This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes).

Today: The Legend of the Wendigo – America’s Original PSA

The gaunt, emaciated creature that Algonquian Indians knew as the “Wendigo” was almost certainly not the first imagined antagonist invented to enforce a cultural taboo – but it’s probably one of the more awesome. Basically, the tale states that a person who ingests human meat will be gripped by a powerful and insatiable hunger for seconds, thirds and beyond. This hunger will drive them to kill, butcher and devour all those around them, but they will never feel satisfied. All emotion, all morality – all humanity – will be lost to the gastrological void and an excruciating urge to consume. The person becomes the Wendigo – starving, ferocious and unstoppable.

Keep in mind, the Wendigo wasn’t created to stop folks from gallivanting around and snacking on each other just for poops and smiles. The Algonquians lived in the Northern Unites States and Canada. They faced unpredictable weather, limited food availability and, one would imagine, intermittent morale shortages. Basically, there were plenty of dark, freezing nights when an Algonquian warrior looked over at his friend, saw a giant, steaming beaver leg, thought of the horrific Wendigo and opted for death by starvation. (The Wendigo was also used as a catch-all poster boy for gluttony and greed in discouraging selfishness and promoting tribal unity and resource sharing. After all, the bogarters of today are the cannibals of tomorrow.)

Even more interestingly, the threatening tale of the Wendigo, and its less-than-subtle discouragement of cannibalism, wasn’t created solely out of tribal nobility or some consensually acknowledged moral imperative – the tale’s description of the monster and it’s meat-fueled creation, embellished as it is by hyperbole and requisite awesomeness, isn’t wholly fictional. The Algonquians had a limited cultural history of necessity-based cannibalism. The problem became that tribe members who indulged out of need during harsh times often found themselves craving succulent friend chops even come prosperous seasons. This culture-bound syndrome, known as Wendigo Psychosis, was almost certainly a psychological consequence of post-noshing guilt. It’s unclear whether these cases actually served as the genesis of the Wendigo story, but there are several reported cases of Wendigo-aware, famine-driven cannibals who begged to be executed out of fear of transformation.

And here we are, a nation of pregnant kids all high on drugs, smashing eggs with frying pans and calling it education. Where did all the monsters go?