A pretty common theme during famines is killing spouses and children to put them out of their agony.

Late Victorian Holocausts covers a lot of less-known ones. Here’s a free PDF.

RE: Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879

Richard later discovered human meat being sold openly in the streets and heard stories “of parents exchanging young children because they could not kill and eat their own.” Residents—who everywhere went armed with spears and swords for self-protection—also “dare not go to the coal-pits for coal, so necessary for warmth and cooking, for both mules and owners had disappeared, having been eaten.”49 (Richard, on the other hand, was struck by “the absence of the robbery of the rich” among so much death.)50 The other European witness to the catastrophe, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanxi, confirmed Richard’s most disturbing observations in a letter to the procurator of the Lazarist Fathers (later quoted in The Times): “Previously, people had restricted themselves to cannibalizing the dead; now they are killing the living for food. The husband devours his wife, the parents eat their children or the children eat their parents: this is now the everyday news.”51