Last year Carole Travis-Henikoff invited about 60 of her pals to her University Village graystone for a smorgasbord representing disarticulated human body parts. At the top she laid a suckling pig head with angel-hair pasta tresses and a beef tongue. There were veal sweetbreads around where the thymus glands would go, and a braised beef heart was surrounded by barbecued pork ribs, a roasted veal breast, and an abdomen of liver paté. Pork shank forearms ended in banana hands. Toward the other end of the 12-foot table there were eggs for ovaries, lamb fries and Italian meatballs for testicles, and a long narrow platter of assorted sausages placed between two legs of lamb.
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The party reflected the streak of wicked humor that runs through Travis-Henikoff’s otherwise scholarly book, Dinner With a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo, and wit makes one of her major premises—that most of us are closer to the taboo than we think—easier to swallow. “When I was a little kid I practiced autophagy all the time,” she says. “I used to roller skate and just get the worst scabs on my elbows and knees.” She argues that most of us have cannibals in our ancestral closets, and in the book points to Viking bones in Copenhagen’s Museum of Natural History that show evidence—cut marks and breakage—of having been cannibalized. “A thousand years ago, my Viking ancestors had a two-course meal: stone-baked clams and roasted Sigvaard,” she writes.
She grew up in her father’s place, cooking for and mingling with the Hollywood showbiz types and UCLA academics who frequented it. She was also a voracious reader, and even in adulthood, after she’d married, had children, and was helping to run the restaurant, she continued to study and hobnob with the scholars who dined there: “I got my education across the dinner table,” she says. She was particularly interested in archaeology and paleoanthropology.
Though she maintains a scholar’s objectivity, of the nine different types of cannibalism she examines, she finds “survival cannibalism” the most palatable. “I mean, if I was truly in a situation where I was absolutely going to die unless I ate other bodies around me,” she says, “I’m going to eat human flesh. I won’t want to, but I’m not going to die.” The body on her dining room table notwithstanding, the form of cannibalism she’s least curious about is “gastronomic cannibalism,” practiced without attendant ritual or need.
