Cannibalism and Epistemology
Chapulines
I was at a mezcal tasting at a farm in the Oaxacan country side, talking with a young lawyer turned agave farmer. He had been sharing some of the Mezcal he had produced, talking about the types of agave his farm raised. His mother brought us out a plate of fresh, cut tomatoes sprinkled with pepper and other spices. I grabbed one and ate it and was curious about the intense flavor.
”What is this spice?”
“Chapulines.”
“Chapulines?”
He gestures with his hand making a hopping motion.
“Grasshopper?” He nodded enthusiastically.
This wasn’t the first bug I’ve eaten. I’ve been known to put crickets on my fried rice at a Mariners game, I’ve crunched a scorpion lollipop, and eaten mezcal worms. So this wasn’t gross to me, but I was curious about how they caught them all. He explained that a pair of workers would go out to the field before dawn, while it was cool and the chapulines were slow. One would hold a big net, and the other would chase them into the net. Gather up pounds and pounds of bugs.
I looked out at the countryside, imagining the thousands and thousands of grasshoppers in the hills, remembering how abundant the grasshoppers were on the high plains of Colorado when I was a boy.
I felt a tiny little clicking in my mind as the pieces of an old puzzle fell into place. I didn’t know it, but I’d been searching for this little fact for over a decade. This fact was the missing protein source that explained away Meso-American cannibalism.
Aztec Cannibalism
In college, I took a class on the Sociology of Hunger. We read a book on hunger and food in the favelas of Brazil and a tragic book by a woman struggling with anorexia. We had many, many discussions about how food shapes culture, and argued about whether food abundance made people more or less violent. One of the books we read briefly skipped off the phenomenon of ritual cannibalism in Meso-America, and then moved on to other points.
I remember thinking, “That’s interesting. Do people actually believe that was a real thing?”
Turns out, yes. There were several articles written about it and a few controversial books. So, much to the simultaneous horror and delight of my professor, I decided to write my paper for the class on cannibalism.
Essentially, the arguments go, humans need to consume specific amino acids in our diet, often at the same meal, in order for our bodies to survive. In Meso-America, those proteins weren’t widely available. Las tres hermanas, (corn, beans, and squash) don’t provide for the right combination in enough abundance to explain the existence of empires like the Aztec. And there weren’t sufficient animal resources like pigs and cows (which didn’t exist there yet) to keep the population going. This protein scarcity problem should have acted as a bottleneck on Meso-American society, but it didn’t.
Instead, the arguments go, humans started eating other humans, since we have the necessary amino acids in our flesh. On top of this nutritional argument, we have “evidence” from the Spanish conquest that depicts Aztecs doing cannibalism as part of a ritual ceremony.
I wrote this essay up saying, hey, this makes some sociological sense, but criticized the source material for being biased by conquesting Spaniards. I also argued that the logistics just don’t make sense. If you need people flesh to survive, then those people have to have eaten the right amino acids to survive. It’s human flesh all the way down.
This is all gross and fun, but I left college with this nagging belief that cannibalism definitely could have been happening in Meso-America and still with this mystery about protein, with the only real explanation being cannibalism. It wouldn’t be until over a decade later that I’d discover the answer.
In the last few years, I’ve traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico and spent time learning about the culture, agricultural practices, food and art of the area. Every time I’ve been down, I’ve done some agri-tourism, seen mezcal made, and gone to the markets to see what people are eating. There’s a lot of pork and beef in their diets these days! Nothing about being in Oaxaca triggered me to think again about this problem, until I was sitting in the countryside talking with this poor farmer.
Epistemology
To be fair, very little of my belief system turns on these facts. Neither my day to day nor my deeply-held value beliefs are affected by these facts. But there are a few second order beliefs and values that *are* affected.
First, I think it’s noteworthy how long we can be wrong about a thing and how easy it is to stay wrong unless confronted with new information. It’s a weird string of circumstances that makes this situation noteworthy: I need to have some beliefs about the history of Meso-American food sources, care about how diets work, be in Oaxaca talking to a local about food, and open enough to discover that a little fact that I learned a decade ago needed to change.
Next, the belief that Meso-American cannibalism could be true is simultaneously ugly and colonial, and naively relativistic. On the nefarious side, it leads to potential beliefs that Central Americans were somehow less than the Europeans who showed up and conquered their land. “What were we supposed to do, they were eating people!” On the other hand, how quaint to think, “Well, if they were eating people, that’s just their culture.” Both are sort of odd beliefs to hold and don’t match up with my typical reasoning.
Lastly, the big reason I wrote this essay, is about my own commitment to true beliefs. While in Mexico, I talked with my friend Andrew about how different people are different levels of “truth-oriented.” He’s an all-in truth guy. Where he sees truth, he embraces it, even when it hurts. On an intellectual level, I’m aligned to this, but over the past few years, I’ve gotten more practical about it. I want to know the truth, if it’s useful. Some of this is ego protecting, no doubt, but I found I’m happy to swim in murky waters of emotion and social structures, where truth is relative and sometimes just not the important part of the stories we tell ourselves.
This practical attitude toward truth has, oddly enough, led to more truth seeing than following the main, analytic path. It trains you to consider and hold counterfactuals as true simultaneously, (is my colleague an asshole, or just emotionally inept and direct?) and also to drive toward the outcome you want, with facts sometimes being mere obstacles, (I don’t care that I’ve never written a book, have no idea how to market a book, or how marketing works on the internet, I’m doing it because people should read my book.) You can see the facts more clearly when you are ambivalent or when they have practical meaning for your life.
One final point: this little change of my mind has me thinking about how changing my mind works at all. I don’t really understand the mechanisms in play, but it has grown little seeds of questions I hope to explore:
Are there any small beliefs that I hold that are keystones for other major beliefs? Pull the keystone and other beliefs fall?
If I want to be a different, stronger, more actualizado person, don’t I need to believe different things? What’s the smallest thing I can change my mind about?
If I was required to change my mind about something every day for 30 days, how would I do it? And what if it was a competition and I wanted to win? What mind changing strategy is the strongest?
