamed this performance. Two of the artist's assistants agreed to let Berzincz slice off a piece of their flesh with a Berzincz sautéed those human cutlets in a sizzling pan and fed the assistants their own meat. The point of it, according to Berzincz, is that a consumer society consumes itself. The public response was more like, Oh my god, gross. Make it stop.

That is disgusting. Chinese artist and self-professed cannibal, Zhu Yu, got an even bigger reaction from the public, not to mention Scotland Yard and the FBI, when in 2000, at an art festival in Shanghai, his work was entitled, Eating People. It was performance art, and consisted of Zhu Yu cooking and eating what he claimed was a human fetus. It was outrageous and an outrage and brought law enforcement running. Fetus in Question was later said to be something the artist had created using the body of a duck and the head of a baby doll. But Zhu Yu's work, this piece and others related to it, took on another life when some of the images were pirated and used by the Turkestan Islamic Party for an anti-Chinese propaganda campaign. The artist said, No religion forbids cannibalism, nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people.

I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it. He's not exactly right about the laws. Spain comes to mind first. I'm guessing the Spanish government was inspired to pass a few laws after the 2019 arrest of Alberto Sanchez Gomez. Alberto's mother Maria had abruptly disappeared, and a friend who became more and more concerned, contacted the police. When officers arrived at the apartment in Madrid that Alberto shared with his mother, they were greeted with a sight straight out of a horror movie. Alberto's mouth was stained with blood. Human flesh was found under his nails. So he's not just a complete psycho, but he's a messy eater on top of it.

There's a couple more details to haunt your dreams. He stored his dead mother's butchered remains in plastic containers, and even shared some with the dog. Unbelievably, he was only sentenced to 15 years in prison, and ordered by the court to pay his brother 60,000 euros. Sorry, but um, how do you kill your and eat her and only get 15 years? At least Stephen Griffiths picked up a life sentence in 2010 for murdering and then munching on three prostitutes. Then there's Dale Bollinger. He was employed in the UK as a nurse, but he'd been fantasizing about feasting on human flesh since he was six years old. He got caught before he managed to behead and eat the 14 year old girl he'd met and groomed online. Bollinger got nine years. Parents everywhere had a sick feeling in the pit of their stomach at the thought of who their kids might be chatting with on the internet. Here in the US where 49 states have no laws against people eating people, and only Idaho took the trouble to put something on the books. We just assume that not that many folks want to be cannibals. We figure that those who do will have plenty of legal consequences wrapped around how they got some human flesh into the air fryer. Because one, it's against the law to kill people. And two, it's against the law to desecrate a corpse. And trust me, turning pawpaw into a pot roast definitely involves some desecration. An enterprising cannibal with cash to burn though can always buy human body parts. That's legal almost everywhere in this country. But with a human elbow retailing for about 200 bucks, that's gonna be one pricey menu. Still, when it comes to homegrown cannibals, America very much over delivers on the drama. Ever heard of Gary Heidnik, the serial killer cannibal from Philly? It's hard to say exactly where Max and I got so weird and twisted. But maybe having this monster in our backyard and all over the news explains it. Heidnik abducted, tortured and raped six African-American women and kept them prisoner in a pit in the basement of his Philadelphia home. He murdered two of his captives, put the dismembered arms and legs of one Sandra Lindsay into the freezer. He roasted her ribs in the oven and boiled her head on the stove. There's a lot more to the Heidnik story. And it's all as terrible and evil and insane as anything you can imagine. Gary Heidnik was so foul, so disturbed and so disturbing that he inspired the character Buffalo Bill in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. Heidnik was sentenced to death. In July 1999, he was executed by lethal injection, the last person to be put to death in the state of Pennsylvania. Say what you want about Philly. It's my birth place and I love it. And I fully own that Philly and everything about it is a whole chaos vortex. But when it comes to murderers with a taste for people, Philly's like, get out of here with that. Anyway, cannibal art, it plays with what might be our ultimate taboo. And it's one job of the artist to confront and challenge and even shock society, right? It's one thing to create art about the devouring of human flesh. It's another thing to turn human flesh into the medium and

materials of art. That does seem to be where you run into trouble. Just ask Venezuelan painter Luis Alfredo Gonzalez Hernandez. Turns out that even though he claimed the farmer he killed ate and mixed into paint, asked him to do just that. The law saw it another way. And public opinion, very anti cannibalism. Just ask the American actor Armie Hammer about that. In the spring of 2021, he found himself at the dead center of one of the more bizarre celebrity scandals of modern times. Text messages from the actor were leaked online.

Texts that read, I am 100% a cannibal. I want to eat you and you just live to obey and be my slave. If I wanted to cut off one of your toes and keep it with me in my pocket. So I always had a piece of you in my possession. Not what anyone expected from the star of call me by your name. But then, who expects anyone to declare their hunger for human flesh in a text? Knowing what followed for Armie Hammer, cannibalism wasn't even the worst of it. He was accused of raping a woman in 2017. After a lengthy investigation, prosecutors announced that there was insufficient evidence to charge the actor with a crime. But the scandal killed his career, and hopefully, his appetite. Let's end with what might be the strangest and spookiest cannibal art tale of them all. It's the odd and eerie story of a painting called The Anguished Man. The artist is unknown. Here's the story. When Sean Robinson was a little boy in the UK, he was fascinated by a painting hanging in his grandmother's house, almost hypnotized by the picture. He described spending hours staring at it almost in a trance. Many years later, his grandmother left that painting to Sean in her will. A grown man by that point with a family of his own, Sean Robinson brought the painting to his house in Cumbria. That's in the far northwest of England, hugging the border of Scotland. The painting. Picture a human figure from the shoulders up. The eyes are wide, staring. The mouth a perfect oa of fear. Or is it surprise? It's hard to tell. There's something crude about the figure, something raw and unfinished. The background of serene blues only highlights the hot, glaring orange flesh.

There's the suggestion of teeth in the open mouth, jagged, pointy. Once the painting was hung in the Robinson home, strange things began to happen. The entire family was soon afflicted with terrible nightmares. Doors opened on their own. Sounds of screaming shattered the quiet nights. How do you even begin to understand or explain this kind of terror?

This kind of crazy mystery. Robinson decided that the bizarre goings on in his home must surely be connected to the painting. He got busy researching the artwork. A lot of us might have gotten busy killing it with fire. But you know how these stories go. Huh, it appears we've inherited a haunted painting. And rather than cast the unclean thing into the night and douse the house in holy water. Let's pop around the library and see what the dealio is. Robinson discovered that the artist again, whose identity has never been revealed, had mixed his or her own blood into oil paint to create the anguished man. The artist died by suicide not long after the piece was completed. The paint probably hadn't even fully dried. You know, this is the part where you might be tempted to get that painting as far away from your home as possible. Robinson refused to part with it. He would not consider selling it refused to even entertain the idea.

Instead, he locked the painting away. Now, even if you don't believe in ghosts or the supernatural or any of that stuff, you can at least understand how a portrait rendered in human blood and bone might be just a little bit haunted. I mean, if anything's going to be haunted, it's got to be that. You can sometimes find fakes of the anguished man for sale on sites like eBay. Hey, the next time you're bored, just do an eBay search for haunted paintings. There are some spectacularly creepy finds just waiting for your bid. What not murky acrylic of a murderous clown poltergeist look just amazing hanging over your couch? Or how about a genuine antique hand colored engraved print from the mid 19th century featuring Australian cannibals performing a human sacrifice.

And if there's any way you can afford the 1969 painting called simply cannibal by the outsider artist El Waitsman, jump on that. Just maybe don't hang it in the dining room. When it comes to cannibal art, there's something for everyone on your holiday gift list. Depending, of course, on your taste. Next time on true weird stuff. It was supposed to be a school.

It was supposed to turn troubled kids into productive citizens. Instead, it was a place of pain, horror and torture and graves. Dozens and dozens of unmarked graves on the next true weird stuff. So Sherry, I, I have a cannibal joke. It's my only cannibal joke. Are you ready? Cannibal joke. I have a cannibal joke. The two cannibals are eaten and the one cannibal says to the other, I'm having a ball and the other one says, Oh, yeah, well, you're eating too fast.

That's a good one. That's a good, you know, I've I have found that all of your cannibal humor is dark comedy. There's there's no light cannibal humor. No light cannibal humor. I don't know where to begin with this. You know, there, here's the thing. Here's the thing. There are so many cannibal stories. It was insane to me. Not just like old cannibal stories. I mean, I looked at 2023. And I said to myself, let me see how many cannibals how many cannibal related murders we had in 2023. And there were like, I don't know, six or eight really solid cannibalism news stories between January of 2023 and midsummer. I found that surprising. I find I find it shocking that people are killing and eating each other at such a clip. Aren't you surprised by that?

I yeah, I'm surprised that we need to come up with laws about this. How about the fact that only Idaho has a cannibalism law on the books, which makes you wonder what happened in Idaho that somebody said, you know, we really need a law about this. Exactly. We need to outlaw this. It's for me the intersection of the cat because because you know, you're cannibals, let's face it, that's such an extreme degree of a broken, disturbed psyche, right? That's that's insanity at the highest level.

But you're cannibal artists are not insane. I don't think that they can they can hide under that cloak. The guy in Venezuela. I think he's on the border. You know, he took a gig, maybe he found it on TaskRabbit or thumbtack or whatever to kill cook, eat someone and turn the body into art, maybe. But the rest of your cannibal artists, they are deliberately choosing cannibalism as a metaphor.

Yeah, agree or disagree? No, yeah. In a lot of those cases, that is what exactly what's going on. But I think it's great that you talked about the situations where the people were so desperate, they had no choice. And I think you could see, you could see that you will be in a situation, you're desperate, you're, you have no choice. And, you know, you're gonna have to do that. Because the story about the people down in was it the Andes Mountains? Yeah, that plane crash. I've heard that many times. And that story has been told many times about what happened with that situation.

The the way those people were rescued, I mean, we would have had to do a whole episode just on that story. So I cut some stuff for time. But the way those people were rescued is really remarkable three of the survivors. And, you know, they've been, they've been in the the high Andes, in winter now for well over two months, subsisting on the frozen flesh of their comrades and snow. And so you can imagine how weakened they were, and how close to hopeless they were. But they looked around now this is December, it's full winter, like here it comes. They looked around, and they knew that if they did not do something to save themselves, they were going to die there. So three of them hiked down, down, down, and they came upon like a river. And on the other side of the river, they saw a handful of indigenous peoples. And these they did not have a shared language in common or anything, but they saw these people, and they began jumping up and down and gesturing and they were able to using pantomime and drawing in the snow, they were able to convey the message that they had fallen from the sky. They begged these people for help. These tribes people took that message, because at this point, these three people are collapsing from hunger and exhaustion, and exposure, they all had frostbite and it was terrible. Those that is how those helicopters were deployed to pull those remaining survivors off the mountain. That part of the story is not I think, as well known as the cannibalism part. But you want to talk about raw, human courage and the survival instinct. That's what that's all about.

Yeah. And I think if I were in the Donner party, the person who was the leader who didn't know what he was doing, he'd be the first person we need to eat. We're going to cook him low and slow. Because here's the thing, we're not going to do any worse without him. The Donner party, you know, one of these days, we might do a whole episode on it. I've talked about this before, where you go to elementary school dictates the history that you learn, right?

Right. So I started elementary school in Wyoming in the beginning of third grade. So I mean, it was, you know, Manifest Destiny, Lewis and Clark, Westward Ho. And we studied the Donner party. And the thing that, and again, you know, this gets lost in cowboy movies, Little House on the Prairie, and all of that, to cross the continental United States on foot behind a covered wagon, is an accomplishment so mind blowing and remarkable that it's a wonder anybody succeeded. Fair enough, right?

When you think of all the things that you would encounter along the way, yes. Oh, my gosh, and women were pregnant and giving birth in on the prairie. I mean, it's unimaginable that it's unimaginable any of our ancestors survived this, like they were made of some strong stuff. The problem was, is that a lot of the people crossing the continental US and those wagon trains were coming from the East Coast, and they knew almost nothing about what they were getting themselves into. And so they were very, very much dependent on the wisdom of people that had made the journey, the help of guides that they would find at various like military and trading outposts.

And so the tragedy for me of the Donner party, isn't the cannibalism, although that's, that's bad. It's that they were they were misled by just an unscrupulous guy out for some quick cash, right? I mean, in some ways, like, those people that died, like, that's like manslaughter, at least, right? Yeah. And the children, the bulk of the survivors of the Donner party were children. For a lot of reasons, you know, they, they were healthier, they were smaller, their caloric needs were fewer, blah, blah, blah, you can see how that played out. And I'm sure there are surviving descendants of those children today, hopefully, who know their family story. I'm sure. So, I mean, you wouldn't, like, you'd hate to have to eat, Doc, you know, your dentist or whatever, but you know, if you had to, um, and that person is already deceased and frozen in the snow.

Could you? If you had to, if your life depended on it? You know what, you don't know what you would do unless you were confronted with that. You really don't. And I'm sure that it's it's it has to be a pretty high level of desperation where you say there's nothing else that I can do. That I mean, you are literally starving to death. And what starvation does to people, people are like, Oh, I'm so hungry. I'm so hangry. Have you ever really been hungry? Like you into madness. That's the kind of hunger that people on that crashed plane felt. That's the kind of hunger the people in the Donner party felt. You could get it down.

If you had to, yeah, because you're realizing that if I do not do this, then I will not live. And if you have that will to live that you're gonna you make all kinds of compromises. Well, obviously, obviously, these people did. And you know, there's no reason to believe that any of these people weren't just reasonable people who were in a situation, but the Donner and this, the soccer team up in the Andes.

I mean, I would hate to be in that position. I don't think well, I mean, there are clearly a handful of people out there who are like, you know, I'd kind of like to eat people like the actor Armie Hammer, which was shocking. You know, the cannibalism business was shocking with Armie Hammer. I did. I did enjoy there was the the cannibal Armin. My vez.

My vez gives us a very nice description of what it tastes like. Yikes is all I can say. That guy. It tastes quite good. That guy, right? I think my favorite thing that I learned with this episode is, you know, um, people are just not nutritious, like, you're going to need to eat a lot of them to sustain yourself. And that's a comforting thought, you know, so if you're listening to this right now, and you've got like a secret hankering to just couple that baby right up.

Listen, if you're low, are you doing a low carb, a keto, something like that? I think you're in pretty good shape here, right? I don't think there's a lot of carbs with with human flesh. So go for the thighs. Apparently the calf is what you want to go for. succulent, well marbled and delicious. We've got some, we've got some images of the the guy Fieri Hannibal Lecter. He is a riot. Is that not hysterically gross and funny. We've got that and a couple of the Goya paintings that we mentioned and stuff. We'll put them up on our website. True. We're sharing. I'm having a ball.

Welcome to flavor town. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see on the next true weird stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by Kevin Nash original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash.

Copyright 2023 Now! Media all rights reserved. All wrongs remembered. Transcribed by https://otter.ai