Child cannibalism

The performance artist Zhu Yu claimed that he prepared, cooked and ate real human bodies, including fetuses,[3] as an artistic performance.[4] The performance was called Eating People, and he claimed it was to protest against cannibalism.[5] It was intended as "shock art".[6][7] The Chinese Ministry of Culture cited a menace to social order and the spiritual health of the Chinese people, banned exhibitions involving culture, animal abuse, corpses, and overt violence and sexuality[8] and Zhu Yu was prosecuted for his deeds.[9]

Snopes and other urban legend sites have said the "fetus" used by Zhu Yu was most likely constructed from a duck's body and a doll head.[10][11][5][12][13][14][15][16] Other images from another art exhibit were falsely circulated along with Zhu Yu's photographs and claimed to be evidence of fetus soup.[17]

Critics see the propagation of these rumors as a form of blood libel, or accusing one's enemy of eating children, and accuse countries of using this as a political lever.[18]

Capsule pills purported to be filled with human baby flesh in the form of powder were seized by South Koreans from ethnic Koreans living in China, who had tried to smuggle them into South Korea and consume the capsules themselves or distribute them to other ethnic Korean citizens of China living in South Korea.[19][20][21] Experts later suggested that the pills had actually been made of newborn placenta for the documented practice of human placentophagy.[22][23]

In Greek mythology, several of the major gods were actually eaten as children by their own father or just barely escaped such a fate. Cronus, once the most powerful of the gods, was dismayed by a prophecy telling him that he would one day be deposed by one of his children, just as he had formerly overthrown his own father. So as not to suffer the same fate, Cronus decided to consume all his children right after birth. But his wife and sister Rhea, unwilling to see all her children suffer such a fate, handed him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes after the birth of Zeus, their sixth child. Apparently not noticing the difference in taste, he devoured the stone, allowing infant Zeus to grow up at some secret hiding place without his father having any idea that a threat to his power was still alive. Once grown, Zeus tricked his father into drinking an emetic that made him disgorge Zeus' swallowed siblings Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. Being immortal gods they had survived being eaten and had indeed grown to adulthood within their father's stomach. Understandably annoyed at their father's behavior, the siblings then rose up against Cronus, overthrowing him and the other Titans in a huge war known as Titanomachy and thus fulfilling the prophecy.