History ImAHumanitarian / Literature

* In Creator/EdwardLucasWhite's 1906 short story "{{Literature/Amina}}," the diet of the titular Amina's [[OurGhoulsAreCreepier Free]]-[[HumanSubspecies people]] includes ''homo sapiens'' flesh. (This leads to them being fanatically-hunted by the local humans).
* In the Creator/TimPowers novel ''Literature/TheAnubisGates'', the head of a secret society of beggars turns down a dinner invitation at a rival society, saying that he doesn't care for the variety of pork they serve.
* The children's book ''Baa!'' is the Soylent Green story [-[[RecycledINSPACE WITH SHEEP!]]-]. No, seriously. Finding out that your lamb chop is made of sheep isn't quite so much of a big reveal, though.

* In ''Literature/TheBadPlace'' by Creator/DeanKoontz the bad guy drinks the blood of his victims. His sisters dug up their dead mother and ate some of it and shared the rest with their mob of cats - so their mother 'would always be with them'.

* Creator/AugustDerleth added the Tcho-Tcho to the Franchise/CthulhuMythos, a Burmese tribe of pygmies that worships ancient and malevolent gods. By their D20 ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'' entry, the Tcho-Tcho have integrated in American society, and tend to operate popular restaurants serving dishes with delicious human ganglia paste... er, "White Pork Sauce."
* Played straight by Literature/TheCulture in [[Creator/IainBanks Iain M. Banks]]'s ''State of the Art''. Removing a few muscle cells doesn't hurt anyone, therefore why should [[ArtificialCannibalism eating]] the resulting [[CloningBodyParts vat-grown meat]] be bad? So, while a Contact ship visits Earth, one of the crew arranges a feast including the power figures of 1977:
-->Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Con Carne ... General Stroessner Meat Balls and UsefulNotes/RichardNixon Burgers ...[[UsefulNotes/{{Philippines}} Ferdinand Marcos]] Saute and Shah of Iran Kebabs ... Fricasseed [[UsefulNotes/NorthKorea Kim Il Sung]], Boiled General Videla and [[UsefulNotes/{{Zimbabwe}} Ian Smith]] in Black Beans Sauce...

** There's also the "bowls of brown" served in the poorer quarters of King's Landing. In ''A Storm of Swords'', Tyrion talks Bronn into making a troublesome bard disappear, and Bronn says he'll likely end up as stew.
** In ''A Dance With Dragons'', the mysterious Coldhands provides Bran and co, who are starving with some nice roasted pork. Pork from pigs Coldhands somehow managed to find in the middle of a barren, snowy forest, and which [[SarcasmMode coincidentally]] turned up shortly after Coldhands killed some Night's Watch deserters. The more benign, if less likely, explanation is that the pigs, like the deserters, were escaping from the remains of Craster's nearby outpost after the Night's Watch mutiny.

* ''Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse'':

--> The last vision was terrible. Zak saw the survivors, starved into madness, turning on a corpse. He and Galt and the other Children could clearly see how horrified the parents were by their own acts. What they had done was a last, desperate attempt to save their children. It was the act of beings so hungry they had lost their minds. As the parents fed their starving children, they cried.
--> The Children had relished the thought of eating human flesh because they remembered it from their childhood. But this vision had shown them how desperate their parents had been, and how horrible their final act really was.
* Jon Shannow is unlucky enough to come across two cases of this in quick succession in ''Literature/StonesOfPower''. First he fights off a tribe of cannibals who file their teeth to points. Then later on, when he's going through the saddlebags of a [[TheLegionsOfHell Hellborn]] he's just killed, he finds some tasty-looking cuts of preserved meat. He's seconds away from having a bite when someone else tells him that the meat comes from child sacrifices. The [[LizardFolk Daggers]] and {{Beast M|an}}en from the sequel ''The Last Guardian'' also find humans rather tasty.
* In ''Literature/StrangerInAStrangeLand'', we see one of the relatively rare subversions of the trope, with [[MessianicArchetype Valentine Michael Smith]] encouraging a literal interpretation of the biblical phrase "This is my body..." This is because Michael was raised by Martians, who routinely practice funereal cannibalism to "grok" the essence of the departed, as well as not let organic matter go to waste on a resource-poor world.
** At one point a character asks Michael if he "feels like dinner". Growing up as he did among the Martians, Michael had always been aware that he ''was'' food, but wasn't expecting to be called upon him to take that role so soon. He's a little surprised and disappointed, but is explicitly still willing to make the sacrifice if it's necessary. However, she explains quickly enough to prevent him from doing anything drastic.

** A front-page article in the ''[[UsefulNotes/BritishNewspapers Sunday Sport]]'', possibly inspired by the ''Theatre/SweeneyTodd'' story, involved a man killing a tramp and making his body into döner kebabs to sell at his takeaway.
** For those who don't know, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab döner kebabs]] (normally, no relation to NoPartyLikeADonnerParty) are a Turkish dish made of meat on a pita (like a gyro); they're a popular fast food in some areas, especially Germany.

* Taken to the extreme in Creator/StephenKing's "[[Literature/SkeletonCrew Survivor Type]]", about a [[AssholeVictim drug-smuggling surgeon]] who gets stranded on a tiny island with nothing to eat but [[spoiler: [[{{Autocannibalism}} himself]], one amputation at a time]].
** [[spoiler: "lady fingers they taste like lady fingers"]]
** Cannibalism was also supposed to be the subject of ''The Survivors'', a novel King was planning about the inhabitants of a high rise who get trapped inside due to a disaster and turn to one another for food. He felt he couldn't find a way to write it without seeming goofy, however, so it's been shelved since the Eighties.
* In ''[[Literature/EddieLaCrosse The Sword-Edged Blonde]]'', Queen Rhiannon stands accused of boiling and partly eating her own child as part of an [[RitualMagic occult ritual]]. Since she was found with a pot containing bones, was coughing up chunks of meat, and the baby was nowhere to be found, most people consider the case against her to be airtight, but her husband the King refuses to believe it. [[spoiler: She didn't do it; someone just went to a lot of trouble to make it appear so.]]
* Terry Goodkind's ''Literature/SwordOfTruth'' series includes a primitive tribe called the Mud People, which practices cannibalism. Our hero, Richard, is obliged to partake as part of a ritual to prepare for [[ISeeDeadPeople communicating with spirits]] (though it's his choice to do so -- the Mud People don't force their practices on others). He is served this special dish three times during the books, each time it's enemies. Appparently, the Mud People mainly eat their fallen enemies, and sometimes gain mystical insights into them by doing so (Richard does once). Richard learns of this when he asks what kind of meat they're serving, and he's told it's 'fire fighter' (apparently, he already suspected what it was). When he asks what that is, they explain it's the BigBad's servant, demanding them to follow the law forbidding fire. They decided to prevent him from bringing any more enforcers.

* In Creator/HGWells' ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'', the {{Time Travel}}ler goes 800,000 years into the future, where he discovers two main humanoid species: the Eloi, a group of attractive, youthful people living in an Eden-like paradise without a care in the world, and the Morlocks, a subterranean race of animalistic, fur-covered monsters that do all the work to keep the Eloi contented. It's revealed to the reader and the Time Traveller that not only [[spoiler: are the Morlocks actually raising the Eloi for food, but both evolved from our own species. So it turns out that it's a satire on the class system, but NOT an example of cannibalism, unless you consider humans eating chimpanzees to be cannibalism.]]

* In ''Literature/TheTwits'' Mr. Twit has no qualms with the idea of making several boys into a pie.
* "Two Bottles Of Relish" by Creator/LordDunsany. Num-numo is not very good on salads.

* In ''Literature/TheVampireChronicles'', Maharet and Mekare's people routinely roast and eat their dead as a properly respectful funeral. It's eventually used as an excuse to destroy the tribe and kidnap the twins.
** In the book, ''Queen of the Damned'', Mekare [[spoiler: eats Queen Akasha's heart and brain]]. This is not what happens in the movie.