Dear Guide:
I received an email last week which was quite disturbing and, to say the least, disgusting. It is about dead babies that can be bought from hospitals in Taiwan for $70 to meet the high demand for grilled and barbequed babies!
I am sure this must be a hoax, although the message comes with an attached slide show, showing how the baby is prepared, cooked and eaten.
Could you please investigate?
Dear Reader:
Given the utter lack of evidence, I think we can safely say that the Chinese as a people, including the Taiwanese and those living on the mainland, do not eat human babies. Neither, for that matter, do Jews, Christians, witches, aborigines, Gypsies, Satanists, or any of the other groups accused of this heinous custom over the centuries. There is simply no proof that such a practice exists, or has ever existed, anywhere. What the historical record shows is that the accusation has surfaced time and time again as an ethnic or religious slur with no basis in fact.
The claim that baby eating is an accepted practice in China (or Thailand, Japan, Korea, or Israel, etc.) is essentially a modern version of an ancient form of bigotry known as "blood libel" -- one group accusing another of murdering infants in ritual sacrifices. According to the Greeks, the Jews did it; according to the Romans, the Christians did it; according to the Christians, it really was the Jews who did it; and so on down through history.
Sociologists say the driving forces behind such prejudices are ignorance, xenophobia (fear of foreigners), and psychological projection (attributing the perceived moral failings of one's own culture to another). As an example of the latter, it has been speculated that the spread of horror stories in the West about the supposed use of unborn babies as food in Asia may be fueled by qualms about practices closer to home -- practices such as abortion and the so-called "cannibalization" of fetal tissue for scientific research.
Cannibalism as art
In any case, it is difficult to tell -- and under dispute -- whether photographs circulating online since December 2000 showing an Asian man apparently cooking and eating a human fetus are real or fake. We do know, thanks to documentation on Chinese-Art.com, that they were the work of a conceptual artist named Zhu Yu. The photos were exhibited at an underground art show after being rejected as "too controversial" by curators of the Shanghai 2000 Bienniale. For those who haven't seen them and aren't too squeamish to take a peek, here are two examples from Zhu's postmodern performance piece, aptly titled "Eating People," collected from forwarded emails:
The artist himself, whose past accomplishments include an opus called "Canned Human Brains," has claimed in interviews that he used real aborted fetuses stolen from a medical school to create the piece, and that he actually cooked and ate the fetuses "for art's sake."Should we take him at his word? Not necessarily.
