Apparently our ancestors used to eat each other all the time. Fun, eh? I enjoyed this book quite a bit, although the author would ramble every so often about subjects that had nothing to do with cannibalism. I still liked it, though. ( )

I couldn't get past the writing, so I quit at about page 150. Now I've seen worse (much worse), but this is incredibly disjointed and soooooo much of it is not actually on anthropophagy (humans eating humans). I think it is actually a insurmountable pet peeve of mine when a nonfiction book is written as if the writer had taken bullet-pointed facts and just... un-bullet-pointed them, pushed them together in weakly-focused chapters, and padded it up with random stuff. haha, reading the other reviews here perhaps it is a pet peeve for many people and not actually a personal problem, haha. Anyway, I stopped when there was a page on people with hypertrichosis (like Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy). I was like, WTF, what does that have anything to do with cannibalism? Don't insult Jo-Jo! Too bad, because it could have been much improved with a strict editor. Well, anything could be much improved with a strict editor... point is, this wasn't. ( )

The history and psychology is far more interesting, ancient, and intricate than Thomas Harris would lead you to believe after reading The Silence of the Lambs. Travis-Henikoff takes her dual loves of food and cultural anthropology and weaves an excellent description of cannibalism. She begins with a very clear description of all the kinds of food humans eat. This puts the reader in the proper mindset: to understand cultures other than your own, you have to stop thinking that your culture is the only one that has it right. I must admit, I learned more about the edible parts of an animal from this book than I would have liked, but this knowledge helped me to remember throughout the book that humans have a special relationship with food.

She then explains the various types: exocannibalism (eating enemies), endocannibalism (eating loved ones) and survival cannibalism (the Donner Party). All of this goes along with the special relationship with food. She is not judgmental of the societies that practiced cannibalism; in fact, she makes it feel foolish to denigrate “savages” who eat their loved ones (sometimes negatively effecting their own health) to make sure their souls are completely gone to the other side. She is not judgmental of those who are forced into cannibalism because of their situations, such as soldiers forced to eat their captives (though she does appropriately rebuke their commanders) or the men who crashed in the Andes. She does a wonderful job of describing their situations and of showing how these people accepted their acts as their new normal.

She gives almost no attention to those who act outside of societal norms; cannibalistic serial killers do not tell us useful things about a culture in the same way as cannibalistic funerary rights do. She does, however, show how deeply rooted cannibalism is in our psyches, both by showing how long humans have been cannibals and also by delineating all the cannibals in our children’s stories. Unfortunately, she does go into quite a few tangents-all related to anthropology and interesting, but not adding significantly to understanding her thesis.

Dinner with a Cannibal shows the reader what so many books on the anthropology of food try so hard to explain: food is a vital part of our lives, cultures, histories, and futures. Our religious beliefs, health, and societal structure all circle around what we put into our bodies. This is a book about life more than death, about food more than sickness, and an attempt to overcome ethnocentrism. ( )