Well, you won't [in the case of a corpse that is dropped as cursed; if it has rotted to cursed in inventory, you will know]. Again, I don't think it's that punishing. For one thing, you've got a guaranteed food store in the early game that most r/c's can typically afford at least one ration from, which should tide you over until you can find some more gold (plus, you start with food). Even if you eat a lot of corpses, cursed corpses aren't that common. (I would definitely peg it at less than 50%). Now, if you have a 5% chance for it to give you poisoning (which, let me add, is something that is pretty easy to recover from most of the time. if you're eating a corpse, you're usually in a least temporary, relative safety), you're at, at most, a 2.5% chance of getting poisoning. That's really not high and won't dissuade anyone from eating corpses, but it does add a bit of risk to eating corpses. Plus, poison resistance isn't that hard to come by.