*This is Chapter 8 of Who Brought the Steak Tartare?, you may want to go back to Chapter 7 or start at the beginning.

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That first meal’s fare set the mundane tone for the culinary aspects of the expedition—at least until disaster struck. The food consisted of individual portions of freeze-dried prepared meals that were rehydrated with hot water. While utensils were available, none of the crew even attempted to use them. It was immediately established as the custom to slurp the food directly from the sachet.

‘This is some of the most bland food I’ve ever tasted,’ said the photographer Hood, smacking his lips together.

Greenstockings agreed, frowning at the silvery sachet she was holding.

‘Everything tastes like this in microgravity,’ said the Chinese astronaut known as Ge Ge. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘I’ve had worse,’ said Franklin. Pointing at Flinders, he continued, ‘His uncle used to burn salmon on the barbecue, I mean, really burn it.’

‘My grandma insisted on making everyone a cake on their birthday,’ said Richards. ‘It always made us sick. But you couldn’t not eat it. She was such a sweet old lady.’

‘The lesson I learned as a child,’ said Akaitcho, ‘was that the problem of taste is not flavor, but hunger. If it doesn’t taste good, you aren’t hungry.’

‘No offense, old man,’ said Hood, ‘But I’m hungry and I’m pretty sure that this still tastes like shit.’

‘I was a poor child,’ said Akaitcho. ‘I ate many things that I would find quite repulsive now. But I was so much hungrier, then. Even in graduate school this was true: hunger was by far the best seasoning.’

‘Some things taste bad, no matter what,’ said Back.

‘Yeah, just because you’re hungry enough to eat something disgusting, doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it,’ said Hood.

‘There is not one meal I’ve had at a fine restaurant that compares to a rotten squirrel I once ate,’ said Akaitcho. ‘It was putrid, but not less acceptable to me on that account; indeed, there was a flavor there that I think I’ve been looking for ever since.’¹

‘I have to disagree with you, pops,’ said Back. ‘I ate a man’s eyeball once. It tasted worse than anything I’ve ever eaten, and I was starving to death.’

Several people spoke all at once.

‘No you didn’t!’ shouted Hood.

‘Who eats an eyeball?’ said Greenstockings.

‘I’m sure it was the texture, not the flavor,’ said Flinders.

‘And now you must tell us all how you became a cannibal,’ said Akaitcho.

‘As long as it’s not too painful,’ said Franklin.

But it was clear that everyone expected a story.

‘I was part of a training exercise on Okinawa,’ said Back. ‘We were heading back to the mainland when something malfunctioned, and our plane went down. Only three of us survived. We floated on a piece of the wing for two months before they found us. Turns out that it’s pretty hard to stay full when you’re adrift on the ocean. When one of us died, there wasn’t any question that we’d eat him. The only parts we didn’t eat were his brain—because we thought it’d give us mad cow disease or something—and his second eyeball—because I ate the first.’

Back finished his story and nobody said anything. Back reached around his neck and unclasped a thong on which hung a small white bone. ‘This is the first joint of his little finger,’ he said.²

Now, I must admit that when I first heard this story of Back’s history of eating people, and this symptom of carrying around a bone from his victim, I interpreted it through my own fantasy, and believed that it represented a penis, but of course this missed the mark as badly as the anxiety-hysteria diagnosis traditionally accepted by historians.³ In reality, that little finger represented survival.

‘Well, I’m glad we got intimate so quickly,’ said Flinders.

Chapter 9 tomorrow, same time, same place.

It was putrid, but it was not the less acceptable to us on that account. John Richardson, 27 September 1821 ↩
Long ago a young man dreamt he was eating one of his own fingers, the first joint of his little finger. Sara John, 1937, in Regina Flannery, Mary Elixabeth Chambers, and Patricia A Jehle, “Witiko Accounts from the James Bay Cree” Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1981 ↩
We initially reacted to the hot dog symptom with our own fantasy, namely, that it represented a penis, but this missed the mark as badly as the anxiety-hysteria diagnosis of earlier therapists. William M Bolman and Alan S Katz, “Hamburger Hoarding: A Case of Symbolic Cannibalism Resembling Whitico Psychosis,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 142, No. 5, 1966 ↩

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Footnotes