Child cannibalism

Some serial killers who murdered children and teenagers are known or suspected to have subsequently eaten parts of their bodies — examples include Albert Fish and Andrei Chikatilo.

In recent decades, rumours and newspaper reports of the consumption of aborted fetuses in China and Hong Kong have attracted attention and inspired controversial artworks.

Cronus (called Saturn in Roman mythology), once the most powerful of the gods, was dismayed by a prophecy telling him that he would one day be deposed by one of his children, just as he had formerly overthrown his own father.

But his wife and sister Rhea, unwilling to see all her children suffer such a fate, handed him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes after the birth of Zeus, their sixth child.

[1] Apparently not noticing the difference in taste, he devoured the stone, allowing infant Zeus to grow up at some secret hiding place without his father having any idea that a threat to his power was still alive.

One of the miracle stories told about the 4th-century bishop Saint Nicholas (who inspired the modern figure of Santa Claus) is that he brought three children back to life who had been killed by a butcher during a terrible famine.

The Juniper Tree is a dark German fairy tale in which a young boy is killed and cooked by his own stepmother, who serves his flesh to her clueless husband (his father).

In Kazakhstan, villagers "discovered people among them who ate body parts and killed children" and a survivor remembered how he repeatedly saw "a little foot float[ing] up, or a hand, or a child's heel" in cauldrons boiling over a fire.

[31] The same famine-induced custom of swapping one's children with those of others and then eating the other child has also been reported from Fiji, French Polynesia, and (with only daughters as victims) from among the Azande people in Central Africa.

Since "meat has become more valuable than human life" for the starving, abandoned children could expect no mercy from those who soon discovered that they could be killed as easily as pigs, states another account from the famine.

[38] During a famine induced by the fighting between the Jin and the Song dynasty in the 12th century, little children were praised for their "superior tastiness" and sold whole to those who wanted to prepare and serve them like suckling pigs or steamed whole lambs.

"Years ago it had been custom for every second child to be eaten" – the baby was roasted and consumed not only by the mother, but also by the older siblings, who benefited from this meat during times of food scarcity.

[47] The consumption of infants took two different forms, depending on where it was practised: When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives.

[48]Usually only babies who had not yet received a name (which happened around the first birthday) were consumed, but in times of severe hunger, older children (up to four years or so) could be killed and eaten too, though people tended to have bad feelings about this.

[50] In north eastern Queensland, there is archeological and some ethnographic evidence for ritualistic mortuary cannibalism, where it was "...often token in that selected parts only were consumed, served to make the participants absorb some of the dead person's qualities or spirit".

Giving a summary of some of the literature, Helen Brayshaw states:[51] Young children were often eaten, usually by relatives, and elsewhere it was not unknown for a mother to eat a still-born child or one dying soon after birth in the hope that its spirit would be born again through her.

[59] Young slave children were at particular risk since they were in low demand for other purposes and since their flesh was widely praised as especially delicious, "just as many modern meat eaters prefer lamb over mutton and veal over beef".

[60] Some people fattened slave children to sell them for consumption; if such a child became ill and lost too much weight, their owner drowned them in the nearest river instead of wasting further food on them, as the French missionary Prosper Philippe Augouard once witnessed.

[70] The German ethnologist Leo Frobenius recorded that young children caught in raids were "skewered on long spears like rats and roasted over a quickly kindled large fire", while older captives were kept alive to be exploited or sold as slaves.

[67] In 1863, the English explorer Samuel Baker talked with a member of a Swahili–Arab raiding party, who told him that their local Azande allies routinely killed and ate the children captured in raids: Their custom was to catch a child by its ankles, and to dash its head against the ground; thus killed, they opened the abdomen, extracted the stomach and intestines, and tying the two ankles to the neck they carried the body by slinging it over the shoulder, and thus returned to camp, where they divided it by quartering, and boiled it in a large pot.

In a case that shocked the European and American press, the Scot James Sligo Jameson, a member of Henry Morton Stanley's last expedition, apparently paid the purchase price of a 10-year-old girl and then watched and made drawings while she was stabbed, dismembered, cooked, and eaten in front of him.

[86] While travelling along the Ubangi River, the French explorer Maurice Musy [fr] declined an opportunity to purchase a young slave girl, though there was "human meat" cooking in pots around them and he was well aware that the local demand for children her age was largely cannibalistic (indeed she might have been offered to his party as provisions).

[87] His colleague Albert Dolisie [fr] was more generous when he met in the same region a young slave boy who, "trembling all over and deeply ashamed", explained that he was destined to be beheaded and eaten soon.

[103] Possibly inspired by reports of this custom, the Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu cooked and ate what he claimed to be a human fetus in a controversial piece of conceptual art.

In 2012 it became known that three years earlier "a man was executed in Hyesan ... for killing a girl and eating her ... after supplies to the city dwindled" due to unsuccessful government attempts at currency reform.

[119] A few months later, reports of "citizen journalists" indicated that "a 'hidden famine' in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae has killed 10,000 people" and driven some to cannibal acts.

The main part of Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Farnham's Freehold (1964) is set in a distant future where, long after much of the northern hemisphere was devastated in a full-scale nuclear war, a dark-skinned ruling class (descendants of the Africans, Arabs, and Indians of today) exploits white-skinned people as slaves, including sexually.

[122] Despite being apparently anti-racist in intent (Heinlein had wanted his white readers to think about how belonging to an exploited and despised minority would feel like), the novel was widely criticized for its racial stereotyping.

The book has been read as criticizing the increasing disparities in wealth and status in Chinese society, where the "pleasure and desire for delicacies" of the wealthy matter more than the lives of the poor, until "the inferior in social rank becomes food" in the novel's satirical exaggeration.

[130] Ignoring the dark story's satirical character, pro-Kremlin activists accused Sorokin of "promoting cannibalism" and "degrad[ing] people's Russian Orthodox heritage".