"Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571"

Cannibals

"They came shuffling through the ash casting their hooded heads from side to side. Some of them wearing canister masks. One in a biohazard suit. Stained and filthy. Slouching along with clubs in hands, lengths of pipe…. Then he heard on the road behind them what sounded like a diesel truck…. The truck had rumbled into view. Men standing in the bed looking out…. The truck passed on and the black diesel smoke coiled through the woods. Lumbering and creaking like a ship."

An important element played by McCarthy in The Road is cannibalism. Used mainly as form of ornament in order to embellish the whole setting, consequently producing an enhanced feeling of paranoia throughout the novel.

A famous contemporary episode of cannibalism was in the Uruguayan flight disaster in 1972, where a plane carrying forty-five people crashed in the middle of the Andes, in the border between Chile and Argentina. After the death of almost one quarter of the passengers due the crash and several avalanches, the survivors ran out of supplies and had to take the gruesome decision of eating the meat of their comrade corpses. Most of them where their team mates since a rugby team was traveling on the airplane, reflecting the radical physical transgression the survivors where going through. All morality is gone, and reflecting on a Darwinism regression enters a superfluous state. However, surviving is not wrong. 

Cannibalism is not considered a mental disorder by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Why does society condemn this conduct so fiercely?