Chestnuts and Cannibals, oh my!

I apologize for the lag in entries. I’m up to my eyeballs in schoolwork. It’s awesome, though. I just love what I’m working on. I have five final papers due by the end of the month. I think I’ve just about finished three of them and have two more to go. Want to hear what I’ve been studying?

The first project I finished was on the chestnut. I’ve been working on that one for a while. Go ahead, try me, ask me anything about the chestnut! I now know for sure that the horse chestnut (which I tried to roast and eat the last time I came back from Europe) is definitely NOT related to the chestnut and it is definitely NOT edible! All of the real American chestnut trees got wiped out by a fungus in the first half of the last century, and – this is incredible, to me – its pathogenic spores are still floating around out there and the American chestnut still cannot grow successfully in North America. There is, thank heavens, The American Chestnut Foundation, which is doing its darnedest to bring ol’ Chester back to life. Seriously, they call the Castanea dentata “Chester” on their website.

Then I finished up a research into cannibalism. One interesting finding I had was that, in Medieval Europe, even though there weren’t practicing cannibals, per se, there were a few interesting cannibalistic “trends”. Yeah, how do you like that? Today it’s tight black pants and tomorrow it’s cannibalism. Go figure. Anyway, there were a handful of popular uprisings – the price of bread was too high, or they imposed a new tax, or whatever filled the Text-Message-to-the-Editor column in the Ye Old Town Crier of 1385 – in which the townspeople took to capturing the scapegoat politician, whacking him, sticking his head on a pole, and then eating his intestines. And then, there were some edgy docs who started prescribing human blood as a curative for all kinds of health problems. Most of the time they got the human blood from criminals who had been hanged or decapitated, and a whole chain of “mummy shops” opened up in the big cities to meet the growing demand. (I’ll bet there was a pyramid scheme/scam and everything.)

Then I had to analyze a piece of art. Most people stick with sensible genres like Last Suppers and Madonnas eating pears and things like that. Horrified by the prospect of seeming normal, I stuck with my cannibal theme and instead analyzed this picture:

Next up, I have a bibliography project I’m doing on sustainable agriculture, and – this is what I’m really excited about – my paper for “Anthropology and Food.” I talked with my prof, and he supported my idea: I’m basically going to do a “field study” regarding the differences I pick up between the food cultures of the United States and Italy. Now that gets me going!