Dear Urban Legends:
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 nature of the "evidence" — namely tabloid-style scaremongering and unsourced photos circulating on the Internet — we must proceed under the assumption that the Chinese as a people, whether on the mainland or in Taiwan, are no more inclined to eat human babies than folks who live anywhere else in the world. The burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise.
The same holds true for Gypsies, Jews, Christians, witches, aborigines, Satanists, or any of the other ethnic or religious groups alleged to practice this heinous custom down through the centuries. There is simply no proof that such a practice exists, or has ever existed, anywhere on earth.
Prejudice and blood libel
The claim that eating babies or fetuses is a common and accepted practice in China (or Thailand, Japan, Korea, or Israel, etc.) is essentially a modern version of an ancient form of prejudice known as "blood libel" — one group accusing another of murdering infants during the course of 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 since time immemorial.
Sociologists say the driving forces behind such bigotry are ignorance, xenophobia (fear of "the other"), and psychological projection (attributing perceived moral failings of one's own group to others). 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 social practices closer to home — practices such as abortion, for example, 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.
