Eleanor V. Braun is an anthropologist and cultural historian specializing in humanity’s most forbidden appetites—how food, ritual, and morality intersect in the stories civilizations tell about themselves. For more than a decade, she has studied the anthropology of consumption and taboo across continents, documenting how societies define not only what may be eaten, but who may be. Her fieldwork ranges from Pacific islands once infamous for “ritual feasts” to European archives that reveal centuries of medicinal cannibalism disguised as science. Braun’s earlier book, Sustenance and Survival: The Cultural Impact of Cannibalism, established her as one of the few scholars willing to confront the subject without sensationalism or apology.
That same fearlessness drives The Book On The Cookbook for Cannibals: Feast of the Forgotten — A Culinary Guide to the Taboo, a work that dismantles every myth surrounding anthropophagy and forces readers to look at what humanity chooses to hide. Drawing from archaeology, myth, theology, and evolutionary biology, Braun argues that cannibalism is not an aberration of human history but an ever-present mirror of it. The book travels from Neanderthal caves and Aztec temples to European apothecaries and modern survival stories, revealing a pattern that repeats wherever hunger, power, or devotion collide. Each chapter exposes how the act of consumption—whether literal or symbolic—defines civilizations more honestly than their moral codes ever could.
Far from a shock piece, The Cookbook for Cannibals reads like a dark anthropology of appetite. Braun reconstructs historical recipes, rituals, and cultural economies to show how human flesh became, at various times, medicine, sacrament, punishment, and metaphor. Her writing is unsparing yet oddly compassionate; she treats even the most disturbing evidence as data about human adaptability rather than depravity. By linking medieval “mummy medicine,” Aztec sacrificial distribution systems, and modern media fascination with taboo, she makes a chilling but necessary argument: that our horror at cannibalism is a recent luxury made possible by surplus, not a moral evolution.
Through this work, Braun challenges the boundary between disgust and understanding. She contends that confronting what revolts us most may be the only way to grasp what civilization truly means. Her research invites readers to face the uncomfortable truth that culture, like hunger, consumes to survive—and that every age invents its own form of acceptable devouring.
Eleanor V. Braun continues to lecture internationally on taboo, morality, and the anthropology of consumption, urging both scholars and the public to replace moral panic with historical clarity. The Book On The Cookbook for Cannibals stands as her boldest contribution yet—a meticulous, unsettling exploration of what it means to be human when every moral system is stripped to the bone.
Published by The Book On Publishing, the official publisher of The Book On Series.