If matter is neither created nor destroyed, could you be eating one of your ancestors in theory?

Answer 1

Well, your asusumption itself isnt scientific. Matter CAN be created or destoryed, energy cant be. Matter is a form of stored energy.

You wont be eating anyone directly unless you're somekind of real sick ppl. When we died, our bodies are merely releasing all the energy they're stored back to the cycle. Other energy converters, like us, may convert this energy indirectly, but this wasnt like eating someone.

Answer 2

interesting question. i would like to bring in something religious, not because it is religious, but because that's one place that we care about how something breaks down.

in a Catholic Mass, after we consecrate the bread and wine, they become the body and blood of Jesus. (just take it for the argument if you don't believe) Now, if the blood is spilled, we simply dillute it and mop it up. It becomes dilluted to the point that the original form is unrecognizable. You could not say that a puddle of 3 parts water and 1 part wine is still wine (or the spiritual identity that we have with it.) So the same with a decomposed human body; it's individual atoms are no longer recognizable as having originated in that body, so they are simply atoms. With this concept in place, everything we eat is what it is at the moment we eat it, and we need not consider all of the myriad possibilities of the objects that the components of that food made up before they were organized into that piece of broccoli, etc, etc, back to the beginning of time, (however you believe that happened.)

Answer 3

Not only that - the world is a giant ecosystem where all organisms interact. Don't think so? The carbon dioxide you exhale, for example, may be swept overseas. A plant abroad uses the CO2 to build an organic molecule, such as sugar. A person eats the plant (or the animal that ate that plant). A part of you is now a part of that person.

Answer 4

Well unless you are directly taking a bite from your great granduncle's forearm, you're not really "eating" him. You may be consuming food in which there are one or two hundred atoms (out of trillions of trillions) that were, at some point in time, part of his body. Earth is a relatively "closed" system: not much leaves the Earth or comes into it, so the chances are pretty darn high.

Answer 5

Yes indeed... and you are breathing evaporated elephant spit.

Here's an interesting physics fact. If you took a teacup full of some speciallly 'tagged' water, and poured it into the ocean, then a year later went and scooped up a cup of water, chances are there will be a few of the atoms from your first cup.

Answer 6

You could indeed eat some molecules that once were part of an ancestor's body.
Don't worry, that does not make you an incestuous cannibal.

Answer 7

Wow, interesting thought! We could be commiting some kind of weird incest. Oh well, parts is parts.

Answer 8

Yes. However, matter can be converted to energy and energy back again to matter.

Answer 9

Yes, ashes to ashes....we all get recycled and thus I suppose eventually end up in the food chain.

Answer 10

You could actually be made of part of your ancestor, or Hitler.