The New York Times Says That Cannibalism Will Soon Become Normalized And Accepted

Citing a handful of authors and screenwriters, The New York Times recently published a piece that strongly insinuates that eating each other is closer to becoming more normalized and accepted in society.

The Times begins their article by citing some of the more recent examples in the entertainment industry on how cannibalism is depicted in them. These screenwriters and authors told the Times that these plotlines were not just written to tell a grotesque story, but because they feel this taboo is on the horizon of becoming socially acceptable, namely because of things of climate change and other factors, they assert.

Moreover, they also note that stories of cannibalism have been around for a very long time, in some centuries old classical works, and depictions in Greek myths and other cultural legends and folklore.

When these episodes were filmed pretending to eat human flesh and blood, the props department would instead use things like repurposed venison meat. The Times expands on this and asserts that this could be a doorway for commercialized human-based meats; writing, “Should it be the lab-grown human steak made from stem cells that spurred outrage at a London museum? The animal-free chicken, beef, salmon and dairy substitutes that some companies are creating using similar technology?”

The WinePress has documented multiple times that the media and companies around the world are steadily and increasingly promoting cannibalism as a future sustainable diet. These companies and media usually are very quick to then backtrack and say, ‘It was a joke: we were just trying to make a splash and create awareness for climate change and the need to eat faux meats.’ While others are less mischievous and comical in their approach, some universities and outlets, for example, claim that there are benefits to eating human flesh and drinking their blood:

• Doctrine Of Devils: Water Company Liquid Death Launches The Vegan Cannibal Steakhouse Serving Pretend Human Meat
• Eat A Swede!? Swedish Organization Wants To Cultivate Lab-Grown Human Flesh To Save The Planet
• Swedish Company Launches ‘Uterus-Shaped’ Cereal To Normalize Period Discussions At Breakfast
• “Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will”
• The Guardian Is Now Encouraging People To Save And Donate Their Pee For Farmers Amidst Fertilizer Shortages
• Doctrine Of Devils: Plant-Based Burger ‘That Tastes Like Human Flesh’ Wins Contest Award
• New Study Reveals That Plant-Based Meats Are Way Less Nutritious And Have A Hard Time Being Digested
• Scientists Develop Lab-Grown Breast Milk And Other Technologies To Track Farming. *Update*

For more details on this latest ploy to prime the masses to be more tolerant towards cannibalism, read what The New York Times wrote:

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An image came to Chelsea G. Summers: a boyfriend, accidentally on purpose hit by a car, some quick work with a corkscrew and his liver served Tuscan style, on toast.

That figment of her twisted imagination is what prompted Ms. Summers to write her novel, “A Certain Hunger,” about a restaurant critic with a taste for (male) human flesh.

Turns out, cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books, and on television and film screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that that time is now.

There is “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime series about a high school women’s soccer team stranded in the woods for a few months too many, which premiered in November. The film “Fresh,” released on Hulu in March, involves an underground human meat trade for the rich.

“Lapvona,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel published in June, portrays cannibalism in a medieval village overcome by plague and drought. Agustina Bazterrica’s book “Tender Is the Flesh,” released in English in 2020 and in Spanish in 2017, imagines a future society that farms humans like cattle. Also out in 2017, “Raw,” a film by the director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau, tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat escalates after consuming raw offal.

Still to come is “Bones and All,” starring Timothée Chalamet. The movie, about a young love that becomes a lust for human consumption, is expected to be released later this year or early next. Its director, Luca Guadagnino, has called the story “extremely romantic.”

Can You Stomach It?

A fascination with cannibalism, perhaps not surprisingly, can toe a fine line, as Ms. Summers learned while writing “A Certain Hunger.”

When fact checkers came calling about the frenzied scenes in which the book’s antiheroine prepares her murdered lovers with grotesque, epicurean flourish, their queries about the intricacies of human butchery left Ms. Summers so disturbed that she went “full raw vegan for two weeks.” The creator was horrified by her own monster.

Publishers may have been, too. When Ms. Summers, who uses a pseudonym, was shopping the book around in 2018, it was rejected more than 20 times before Audible and the Unnamed Press made an offer.

If she were selling “A Certain Hunger” today, Ms. Summers, who is 59 and lives in New York and Stockholm, believes it would be easier. “God bless ‘Yellowjackets,’” she said in a Zoom interview, which was later interrupted by her dog, Bob, vomiting in the background.

Released in December 2020, her book started to experience a boom in popularity on social media — the actress Anya Taylor-Joy posted about it on Instagram, and it received many plaudits in the corner of TikTok known as BookTok — about a year later, around the time that “Yellowjackets” debuted on Showtime.

The pilot episode of “Yellowjackets” shows a teenage girl getting trapped, bled out like a deer and served on a platter in a terrifying ritual. Bloodthirsty fans continue to dissect the scene on Reddit, where a subreddit message board dedicated to the series has more than 51,000 members.

The show’s tension is in the knowledge that you know cannibalism is coming, but when? And why?

The creators of “Yellowjackets,” Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who live in Los Angeles, say they wanted the plot to hint that human consumption wasn’t merely for the characters’ survival. This not only adds a spine-tingling creepiness to the already dark story about the soccer team stranded in the wilderness, but also separates it from the real-life tale of a Uruguayan rugby team trapped in the Andes in 1972, whose members resorted to cannibalism to survive. (That event was later dramatized in a 1993 movie, “Alive,” starring Ethan Hawke.)

“I think we’re often drawn to the things that repulse us the most,” Ms. Lyle, 42, said. Mr. Nickerson, 43, chimed in: “But I keep coming back to this idea of, what portion of our revulsion to these things is a fear of the ecstasy of them?”

“Lapvona,” by Ms. Moshfegh, is also not overtly cannibalistic; unlike “A Certain Hunger,” there’s no braising with bouquet garni. But one scene involving a toenail is harrowing.

Known for her unsettling, delving-into-the-darkness stories including “Eileen” and “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Ms. Moshfegh, 41, who lives in Los Angeles, wrote “Lapvona” during the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. “I wrote it in such complete isolation that I felt this incredible freedom to go wherever I was being led,” she said.

The character who eats another human, the greatest sin in his religiously vegetarian village, does so in an act of “depraved desperation,” said Ms. Moshfegh, a vegetarian herself.

Tales as Old as Time

Bill Schutt, the author of “Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,” says that fictional plots about eating human flesh are as old as literature itself.

Pointing to examples that include the man-eating Cyclops in Homer’s “Odyssey,” he said the taboo has artistically been used to horrify for centuries.

When you take something that is so horrible and put it through this lens of fictionalization, we get charged up about it, but we know we’re safe.

At least most of the time: Mr. Schutt only made it halfway through Hulu’s “Fresh” before he had to stop the movie. “It was almost too well done,” he said.

But as his book documents, cannibalism has occurred around the world throughout history, lending these fictional tales a queasy whiff of “what if?”

Historical examples in the book include “mumia,” a practice of using ground-up mummified bones to soothe various ailments that was popular in 17th-century Western Europe; the infamous Donner Party pioneers who became trapped in the Sierra Nevada in 1846; ritual cannibalism that took place in Papua New Guinea until the 1950s; and famine-induced cannibalism in China in the 1960s.

Mr. Schutt’s book also features the story of the so-called Cannibal Cop, a former New York Police Department officer who was arrested in 2013 for participating in fetish forums that fantasized about cannibalizing women, and later acquitted. The New York Post has published more than 30 articles about the case, including one suggesting the Halloween costume of a policeman’s uniform with a severed hand on a plate.

Flavors of that saga can be found in the more recent accusations of sexual and physical abuse against the actor Armie Hammer, which have included that he allegedly sent cannibalistic messages to a romantic partner. Mr. Hammer has denied the accusations and, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article.

After the allegations became public, he was dropped by his agency, checked into rehab and is now, Variety reports, selling time shares in the Cayman Islands. Coincidentally, Mr. Hammer worked with Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Guadagnino on “Call Me by Your Name.”

‘The Unthinkable’

As to what may be fueling the desire for cannibalism stories today, Ms. Lyle, the “Yellowjackets” co-creator, said, “I think that we’re obviously in a very strange moment.” She listed the pandemic, climate change, school shootings and years of political cacophony as possible factors.

I feel like the unthinkable has become the thinkable, and cannibalism is very much squarely in that category of the unthinkable.

Ms. Lyle said

According to Ms. Summers, cannibalism is always symbolic. For her novel’s protagonist, eating human flesh can be seen as a way of holding on to a relationship that ended. For Ms. Summers herself, the plot of “A Certain Hunger” can’t be uncoupled “from my own personal experiences with disordered eating, with the tamping down of feminine appetites, the way the media chews up and spits out writers, bougie consumption — and bougie lady consumption,” she said.

More generally, Ms. Summers thinks that the recent spate of cannibalistic plots could also be commentaries on capitalism.

Cannibalism is about consumption and it’s about burning up from the inside in order to exist. Burnout is essentially over-consuming yourself, your own energy, your own will to survive, your sleep schedule, your eating schedule, your body.

She said

Ms. Moshfegh said her theory was “that it might be an antidote to the actual horror of what’s happening to the planet.” Like Ms. Summers, Ms. Moshfegh at times couldn’t stomach her own work, describing the process of writing about cannibalism in “Lapvona” as “a bit disturbing.”

I had to think about what part of the body would be an interesting place to start, and how it would feel to hold someone’s severed hand in yours.

She said

The prop team on “Yellowjackets” had a similarly unnerving task in determining what to use as faux human flesh in the show’s pilot episode.

Should it be the lab-grown human steak made from stem cells that spurred outrage at a London museum? The animal-free chicken, beef, salmon and dairy substitutes that some companies are creating using similar technology?

Ultimately, the prop team went with venison.

But they’ll have to find an alternative for future episodes, Ms. Lyle and Mr. Nickerson said, because many in its cast are vegan.

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY

Regulars of The WP know that I have oft warned that “normalized cannibalism” unquestionably will be the future around the world, as the whole world is brought under deep famine and economic collapse. Right now we are still in the ‘I’m just joking’ phase, but this predictive programming piece from the NY Times is starting to lean into the actual formality of such a sinister future.

[1] Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; [2] Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; [3] Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.

1 Timothy 4:1-3

My prediction is that the masses, who will be eventually be plugged into the smart grids and packed like sardines in these smart cities, will be eating their gene-editing and modified human flesh burgers. To me, the plant-based stuff is just a smokescreen and bait & switch until the arrival of the real thing.

Boston Biotech Company Introduces “CRISPR 2.0” For The First Time Ever In Patient, Allowing The Ability To Completely Alter People

[53] And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the LORD thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee: [54] So that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave: [55] So that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates. [56] The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter, [57] And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates. [58] If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD; [59] Then the LORD will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance.

Deuteronomy 28:53-59

I discuss that passage, and others like it, in my report, “Are You Awake? Are You Ready For What’s Coming? Do You Loathe The Honeycomb??.”

Even the book of Revelation prophesizes this formality:

[3] And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. [4] And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. [5] And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. [6] For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. [7] And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.

Revelation 16:3-7

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[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).

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