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posted by martyb on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the "Long-Pig" dept.

A Swedish behavioral scientist has suggested that it may be necessary to turn to cannibalism and start eating humans in order to save the planet.

Appearing on Swedish television to talk about an event based around the "food of the future," Magnus Söderlund said he would be holding seminars on the necessity of consuming human flesh in order to stop climate change.

Environmentalists blame the meat and farming industry for a large part of what they claim is the warming of the earth.

According to Söderlund, a potential fix would be the Soylent Green-solution of eating dead bodies instead.

https://summit.news/2019/09/04/swedish-behavioral-scientist-suggests-eating-humans-to-save-the-planet/

[Ed note: At first I was going to give this story a pass and then, well... this site is called SoylentNews said name being tangentially related to Soylent Green and the tag line is: "SoylentNews is people", so it only goes to follow that you are what you eat, right? Feel free to comment seriously, but I'm quite frankly more interested in what kind of fun the community can have with this story! Some jokes just write themselves. --martyb]


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Saturday September 07 2019, @10:57AM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Saturday September 07 2019, @10:57AM (#890920)

    Just to fix a few errors in the article and which this segment is based on.

    (1) Magnus Söderlund is a professor in Economics, focusing on consumer behaviour. I guess he could technically then be a behavioral scientist but I think he see himself as an economist.

    (2) The segment was not on Swedish television (SVT) but on TV4 (channel 4). I guess it could be "swedish television" like they somehow only have one television channel in the entire country, which they don't. You can probably watch the clip here, if you understand swedish and it's not geotagged or something.

    (3-4) Here is the GastroNord summit page. It's quite odd when you look at the english version vs the swedish version. The english one just looks like it's some kind of cooking summit to show the latest and greatest in kitchen appliances.

    But if you look at the swedish version you can read that it's about the food of the future: worms, grasshoppers or human-meat? (Framtidens mat: Maskar, gräshoppor eller människokött?). I guess they didn't plan on this to go global. Which might be silly considering that they had a professor on that suggested that perhaps we should eat people (... to save the environment). That said Söderlund did conclude that he doesn't think that it's actually going to happen. The taboo of eating humans, even for the environment, is just to great. Not to mention that there are, currently, many laws that prohibit the processing and consumption of human flesh.

    (5) It all remindedme of the quote from the first Judge Dredd movie, "eat recycled food, it's good for the environment and okay for you ..."

    That said there probably has to be a lot of processing cause we might not taste super good. If I recall correctly it's been mention that we taste like salty pork. So I guess jews and muslims and other people that don't like pork are just not going to eat humans, even to save the planet.

    What would a kilogram of human meat go for? If any weight of food is based on the cost of raising it to eating age then the cost of human meat is going to be astronomical. Even if we somehow just decided to eat babies that is still quite expensive. A human that died of old age would have an enormous cost associated with it that could quite probably not be recovered by selling it off for flesh. Not to mention that a lot of people die from disease and might not be safe for consumption. As a cattle/chicken substitute we are just not going to work even if it's a staple idea from various vampire horror movies to have some kind of "human farm" (or processing plant) for blood (see the last season of 'The Strain'). But it appears somewhat wasteful.

    Question might be why we cannibalize otherwise and it would appear that it's more about rituals and trying attain power (or souls) or connect with the dead people much more so then to gain nourishment as a food source. The people that eat people for food only appear to be some kind of exception.

    (1) https://www.hhs.se/en/person/?personid=4071033 [www.hhs.se]
    (2) https://www.tv4.se/efter-fem/klipp/forskaren-unders%C3%B6ker-m%C3%B6jligheten-att-%C3%A4ta-m%C3%A4nniskok%C3%B6tt-finns-m%C3%A5nga-tabun-12496854 [tv4.se]
    (3) https://www.gastronord.se/?sc_lang=en [gastronord.se]
    (4) https://www.gastronord.se/summit-om-summit?sc_lang=sv-se [gastronord.se]
    (5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDdK_kdhhg [youtube.com]

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:34PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:34PM (#890992) Journal

    The segment was not on Swedish television (SVT) but on TV4 (channel 4).

    "Swedish television" refers to television made in and/or for Sweden. If the name of a specific TV channel had been meant, it would have read "Swedish Television" instead.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday September 08 2019, @04:03AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday September 08 2019, @04:03AM (#891174) Homepage

    Somewhere Out There is a paper by an early-1900s anthropologist, who who'd made a sympathetic study of Australian aborigines. Seems they routinely ate their firstborn shortly after birth -- partly for 'strength' but mostly because it was 'delicious'.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.