Famines In severe
famines, when all other provisions were exhausted, starving people repeatedly turned to cannibalism, eating the corpses of the deceased or deliberately killing others – most often children – for consumption. Two factors put children specifically at risk: they could be more "easily snatched" and killed than adults and their flesh was often considered "more palatable" than that of the latter. Famines bad enough to lead to the consumption of human flesh were usually caused either by natural disasters such as droughts or by wars and other social conflicts.
Europe There are reports of the consumption of children from various European famines. In 409 CE, the
Visigoths under
Alaric I laid siege to
Rome,
conquering and sacking it in the following year. According to
St. Jerome's account, the siege led to a cruel famine, in which "the starving people had recourse to hideous food and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat. Even the mother did not spare the babe at her breast." In the same year, the
Suebi invaded
Iberia, with their plundering leading to widespread famine. Facing starvation, some parents killed their own children for food. In 536, during a famine under the rule of the
Ostrogoths in Italy, papal records recount that in the region of
Liguria, some mothers ate their children due to extreme hunger. Similar incidents were recorded in 539 in the
Emilia-Romagna region. In the early 11th century, a famine that lasted five years devastated much of Europe, reportedly driving some starving mothers to consume their own infants. During another pan-European famine from 1032 to 1035, affecting countries from Greece to France and Britain, numerous instances of cannibalism were recorded. Many children were lured away with as little as an apple and eaten, according to chronicler
Rodulfus Glaber, who wrote about both these famines. During the
siege of Sancerre, France, in 1572–1573, some of the starving inhabitants resorted to cannibalism. In one household,
Jean de Léry saw the dismembered body of a three-year-old girl; some parts were boiling in a pot on the fire, while others had apparently already been consumed. The girl's mother assured that the child had died of natural reasons. The
Nine Years' War caused a severe famine in
Ireland in the late 17th century. Several young children were entrapped, killed and eaten, with only their skulls and bones remaining for the authorities to retrieve. At least one child suffered the same fate during an earlier famine in the mid-17th century, according to court documents.
Middle East Ankhtifi was an
ancient Egyptian administrator active during the
First Intermediate Period (), a time of chaos and power struggles. An inscription in his tomb states that, when the country was struck by a dire famine, causing many to eat their own children, Ankhtifi did what he could to feed the hungry and prevent starvation in the province he governed. According to
Flavius Josephus, during the Roman
siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, a woman who had lost all her possessions in the chaos of the war became so hungry and desperate that she killed and started to eat her own son – an act that shocked the whole city when the remains of the boy's roasted body were discovered. In the early 13th century, a famine in Egypt became so severe that many people turned to cannibalism. In
Cairo, the Arab physician
Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi repeatedly saw "little children, roasted or boiled" whole, offered for sale in baskets on street corners. He also saw a prepubescent child who had been murdered and roasted whole by two young people. In some cases, children were roasted and offered for sale by their parents; other victims were street children, who had become very numerous and were often kidnapped and cooked by people looking for food or extra income. There were so many victims that sometimes "two or three children, even more, would be found in a single cooking pot." Al-Latif notes that, while initially people were shocked by such acts, they "eventually ... grew accustomed, and some conceived such a taste for these detestable meats that they made them their ordinary provender ... The horror people had felt at first vanished entirely". To cater to the tastes of the rich, cooks started to combine human flesh with exquisite ingredients, such as in
Alexandria, where one of his friends saw "five children's heads in a single cauldron, cooked with the choicest spices", among "a great many [other] events of this kind".
East Africa A huge famine devastated
Ethiopia in 1888–1892, caused by
a rinderpest epizootic, which killed more than 90 per cent of all cattle, as well as "excessively hot and dry" weather that reduced harvests to a fraction of their usual yield. Witnesses estimated that half or more of the population starved in some regions. There were several reports of cannibalism, including of various mothers who ate their children. One woman was brought before the emperor and charged of having murdered seven children for food. She freely admitted this, explaining that she had waylaid and strangled playing children to get flesh to alleviate her hunger.
Menelik II, shocked by her frank confession and her starved appearance, gave her food and clothing instead of punishing her, judging that "no one could be expected to stand up to the trouble of the times".
Soviet Union In the
Soviet Union, several severe famines between the 1920s and the 1940s led to cannibalism. Children were particularly at risk. During the
Russian famine of 1921–1922, "it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh." An inhabitant of a village near
Pugachyov stated: "There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children." Various gangs specialized in "capturing children, murdering them and selling the human flesh as horse meat or beef", with the buyers happy to have found a source of meat in a situation of extreme shortage and often willing not to "ask too many questions". This led to a situation where, according to the historian
Orlando Figes, "a considerable proportion of the meat in Soviet factories in the
Volga area ... was human". Cannibalism was also widespread during the
Holodomor, a man-made famine in
Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. While most cases were "
necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation", the murder of children for food was common as well. Many survivors told of neighbours who had killed and eaten their children. One woman, asked why she had done this, "answered that her children would not survive anyway, but this way she would". Moreover, "stories of children being hunted down as food" circulated in many areas, and indeed the police documented various cases of children being kidnapped and consumed.
China In
China, a custom known as "exchanging one's children and eating them" was practised over thousands of years during times of hunger. Neighbouring families swapped one of their children, each family then slaughtering and eating the child of the other family, thus "alleviat[ing] their hunger" without having to eat their own family members. The oldest references to this tradition are from a
siege in the 6th century BCE; the most recent ones from the
Great Chinese Famine triggered by the
Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). It has also been recorded from various other famines in Chinese history, including other sieges, the
Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879, and famines in the 1930s. Most of the victims were girls, since "boys were considered more valuable". Early accounts of the practice treat it as "a sign of determination rather than desperation", since it made cities "essentially impossible to starve out". In the 1990s, survivors of the Great Chinese Famine told the journalist
Jasper Becker that the deadly exchanges had been accepted as "a kind of hunger culture" driven by desperation. 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. In other cases, children were kidnapped and eaten, and desperate parents sometimes killed and consumed their own children, both during the Great Chinese Famine and in various earlier famines. Children whose parents had died or abandoned them were particularly at risk. A relief worker in the 1870s famine observed that such children "were slaughtered and eaten by other famine victims as though they were sheep or pigs". 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. Accounts from earlier famines indicate that wealthy people sometimes purchased poor children when their starving parents had to sell them, and then used them as a source of meat. During a siege in the 9th century, "parents brought their children to butcher shops to sell them" for immediate processing. Oral accounts from the 1870s famine as well as earlier famines also indicate that human flesh, usually from "young women and children", was served at
inns to customers who preferred it to a meatless diet. Sometimes the flesh of butchered children was sold on markets. 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. Like the sale of human flesh at inns, such customs indicate that the consumption of such flesh also had a culinary side, even in times of famine.
Infanticidal cannibalism (1853)
Infanticidal cannibalism or
cannibalistic infanticide refers to cases where newborns or infants are killed because they are "considered unwanted or unfit to live" and then "consumed by the mother, father, both parents or close relatives".
Infanticide followed by cannibalism was practised in various regions. It has been documented among some
Aboriginal Australian peoples, though its prevalence in that region is disputed and was likely overestimated by some observers during colonial times. Among animals, such behaviour is called
filial cannibalism, and it is common in many species, especially among fish. Before colonization, Aboriginal Australians were predominantly
nomadic
hunter-gatherers at times lacking in protein sources. Infanticide was sometimes practised as a means of population control and because mothers had trouble carrying two young children not yet able to walk, and various sources indicate that killed infants were often eaten. In the late 1920s, the anthropologist
Géza Róheim heard from Aboriginals that infanticidal cannibalism had been practised especially during droughts. "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. One woman told him that her little sister had been roasted, but denied having eaten of her. Another "admitted having killed and eaten her small daughter", and several other people he talked to remembered having "eaten one of their brothers". The consumption of infants took two different forms, depending on where it was practised: 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. Babies were killed by their mother, while a bigger child "would be killed by the father by being beaten on the head". But cases of women killing older children are on record too. In 1904 a parish priest in
Broome, Western Australia, stated that infanticide was very common, including one case where a four-year-old was "killed and eaten by its mother", who later became a Christian. In north eastern Queensland, there is archaeological 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: 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. In other cases, who consumed the bodies, or parts thereof, depended on factors such as relationship with the deceased and status in the social group. Some have interpreted the consumption of infants as a religious practice: "In parts of
New South Wales ..., it was customary long ago for the first-born of every lubra [Aboriginal woman] to be eaten by the tribe, as part of a religious ceremony." However, there seems to be no direct evidence that such acts actually had a religious meaning, and the Australian anthropologist
Alfred William Howitt rejects the idea that the eaten were
human sacrifices as "absolutely without foundation", arguing that religious sacrifices of any kind were unknown in
Australia. Infanticide followed by cannibalism has also been documented for the
Azande people in Central Africa, where twins were sometimes killed and eaten. Among the
Wariʼ in the
Brazilian rainforest, infanticide was rare, but cases occurred, especially of babies born to young unmarried girls. During the stress and chaos of the contact era, infanticide became more common – young orphans, sometimes already toddlers, were killed if there were no relatives or if the relatives found it impossible to care for them. Killed infants and toddlers were regarded as "nonpersons", and hence "cut up and roasted immediately" and then eaten in the same way as "animals and enemy outsiders" – this treatment signalled that the infant had been rejected as a kin and person.
Consumption of slave children Sumatra According to the 14th century traveller
Odoric of Pordenone, the inhabitants of
Lamuri, a kingdom in northern
Sumatra, purchased children from foreign merchants to "slaughter them in the
shambles and eat them". Odoric states that the kingdom was wealthy and there was no lack of other food, suggesting that the custom was driven by a preference for human flesh rather than by hunger. He shows excellent knowledge of Sumatra, indicating that he had really been there, and several other sources confirm that cannibalism was practised in northern Sumatra around that time. The merchants, though likely not cannibals themselves, apparently had no scruples selling slave children for the "shambles". Odoric's account was later borrowed by John Mandeville for his
Book of Marvels and Travels.
Congo Basin in a raid and about to be sold on the
Ubangi River, where cannibalism was widespread, "as meat for slaughter". Photograph from 1889, published in
Le Mouvement Géographique. Up to the late 19th century, cannibalism was practised widely in some parts of the
Congo Basin, with slaves being frequent victims. Many "healthy children" had to die "to provide a feast for their owners". 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". 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. Various reports from the late 19th century indicate that around the
Ubangi River in the north of the Congo Basin, slaves were frequently exchanged against
ivory, which was then exported to Europe or the Americas, while the slaves were eaten. The local elephant hunters preferred the flesh of young human beings – four to sixteen was their favourite age range, according to one trader – "because it was not only more tender, but also much quicker to cook" than the meat of elephants or other large animals. Near today's
Bangui, whole groups of ten or more children were sometimes purchased, butchered, and consumed together. A French traveller visiting the area in the 1890s saw the disembowelled bodies of children exposed for sale, hanging from the branches of bushes. In order to ensure a regular supply, "the chiefs raise herds of [children], like we do with sheep or geese at home", stated a missionary after a trip along the Ubangi. Several accounts indicate that children were indeed fattened and slaughtered on a regular basis. While one or two victims per village and week seem to have been typical, Augouard also mentions "a village which I know well, [where] a child aged ten to twelve was sacrificed every day to serve as food for the chief and the principals of the area," thus also indicating that the regular enjoyment of such dishes was a privilege of the influential and well-connected. The killing of slave children for culinary purposes is also documented for various other parts of the Congo Basin, including the north and northeast, the
Maniema region in the east, and the
Kasai region in the south. In Maniema, the body of a slave child was considered an appropriate "
pièce de résistance" (chief dish) for banquets held among the wealthy even during the early years of colonial rule.
Congo Free State official Guy Burrows once rescued a young slave boy from this fate after the boy had managed to run away and beg for help. Burrows's local colleague did not understand why he had bothered, pointing out that such banquets were often held in the area without the Free State getting involved. Slave raiding and cannibalism often went hand in hand, as those killed in fighting and those who were too young, too old, or otherwise considered less suitable for sale, were often eaten right after a slave raid, or otherwise sold to nearby cannibals for consumption. 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. 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: Another man told Baker that at
Gondokoro, where they were at that time, he had seen how several slave children were slaughtered and then served at "a great feast" held by the Azande members of a slave raiding party. Children born to enslaved mothers could meet the same fate. The German ethnologist
Georg A. Schweinfurth once saw a newborn baby among the ingredients assembled for a meal. He learned that the baby, whose mother was a slave, would soon be "cooked together with the
gourds", since capturing slaves was more convenient than raising them from birth. He also heard persistent rumours that little slave children were frequently served at the table of the Azande king. Generally, slaves and their flesh were not expensive in the Congo region. In some areas, human flesh was up to twice as expensive as that of animals, while elsewhere the prices of both were comparable. Accordingly, a girl of six or ten years could be purchased for the price of a
dwarf goat, or sometimes even cheaper, and people do not seem to have regarded the consumption of one as more morally troubling than the consumption of the other, though they generally preferred the taste of the child. Missionaries observed that a living slave child was nevertheless "worth less than a quarter of a
hippopotamus or of a
buffalo", due to the much smaller amount of meat the child would yield. , who watched while a girl he had purchased was killed, cooked, and eaten Sometimes white men played a role in the death of Congolese slave children. In a case that shocked the European and American press, the Scot
James Sligo Jameson, a member of
Henry Morton Stanley's last expedition, 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. Jameson defended himself by claiming that he had considered the whole affair a joke and had not thought the child would really die until it was too late. Other cases received little or no international attention. At about the same time as the Jameson affair, in the late 1880s, a white trader accidentally caused the death of a slave boy whom he had rented from a
Bangala head man. When he complained about the boy's unreliability, the man reacted by killing the boy "with a thrust of his spear", and one day later his teenage son "nonchalantly remarked that – 'That slave boy was very good eating – he was nice and fat. According to
Herbert Ward, who witnessed and documented the incident, "the pot" was the usual destination of any slave who annoyed or disappointed their owner, and "light repast[s] off the limbs of some unfortunate slave, slain for refractory behavior", were served in the area on a fairly regular basis. The relations between the locals and the white men at the trading post were nevertheless, "as a rule, friendly". While travelling along the Ubangi River, the French explorer 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). "Maybe at this hour she is being eaten. That is very likely", he commented in a diary-style letter. His colleague 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. Dolisie approached the boy's owner who finally agreed to hand the boy over to him. Cannibalism did not disappear overnight, and as late as 1950 a Belgian colonial administrator found out that the dish he had just eaten had been made with "the meat ... from a young girl". In agreement with earlier appraisals, he described it as "remarkably delicious".
Angola and West Africa There are also reports of the consumption of young slaves and victims of slave raids from other parts of Central and Western Africa. Around the
Cuanza River in today's
Angola, children caught in raids but too young to be profitably sold as slaves were butchered in public, their fresh flesh then sold to passers-by, according to the Hungarian explorer
László Magyar, who states that he repeatedly saw such scenes himself. In regions that today belong to
Nigeria, the baked bodies of deliberately fattened slave children were served as delicacies, as young children's flesh was said to be "the best [food] of all". Oral accounts indicate that around the beginning of the 20th century, children playing outside were still at risk of "being kidnapped and either killed and eaten or sold away or sacrificed to one god or the other."
Cannibalistic child murderers murdered more than a hundred children during a famine in Iraq in 1917, eating some of their flesh and selling the rest in a small restaurant. In
early modern Europe, claims of similar acts were sometimes associated with
werewolves. In 1521, two Frenchmen, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun, confessed before their execution for murder and lycanthropy that they had transformed into werewolves after making a pact with a witches' coven, and had killed and eaten six infants. On 18 January 1573, the French "Werewolf of Dole",
Gilles Garnier, was burned at the stake for strangling four children and eating their corpses. On 16 September 1581, German serial killer
Peter Niers and his accomplices were executed on the breaking wheel for the murder and consumption of 544 people. Among the victims were dozens of fetuses, which had allegedly been cut from the wombs of pregnant women and eaten as part of black magic rituals. The reliability of these claims is unclear, as they are largely based on contemporary ballads and confessions extracted under torture. An unidentified man (his name may have been
Nicolas Damont) was burned at the stake in 1598 for the murders of up to 50 children in the French town of Châlons-en-Champagne after some of their remains were found in his home, including partially eaten cuts of human flesh. He admitted to having abducted, killed and eaten his victims during psychotic episodes, but denied accusations by authorities that he had done so while transformed into a werewolf. The 18th-century French showman
Tarrare was known for his insatiable and bizarre appetite. During his time under medical observation in the hospital in
Soultz-sous-Forêts in 1794, Tarrare's uncontrollable hunger drove him to eat anything available, including living cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies. This culminated in the suspected consumption of a 14-month-old child who went missing within the hospital. Although Tarrare was never conclusively proven guilty, the accusations and circumstantial evidence were strong enough that he was promptly expelled from the hospital. While most later cases from the 20th century were committed by men and motivated, at least in part, by
sexual sadism, an unusual case committed by a couple was apparently motivated by hunger and greed. During a severe famine in
Iraq in 1917,
Abboud and Khajawa murdered more than a hundred young children in order to eat or sell their flesh. The couple deliberately targeted children because they found their flesh to be much tastier than that of their first victim, an elderly woman. They employed their own young son to lure other children whom they then bludgeoned to death before skinning, dismembering and cooking them. They sold some of the meat in a small restaurant. The chaos of the famine allowed them to get away with an enormous number of murders before one of their customers became suspicious and informed the police, leading to their arrest and subsequent execution. In the 1990s,
Nathaniel Bar-Jonah seems to have killed and consumed at least one boy, though further child victims are suspected. The body of his ten-year-old victim was never found, but after the boy's disappearance Bar-Jonah apparently did not buy any groceries for a month. At the same time he held a number of cookouts, at which he served burgers and other meat dishes to his guests, several of whom found that the meat "tasted strange". He told one of his guests that it came from a
deer which he had personally "hunted, killed, [and] butchered". After his arrest, a number of recipes using children's body parts were found in his apartment, plus notes indicating that he had actually cooked some of these dishes for his neighbours. , the "Butcher of Hanover" In
Germany,
Fritz Haarmann, also called the "Butcher of Hanover",
sexually assaulted and murdered at least 24 boys, most of them teenagers, between 1918 and 1924. He regularly sold boneless
ground meat on the black market and gave different and contradictory explanations about the origin of this meat. Suspicions that this was his way of getting rid of some of the mortal remains of his victims were never definitively confirmed, nor refuted. Between the 1950s and 1970s,
Joachim Kroll, nicknamed the "
Ruhr Cannibal", murdered probably more than a dozen women and girls. Most of his victims were girls from four to sixteen years of age, and he usually
raped them before strangling them. When he was arrested, parts of the body of four-year-old Marion Ketter, his last victim, were in his freezer, while a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water. 's victims, 9-year-old Yelena Zakotnova, was found under this bridge In the
Soviet Union,
Andrei Chikatilo sexually assaulted and murdered more than 50 women and children between 1978 and 1990. His first victim was a nine-year-old girl and most of his victims were boys and girls, some as young as seven. Over time, he "started cutting off boys' genitals and excising the
uterus from his female victims, chewing and eating them to attain new heights of sexual pleasure." The police also found evidence suggesting that he had roasted body parts of his victims on campfires. Many of the murdered were
runaways or
vagrants, and he motivated his acts as due to "his disgust at these kinds of people [who were] always pestering people". ==Recent cases==