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There are so many, many bad things in the world, but for some weird visceral reason, cannibalism is considered just about the worst. Depending on your point of view, it rises above even such criminal abominations as pedophilia, rape and genocide, but in the final analysis, it's what's for dinner.
Then again, we live in a culture in which people would run vomiting to the bathroom if they saw what went into making their McDonald's hamburgers, in which a cow is brutally killed with blunt-force trauma, its innards are outered, and then the whole thing is ground up into a mealy paste, intestines, feces, bones and all.
With McDonald's, you can mentally blank out the process in favor of focusing on the tasty fat-and-gristle laden product. With cannibalism, there is a nearly unavoidable tendency to linger on the details of the process -- removing the limbs, peeling the skin, roasting it over an open flame, etc., etc. And do we really taste like chicken?
Cannibalism is, of course, the eating of one's own species. It should be distinguished from vampirism, which is the drinking of human blood. If you cut a fellow human up into little pieces and pure him or her in a blender, that would technically be cannibalism and not vampirism.
There are two kinds of cannibalism -- sociological and pathological. The former means living and eating in a culture where cannibalism is accepted, and the latter means practicing cannibalism within a culture where it's not accepted.
There is a lot of controversy over the idea of sociological cannibalism, mostly because reports of its existence have been greatly exaggerated. Ever since human society expanded past the tribal stage, the charge of cannibalism has served as a primary justification for one social collective (European nation, Western religion, Aztecs) to annihilate another, usually militarily inferior social collective (aborigines, pagans, Mayans).
In many cases, these charges were wholly fabricated. Reports of social cannibalism are mostly pointed at the Americas and Africa, since these were the primary continents subjected to European killing and conquest sprees from the Middle Ages through modern times. Despite the political convenience of these claims, there are documented examples of cannibalistic cultures and practices.
There's no evidence that the Native Americans encountered in North America by the first European settlers had any history of cannibalism, although the accusation was repeated often enough. But there are some isolated examples that have been confirmed by recent research. Most demonstrable cannibal practices in North America were in the distant past, far earlier than Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Unfortunately for the weak of heart, we're all descended from cannibals. Isn't that peachy......I mean bloody?
