Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was “not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.” The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did…
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
And the Holodomor
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