Hope I am never in an emergency with you. How many people who had been through such a traumatic experience as a plane crash could think clearly and rationally and do the right thing, without prior survival training? Damn few, I would guess. Even supposed "professionals" can screw up. I recall a very interesting article by Jared Diamond on the dumb decisions made by the Donner Party.

I was going to add something about the smartass being the first person to get eaten, but I'm above that, really I am.

This didn't need to happen. The original 28 survivors expected that the would be rescued quickly and squandered their resources in the first few critical days of their ordeal. They ate and drank freely from the plane's supplies. They didn't ration the food and waited too long to conserve water and to keep themselves warm. By the time they realized what they needed to do, it was too late and they had to resort to cannibalism. Their upper-middle class backgrounds did not provide them with the basic survival skills need to survive an emergency.

Most people die withing the first 24-48 hours of an emergency. They do not conserve their physical energy or keep themselves warm; and engage in other wasteful actions. They refuse to face the seriousness of their situation and thoughtlessly consume the available food and water before the physical reality of their situation sinks in. We can all learn from this and thank God these people made it out alive to have 100 descendants.

I think it's also valuable to see that a shared value system is very helpful in maintaining a social order, even in the direst of circumstances, and that such an order can be maintained in the absence of authority, at least in small groups like this.

Clearly there was a consensus arrived at in their decision, versus it being a case of somebody taking charge and directing the matter from there, in the leader-driven manner that is so popular in this country. There was no out-group (except for the dead), so everybody in the in-group was part of the social franchise, so no "Lord of the Flies" scenario could arise, no tyrants appearing amid the ashes of the wreck. They survived with their civility and dignity intact. Fortunate for them that they were all Catholics -- I think that helped them work well together.

As I think I made clear, the story is told honestly and clearly. The men in the film could not possibly have been more forthcoming about what they did and how they felt about it. For instance, the first time they tried to eat small pieces of flesh cut from the frozen bodies, several of them retched and had great difficulty getting it down. But the salacious question of what the meat tasted like is not discussed. Do we really need to know that to appreciate the story?

As someone else pointed out, there have already been a Hollywood film and a couple of bestselling nonfiction accounts, which adequately cover the basic adventure-survival aspects of the story. This film is, in large part, about other questions.

Some accounts made by rescuers have suggested that they didn't eat the women's bodies, although that's never directly stated in the film. As I also made clear, the two men who prepared food never told the others whose bodies they were eating, and to this day are presumably the only people who know for sure.

Not trying to ennoble or demonize anybody, but I thought those were interesting details. Perhaps even in these extreme circumstances a certain South American chivalry and/or machismo was at work.

"How long could they last, in the most extreme conditions imaginable, before reverting to savagery?"

What savagery?

"(Some corpses, probably including the women's, were still intact at the time of rescue.)"

Is the author trying to further ennoble the cannabilistic teenagers by perhaps suggesting that they didn't eat the women? Or is he just unsure which sex were eaten? In either case, why mention it at all?

We have been duly chastized for wondering what human flesh tastes like. After all, it is a taboo and only vulgarians would want to hear of a situation in which humans have resorted to eating their friends, right?

Kind of makes the whole movie pointless. Either you are interested in stories of extreme survival or you are not. Either you are going to tell the story honestly or you are not. I guess the film maker went for the latter by deifying the both the living and and the dead victims.

for that matter!

I'm mildly annoyed that everyone seems to studiously avoid mentioning that this was already the subject of a major feature film.

That's the nation I was thinking of when I made my earlier comment.

Saw Stranded at the Montreal World Film Festival and was mesmorized. This is a very gripping yet touching account, even more compelling than the excellent Touching The Void because the survivors had no mountaineering experience: most had never seen snow.

There is a quiet subplot, if you will, about how these privileged Uruguayans became so immediately and desperately impoverished. The amount of hardship they faced was clearly something they were never prepared for.

See this, rent this, buy a copy. You won't be disappointed.

A great story, but I never found the eating of the bodies part surprising. I think anyone else would have done the same in the same situation.

Heck, the Aghori babas in India hang out by crematoriums, eating the half charred remains and drinking out of human skulls--without the same compelling reason to do so. They even eat uncooked corpses that they get out of the Ganges (some bodies aren't cremated--like holy men and children).

I've seen them hanging out at temples. Seem like nice enough folk. But yuck, just yuck.

Forgive me if I seem oversensitive.

This was an incredible story and involved an incredibly hard moral choice. These men have had to live with the consequences of that. I can only imagine what the families of the dead must have thought. Upper-class Catholics, no less.

Personally I call what happened out there was a horror, though not a sin.

But some of the comments on this board I have seen so far have had no purpose but to chime in with some truly, truly tasteless attempts at humour.

Grow up. Or shut up. I don't care which.