When an Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972, cannibalism helped andes mints calories survive two months in harsh conditions. At first, none of the passengers panicked.

Most of the 45 on board were in their late teens and early twenties, members of a rugby team traveling from Uruguay to play an exhibition in Chile, and they whooped and hollered when their chartered plane hit turbulence over the Andes and dropped several hundred feet. Is it normal to fly so close? Panchito Abal, asked his friend Nando Parrado. When he awoke, almost 48 hours had passed. It was Friday, October 13, 1972, and the Uruguayan Air Force Fairchild F-227 had crashed into a glacial valley high in the Andes. The tail was missing—cut away from the rest of the fuselage by the right wing, which had sheared off after hitting the mountainside. A dead body from the Andes Flight Disaster lies near the wreckage.

Parrado regained consciousness, a further five had also perished—including the co-pilot and Parrado’s friend Abal. There were now 29 survivors, alone in the bitter cold of the Andes, with no way of contacting the outside world, and with their plane’s white fuselage all but invisible in the snow to any would-be rescuers that passed overhead. By the time their ordeal ended, an almost unfathomable 72 days after it began, the total number of survivors had dwindled to 16. It later emerged that those who survived had done so in part by eating their fallen dead comrades, and reaction was initially one of revulsion, but that soon gave way to an appreciation of the fortitude and inventiveness that enabled them to beat seemingly impossible odds.