An even more striking example of the way in which food taboos can hamper good nutrition, even among so-called scientifically advanced people, also occurred during the war years in Great Britain.

At that time large amounts of human blood were collected from such people as were prepared to give it. The blood was centrifuged, the plasma put aside for parenteral injection into those victims of bombing that might need it, and the red corpuscles discarded.

Again the scientific advisers to the minister of food put forward a scheme to make use of the red-blood corpuscles, so self-sacrificingly contributed by patriotic donors, and manufacture from it black pudding for distribution on the food ration.

The curious anthropological phenomenon then emerged that although the British were prepared to consume each other's blood by vein, they considred its ingestion by mouth was a variant of cannibalism and therefore disgusting.

the story circulated about how postwar food packages from the United States led to a gruesome confusion. When one package arrived containing an unlabeled dark powder, people assumed it was some kind of instant soup or drink, or perhaps a condiment. Only after most of the powder had been consumed did a letter from the United States arrive explaining that the powder was the ashes of their emigrant grandmother who had died during the war and who wanted her remains returned to Romanian soil...

A recent version of the legend describes the cremains of a relative shipped home from Australia to England and mixed there into the Christmas pudding. Half the pudding has been consumed by the time the letter of explanation anives.

I'm taking just the bone pieces. I'm grinding them down in a molcajete, or a mortar and pestle, and then I'm adding them into the food. I'm grinding them down in a metaphorical sense to help grind down the body and flesh, but also it's almost to subvert the grinding that we do in real life, and all the beating that we've taken throughout, but now it's done out of love.

In Fukuoka prefecture, Japan, banking on the superstition that to eat of human flesh cures all ills, a Korean whose wife had neuralgia cut a half-pound slice of flesh off his thigh, cut the slice in three parts, cooked one part, fed it to his wife, telling her it was rabbit. His wife improved; he went to the government hospital with an infected thigh.