These Capsules Are People!!

Likely going by the wayside in the news media is this lovely story out of South Korea.

I seriously don't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up my breakfast.

Evidently the consumption of human flesh is a cure-all in some Asian cultures.  Fine.  Even if I don't agree with the medicine, I can at least understand the concept.  Plus, if I was ever starving, I can't say I wouldn't eat human flesh if it was presented to me.

To me that's not the disturbing part.  The disturbing part of how the capsules of dried, powdered human flesh that were confiscated after their being smuggled from China into South Korea for distribution to those who hold such beliefs is in their production.

Read the article.

Smuggled capsules of human flesh confiscated in S. Korea

It states that babies and/or fetuses were chopped up, left out to dry and then ground up into a powder.  So try to imagine that.  We're already dealing with backwards, pseudo stone age beliefs that result in people thinking that swallowing a pill of dried flesh helps cure them of various diseases.  Couple that with the fact that where this occurs is also likely in some backwater town of rural China and you come up with a most horrific scene.

Somewhere out there, there is a village, or villages in China, where babies (still born? unwanted female babies? abandoned babies?) and fetuses (abortions?, miscarriages?) are being collected, chopped up by hand axe and left out to dry.  Can you see it?  Some dusty, dirty town with wooden, sticklike drying racks stacked with small baby parts.  Arms and legs left out in the sun, wrinkling and bronzed.

After a few weeks, some elderly, female villagers come by and pick up the parts that have dried out sufficiently, placing them in a wicker basket loaded to the brink of overflowing.  They are then taken back to some other nearly falling down building where the women of the village break out their 100+ year old mortar and pestle to grind down the baby bones and flesh until it makes a fine, brown, powder.

The powder gets collected in a big plastic, Tupperware like bin and once a month a rattletrap truck, a relic of the cold war, stops by to pick up the bin and take it to some dark and dingy back alley in one of a thousand overcrowded Chinese cities.  It is here that some enterprising man has devised a system to fill some small capsules, likely manufactured at a local Chinese medical supply company, with this powder, turning a nearly free resource that is in abundant supply, into something worth literally, its weight in gold to his more affluent cousins across the border in South Korea.

Just beyond epic here...only in our modern world.  So the next time you visit China, take a peak at what is drying out in the backyard garden.  It might just be your waitresses grandchild.