CANNY EATING

 I’ve been reading The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird, an anthology edited by Zara-Louise Stubbs for the British Library. I think I understand what’s meant by ‘the uncanny gastronomic’ but I’m not sure I’d know how to use it in a sentence, apart from this one.

There are some big names in the anthology including Saki, Mark Twain, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Roald Dahl, but it’s not just the usual suspects. I was delighted to find the story ‘To Serve Man’ by Damon Knight, which was the basis for the classic episode of the Twilight Zone.  Spoiler alert: It’s a cookbook!

There’s Kafka’s “A Fasting Artist,” which I’ve always known as “A Hunger Artist” and always thought was a bit of the cheat – the reason why the hunger artist can fast for so long is because he’s never found anything he likes to eat, or maybe that's the point.

 

I think my favorite story in the book is O. Henry’s “Witches’ Loaves.”  O. Henry is the king of the fictional twist.  You know the twist is coming but when it arrives it’s still surprising because it’s not the twist you were anticipating, which in this case is perhaps to say that it turns out not to be so weird or uncanny as expected.

 

A significant percentage of the stories involve cannibalism one way or another. I suppose most of us these days, if we’re not psychopathic anthropophagi, wouldn’t choose to eat human flesh, unless we really had to, but if history has proved anything it’s that when people really have to, they seem to get over their objections without too much difficulty.

 

And I started to wonder how I’d feel about being eaten.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be eaten while I’m alive but after I’m dead, what does it matter?  As we’re told by the song "On Ilkla Moor Baht'at" (Baht’at is supposedly Yorkshire dialect for “without a hat” though I think you could spend a great deal of your life in Yorkshire and never hear the expression) once we’re buried we’re eaten by worms, the worms will then be eaten by ducks, and then humans will eat the ducks, and so we’ll have eaten “thee.”  It’s cannibalism with three degrees of separation. I’m not sure if this is an absolute argument for cremation but it’ll do well enough.