Diego’s Diet (Macabre)

Posted on January 26, 2003 in Gross Scoundrels

You’ve got to wonder about the guy who Frida Kahlo married. According to a fan site, famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera took a human anatomy course in university where he read about a bizarre experiment. A French scientist fed a lab population of cats the meat of other cats, exclusively. The lab population grew in size and thrived on the diet.

Rivera and his friends decided to try the Aztec diet for themselves. They procured fresh, disease-free corpses from the city morgue. Then, presumably following old family recipes for preparing carnitas (pork), they dined regularly on accident victims for a time. The results impressed Rivera so much that he said:

I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos

Woman-flesh especially delighted Rivera, who relished the legs, breasts, and brains.

Later in life, Rivera included depictions of ritual cannibalism in the murals he did for the Department of Education inside the Palacio Nacional. A beautiful impersonator of the goddess of flowers, Xochiquetzal, coyly considers a priestly offering of an arm. Other nearby vendors sell unidentifiable meats. Was Diego salivating as he rendered this scene?

His one great love of his life, Frida Kahlo, escaped being served for dinner when she died before he did in 1954. Rivera admitted his sadistic tendencies: “If I ever loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.”

For her part, Frida, who had suffered from polio in her youth and had her disability compounded by a traffic accident at the age of 16, survived to a ripe old age by never saying the two words he longed to hear from her: “Eat me.”

Does this “rawk” you blu? If the word means what I think it does, it rawks me, too!