Helen Craig’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
The Road is a relatively short book, comprising 320 pages and weighing approximately 380 grams. It contains several scenes of interest for professionals in the animal product industry. Sadly, each has several inaccuracies, and so I am unable to unreservedly recommend this novel. Here I list the fundamental defects, and attempt to suggest alternatives.
Mr. McCarthy has written a scene where a number of people are being kept for food in a basement structure. They are alive, and call out piteously to be rescued by our narrator. Needless to say, in a situation where the stock and consumers subsist on the same food, a “living larder” such as this is immensely wasteful. Every day they are alive, these people will be depreciating in calorific value, converting valuable fat stores and skeletal muscle into energy for continued life. This would have been obvious to Mr. McCarthy if he’d done even the smallest amount of research.
I would suggest that our enterprising cannibals slaughtered their captives as soon as possible. Any butcher could advise them on a huge variety of preservation procedures. The ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham. The fat may be rendered and stored safely in well-boiled jars, and sausages and jerky will use up any further scraps.
In addition, the narrator is horrified to note that one man shows the signs of limb removal and cauterization. Obviously Mr. McCarthy has heard the joke about the pig that was too good to eat all at once! (You will excuse my levity, although, indeed, I fear this to be close to the truth. The man’s knowledge is truly lacking.) Of course, as any slaughter man knows, shock and blood loss, combined with the heightened risk of infection in burnt flesh, make amputation a very poor choice for the sensible practitioner of animal husbandry.
What is worse, in the closing stages of the novel, a group of characters are depicted as eating a baby. Now, as we all know the young of the sheep, cow and pig remain luxury choices. They represent a high level of investment, and this is in animals that can subsist on foods human beings find unpalatable. The use of a human baby for nourishment is an immense waste of resources.
Let us do some basic math. Let us be fair, and not that there have been documented cases of women carrying a child on 400-800 calories a day. Over a 9 month pregnancy, that’s an investment of 108,000 – 216,000 calories. We shall generously estimate that the infant weighed 7 pounds. A small 7 pound turkey will provide roughly 4,480 calories, an order of magnitude less than that which was put in. (And bear in mind that modern turkeys have been bred for a large and broad breast, meaty thighs, and white feathers that do not leave unsightly spots on the skin when plucked. The human infant has not been bred for these characteristics, and will likely be a disappointing eating experience.) Again, Mr. McCarthy does not appear to have thought this through at all. Perhaps he thinks that women simply spontaneously generate babies from the ether! The woman’s companions would have been better of slaughtering her immediately, or, if they still wished to associate with her, seeking a medical end to the pregnancy as soon as possible.
Despite these qualms, I otherwise enjoyed the novel. I wish Mr. McCarthy luck in his future literary endeavors.
Tags: books, food, helen craig, humor i guess, meat, that maroon 5 video is messed up man
My first inclination was post “MALLORY!”
Congratulations on being so dark I confuse you with the esteemed Mallory! Kudos!
Ah man, thank you! I don’t know what to say, so I’m just going to grin creepily and wander away.
I feel a lot of love right now and it’s not for Cormac McCarthy
(it’s for you)
THANK YOU (for the amputation part)
But aren’t babies just tiny butterballs of fat? In a society where everyone is starving to death, a baby might be the best sustenance around.
Signed, Someone Who Evidently Has Not Bonded Enough With the Babies She Knows
I think they are when they’re well-nourished–but a woman carrying a baby on a near-starvation diet probably wouldn’t be able to eat enough to fatten it up properly, and to feed it after birth. Breastfeeding takes just huge amounts of calories, far more than the baby would probably contain itself.
So if they were REALLY into the sustenance thing, it might be a better idea to impregnate women in order to collect their milk.
Well, except you’ve got to feed the woman in order to get the calories out of the breast milk. They’d be better off eating her, and then eating whatever they were planning on feeding her.
Cannibals these days, I tell you.
wouldn’t it be better for the woman to slaughter her partner in conception as soon as he had done his part and make sausages out of him though, so that she could be assured of a good nutrition source through pregnancy and lactation
“what was dad like” the child will ask someday
“tough but fair(ly tasty)
Oh, well, in that case definitely. I was assuming that, in the circumstances, that the people eating the baby were the cannibals and the woman was not.
But yeah, practically speaking, if it’s the woman who’s the cannibal, then after getting impregnated she should pickle those haunches for her larder, if you know what I mean.
(I mean eat him.)
think of the jokes you could make about how hanging out with your boyfriend and his friends was always a total sausagefest. what pregnant woman could resist, you would eat him just for that
In my opinion, no lady should be ashamed for enjoying some beefcake now and then.
Sometimes you see a gorgeous hunk of man, and you just have to break off a piece and enjoy yourself.
AHHHH! CAN’T READ THIS YET. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK NOW.
BUT I WANT TOOOOOOOOO
This advice will be on my mind whenever I read/watch/hear about cannibalism from now on. Just KILL THEM, cannibals. IMMEDIATELY KILL THEM ALL AND MAKE SAUSAGES. It’s the most calorically economical choice.
Or, you know, pie. If you’re feeling traditional.
Mmm, meat pies.
1. This was very funny, thank you! I like McCarthy despite how he is such a Male Author but this article really makes some great points re: cannibalism strategy.
2. Apropos of nothing, the first time I heard the joke about how “you don’t eat a pig like that all at once” was in the Boba Fett story from Tales from Jabba’s Palace and I have mentally substituted “a barve like that” every time I’ve come across it since.
Oh hey another sample from Hannibal Lecter’s bookmarks.
Dammit I was gonna make a Hannibal Lecter joke. He obviously already knows this stuff though.
Truly, the moral depravity of these cannibals was only matched by their ignorance of proper meat processing techniques.
I hereby submit a petition for the Meat Processing Professional to review Snowpiercer next.
“So we’re definitely 100% stocked up on axes, huh?”
“Yeah, you never know what you’ll need after civilization crumbles and a throbbing engine is all that keeps you from becoming a meat popsicle.”
“So, hey, speaking of the engine that you, uh, really do need to stop referring to as throbbing, I mean, we know it does but you don’t have to mention it every time, anyway, how about some spare parts for that?”
“You know, we should, but we can’t pack those and the axes and the fishtank and the hair salon. Plus I’m pretty sure we can use interchangeable moppets instead and that’ll add a touch of pathos to our gilded life capsule.”
“Oh good point.”
INTERCHANGEABLE MOPPETS
This review was actually inspired by a spoiler I read about Snowpiercer! I’m sure it works very well in context, blah blah blah, but what I heard was so funny that I have to be careful not to think about it before I go to bed, unless I want to wake myself up laughing.
Haha, that’s great! I think I might know what you’re talking about, but won’t say any more because spoilers.
Cannibalism is one of my favourite themes. Has anyone seen The Green Butchers? It’s a great Danish cannibalism comedy.
The Road was not my favourite piece of cannibal lore, however. I found the writing style infuriating. Fragments are a stylistic device to be used like a spice, a teaspoon here and there, not a whole fucking book of them. And also I understand that the landscape (and everything else) is bleak, I understood it the first eight times you described it, you can just get on with the story now, please.
I do enjoy Cormac McCarthy Yelp Reviews. http://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/best
Those reviews perfectly encapsulate everything I hate about Cormac McCarthy. Yes, yes, Hemingway descendant, speaker of bald truths and despair, yes, but oh my GOD, WRITE A REAL SENTENCE.
The Hairpin did some articles of McCarthy describing music videos http://thehairpin.com/user/27537/celeste-ballard
THANK YOU.
One book in that weird run on fragmented style that stubbornly refuses capitalization was more than enough! Someone make him stop!
“It’s a great Danish cannibalism comedy.” Sentences you don’t see every day.
The butchery basement/living larder thing really bothered me (even as I gave it full points for YIKESiness) because, yeah, that’s just asking for wasted, infected meat and food-borne illness. I was willing to let the baby-eating go* only because I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that there’s a certain clique of road-scavenging cannibal that’s not industrious enough to do anything about the obvious pregnancy but is perfectly happy to eat the baby once the woman’s done the work of gestating and delivering it. In this scenario, they’re behaving opportunistically rather than meticulously: catch-as-catch-cannibals, if you will.
*There’s a sentence that sounds different out of context.
But they don’t eat the head, why wouldn’t you eat the head, why would you leave the murdered soldier’s intestines behind, you can feed that to the food!
Also keeping people alive increases the chance that they will mutiny and overcome you and eat you! Another argument in favor of the practicality of making them inanimate objects.
Side note: This post makes me really glad I never read The Road. Ugh.
This whole book (The Road) was such bullshit. It was filled with McCarthy desperately trying to prove that he was a really truly tough guy who could really truly face up to the grimdark bits of life. See? See, Mommy? See me writing about bloody and dirt and rape and all the scary nasty things under the bed, Mommy? See?
Just like all his books. And all of it just such bullshit. If he ever met anything really scary he’d piss himself.
So, um, somehow I had survived my adult life up to this moment without knowing what The Road was about. So thank you, Toast, for enlightening me.
I knew in a rough sort of way but I didn’t know about the ‘and then they et a baby’ part. I have always heard McCarthy given the highest praise but I must say this seems a very silly book.
edit: like it is just a book-length Simpsons joke without the jokes, right (“After all, isn’t there a little Uter in all of us? In fact, you might say we just ate Uter and he’s in our stomachs right now!”)
It’s about not eating people when everyone else is eating people. Not, you know, letting the living larder go, or not killing people, just not eating people you meet/kill.
The (non-) cannibal equivalent of walking away from Omelas.
You guys, I just….I just love this site so much. This is hitting my post-apocalyptic scenario button and my pedantry button and my dark humor button and it’s basically perfect.
yessssss
Is this what happens when you read too much Jonathan Swift*?
*no such thing
Never forget that Cormac McCarthy gave one of his only major interviews to Oprah, and it was great.
http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Oprahs-Exclus…
It is almost as good as the Simpsons/Pynchon connection. ALMOST.
I am so excited that I am not the only person who thought these things! Does no one in the apocalypse take survival seriously? we spends SO MUCH energy building and housing our shitty-tasting brains, why the fuck would you keep humans as livestock? UGH
Also, we build muscle very inefficiently, and would tend to be either stringy or fatty (or both). And we don’t reproduce fast enough to be a viable primary food source.
Yeah, post-apocalyptic cannibalism really only makes sense if you’re raider-cannibals — like, letting some other group of humans do the hard work of farming or whatever, and then periodically killing and eating a bunch of them. (Though in practice, this is STILL pretty inefficient, you’d be better off just finding some goats are something, are you kidding? Of all the things that are going to make it in a post-apocalyptic environment, why would you spend your time cultivating a herd of *humans* when you could cultivate a herd of *goats*? Those fuckers eat anything!)
I think cannibalism is a pretty interesting theme, but we have to be real about when cannibalism is appropriate and that is: when it’s out of spite.
*decides to never, ever read ‘The Road’ as she is a squeamish soul*
Those lazy, wasteful cannibals. *smdh*
There are two ways to read the description “what the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.”
One is purely practical (and I am going to overcome my natural reluctance and speak about a baby as no more than meat here, so fair warning). If you’re going to roast a small animal, it makes sense to gut and behead it first, just to get even, faster cooking, to avoid eating the waste products in the intestines, and to get better balance on the spit. That doesn’t mean that the removed portions aren’t also consumed, and I don’t see anything in the book that indicates they’re tossed aside or even in evidence at the site of the fire.
The other is less practical but thematically resonant. If you believe that the cannibals left behind PERFECTLY GOOD INTESTINES and so on, that profligacy contrasts powerfully with the terrible parsimony required for the protagonists to survive, eking out their last few sips of powdered grape drink and rationing canned goods to keep them tottering along. It communicates how easily, how luxuriously, one can live if they just let go of the last remnants of their empathy and humanity.
In addition to representing a very real threat to their safety, the cannibalism occurring in the book is intended to represent a threat to their selves, to their humanity, the what the father calls “the fire” that they carry. It’s not just the terrible danger of being eaten that looms over them, but the danger that they could succumb to the temptations of hunger and become eaters.
And that’s part of the reason (the other obviously being purely realistic: because that’s where bomb shelters are) why the bounty of the shelter they stumble across is found underground: though the goods of the shelter and their use of it is blameless, its placement and discovery echoes the horrors of the living larder, reminding them (and us) that even the most innocent of sustenance comes to them from the death of others.
[eta: Dang you, IntenseDebate unthreading known issue! This was written as a response to/enlargement on the conversation I was having with LeastBittern above.]
I really like your second point, but they live in a world where murder is cool, and leaving people to die is cool, but eating someone who is already dead is unconscionable. Which I was fine with, I guess, as a very Western line in the sand, but then the end has the heavy heavy implication that they were carrying the freaking light of God and human goodness within them and then I had problems.
Also from a energy availability standpoint, it doesn’t make sense! The “profligacy” theory does give the impression that everyone is eating MREs until the Man and the Boy show up.
Oh, I disagree–I think the major moral conflict in the novel is between the Boy and the Man, and the Man knows he’s terribly in the wrong, and mostly worried sick about being in the wrong. You can’t go three paragraphs without the dude moaning about how he can possibly ensure his child keeps his innate goodness. And the argument about the thief, and the last conversation in the novel, seem to settle the question pretty decisively.
It’s been six years since I’ve read it, but I don’t remember much of anything about the Man giving any kind of genuine religious or moral instruction (beyond, “Don’t eat humans”) to the Boy: in fact, almost the reverse, he seems to reverence his own child, because the child can see hope and innocence in a horribly fucked-up place. Which would suggest that people are born good, and this isn’t such an awful world after all. Except he can’t quite place his faith in that, because he also knows good and well how naive, and ignorant the kid is.
I’ll admit that the passage about the kid remembering his father’s voice in later years may totally botch up my theory, but I don’t have my copy of the book with me to check…
this is PERFECT.
I’m going to click on every single food ad on this article.
This seems like a reasonable place to link to the Feeding Hannibal blog, by the Hannibal food stylist.
Janice Poon is the best (and has the best job)!
Yeah, post-apocalyptic cannibalism really only makes sense if you're raider-cannibals — like, letting some other group of humans do the hard work of farming or whatever, and then periodically killing and eating a bunch of them. (Though in practice, this is STILL pretty inefficient, you'd be better off just finding some goats are something, are you kidding? Of all the things that are going to make it in a post-apocalyptic environment, why would you spend your time cultivating a herd of *humans* when you could cultivate a herd of *goats*? Those fuckers eat anything!)
I think cannibalism is a pretty interesting theme, but we have to be real about when cannibalism is appropriate and that is: when it's out of spite.
I came out of the cinema saying this! It REALLY REALLY ANNOYED me. And then there would be people who really liked The Road, and who would look at me in a slightly superior way when I said I didn’t like it, and say something like, “Oh, did you find it distasteful?” And I would say, “No, I found it ridiculous! If it made ANY sense to keep your meat alive and chop bits off them, we would have fields full of three-legged cows! They should have slaughtered their prey and preserved it properly! Also, why do it in THE BATHROOM when that farmhouse had lots of perfectly good outhouses that were probably even built for slaughtering and preserving meat? FRIGGING WASTE OF CALORIES!”
This conversation nearly always ended with the other person backing away slowly.
Oh, I have just read my old blog post and apparently I had another complaint too:
Fourthly, if you’re a lean, mean, bad gang who thinks nothing of hunting down a woman and her child to eat, why put skulls on sticks around your den? Who are they for? Either the audience are bloodthirsty cannibals with guns and numbers like yourself, in which case, a few mouldy old skulls aren’t going bother them, or they’re innocents and vulnerable, in which case, don’t scare them off, entice them in, yum yum!
Also the part where everybody is rescued by the heteropatriarchal family. Heteropatriarchy is so amazing that this family can even afford to feed their dog! Hooray!
No don't..
For me it was Old Man and the Sea. Guy sits in a boat. Guy is still in a boat.
As far as I know, that guy never got out of the boat.
The world needs this level of pragmatism. Very amusing, more from HC please!