For some reason, cannibalism remains one the great taboos of the 21st century. Nonetheless, virtually all sane and normal people, like myself, wonder from time to time (every night before I fall into a fitful sleep and have that recurring dream about the butcher's shop) what exactly human flesh is like to eat. Curious, and bored waiting for my latest Krill simulation to finish running, I thought I'd find out.
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The first shock I had was that a company supposedly started selling a "Healthy Human Flesh Alternative" base on Tofu - Hufu - back in 2005. They described the taste of their dubious product thus: "If you've never had human flesh before, think of the taste and texture of beef, except a little sweeter in taste and a little softer in texture. Contrary to popular belief, people do not taste like pork or chicken." Further investigation revealed that it was in fact a spoof, and you can see it on Comedy Central in the video below.
So, "sweet soft beef" is a dubious claim at best, and it certainly flies in the face of the overwhelming "pork" consensus that appears from a Google search on the subject. Clearly if we want to get the true flavour of cannibalism, we need to find out from people that have actually tasted human flesh, rather than health food companies.
Of course it's not just human flesh substitute that's available in the West, many people eat the placenta after birth - something quite unbelievable to me given their unappetizing appearance and, you know, where they came from.
To cook it, you need to remove the umbilical cord along with a membrane, and then treat it in a similar fashion to liver, as an enterprising chef manages in the video below (featuring Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall). According to Hugh, the result is like liver. But of course the placenta isn't really anything like a proper human steak would be, being a fundamentally different type of tissue, and therefore most likely a very different taste.
Similarly unhelpful is the opinion of a cute little robot NEC System technologies and Mie University. The "electromechanical sommelier", is "capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d'oeuvres." On tasting the hands of reporters, it identified one as bacon, and the other as prosciutto. Unfortunately, since the reporters didn't bother to skin and cook their hands before placing them in the robot's jaws, that doesn't tell us a lot.
So we're getting nowhere. What we need are some proper cannibals, and where better to start than one of Germany's most infamous citizens, the cannibal Armin Meiwes. Having eaten an estimated 20kg of his "victim", Meiwes is something of an expert on the subject, and in an interview from his prison cell, he was more than happy to explain the taste: "The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger. It tastes quite good."
That's the best answer so far, but does it tally with the experiences of other Western cannibals? After a bit more searching I found the case of William Buehler Seabrook, a journalist with the New York Times who traveled extensively in West Africa. Fascinated with the concept of cannibalism, he persuaded a medical intern at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris) to give him a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy man killed in an accident, which he cooked and ate, describing is as follows:
"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have."
So we have one for pork, one for veal. Clearly a sample size of two isn't enough, we need more people, and here's where we descend into the really grim. Many people may have eaten human flesh unintentionally.
I'll start with Pole Karl Denke, "a devout, peaceful, generally respected citizen of Zi?bice, turned out to be a cannibal who killed 40 people before his arrest (and immediate suicide) in 1924. He pickled their flesh in jars and sold it on the Wroc?aw market as... 'pork'."
The same tactic was allegedly employed by Fritz Haarmann, a German who killed at least 24 people in Hanover, generally male prostitutes who's throats he bit while sodomizing them. Rumours suggest he too sold his victims as pork on the black market. He was executed by beheading in 1925.
Another German serial killer, Karl Grossman was arrested in 1921 having been a very busy man during WWI. Grossman sold the meat from the estimated 50 women he killed on the black market, and even ran a hot dog stand, throwing the inedible remnants in a nearby river.
Ultimately, without actually eating some of the stuff ourselves - something I'm not exactly in a rush to do - all we have are the subjective evaluations of other people, and those people aren't exactly the most reliable witnesses! But there is a certain consistency here... certainly the cannibals themselves seem to have generally considered it closer to pork, and indeed close enough that they were happy to label it as such when selling it to unfortunate members of the public in the markets of 1920s Germany and Poland.
And so unless somebody has any further evidence, the official opinion of this blog is that human flesh tastes a bit like pork. Of course, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, that means that pork tastes of human...
Enjoy your bacon today, folks!
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Hmmmmm... I wonder if maggots have a preference, do they prefer pork, beef or human flesh? Maybe if they prefer pork and human, it indicates human flesh tastes more like pork.
The fact that people sold the meat as pork isn't strong evidence that it does in fact taste like pork. Those people could have been operating under the same cliche that the rest of us are and so assumed that it tasted like pork to most people.
Firstly, can I just say that I'm really not pretending I've painted a strong scientific case above :P
As for the point, well true, but then they did eat the stuff themselves, so they must have had some idea...
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Interesting idea.. I'm not sure if maggots have much preference, but certainly anecdotally lions are supposed to prefer human flesh...
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What a delightful topic.
I would assume there is a variation among humans as regards our taste, dependent on diet. As a curry fiend I expect a succulent shank of me to have a slight hint of spice ...
A doctor friend of mine once told me that pork was considered to be the most palatable food for humans.
Does that mean that, without the moral constraints, people would prefer to eat other people? I've read about many more cannibals not on your list and those that had been interviewed all say human is quite tasty.
Is that not simply because humans are a damn sight easier to eat than wildebeest - fewer horns and hooves and so forth?
Plus, humans run slower. We need to do a controlled test - put a trussed up wildebeest, a hungry lion and Ray Comfort in a cage together, and see where the lion goes...
well, the maggots don't ask where to be born, so the better questions might be: does pork SMELL better to flies (do flies smell?), and/or, are the nutrients in pork superior to those in other meats, leading to more surviving offspring, leading to selection for flies that lay eggs on pork?
curiouser and curiouser...
There is a description of Aztec ritual cannibalism at Codex Magliabecchiano. At the end says something like "they said that [human flesh] tasted like pork, and for that reason pork is very desired among them". It seems the codex was writen by European missionaries and/or conversed Aztecs based on destroyed codices and oral testimony, so it might be a little more reliable source than German psychopaths.
You can read it here, at page 72v; next page is the illustration for the text.
Awesome, thanks for the link, that's a fascinating document
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I've occasionally thought that if some misadventure required me to have a bit of myself amputated, I'd be quite keen to have it frozen until I was recovered enough to cook and nosh it. It surely wouldn't be a crime to nosh a bit of your own flesh, when it had been removed for good medical reasons. And at least I'd know what I tasted like.
(There's liable to be some variation in what people taste like, given wide variation in diet. I'd bet that a sashimi-reared supermodel, for example, would taste way better than that Morgan Spurlock dude.)
Eeeeeoohhhwww! I don't know if my laughter is about to turn into spew or not - but Yikes!!
There's always the old "long pig" cliche. A human ham strongly resembles a pork ham and shank except that the human thighbone is much heavier and longer.
Someone I met told me it tasted a bit like koala.
fucking disgusting.
A couple of years ago I had a small mole removed from my shoulder(after application of a local anesthetic, of course) following which a nurse cauterized the wound. The aroma during cauterization was that of burning pork and reminded me of the reported similarity in taste between pigs and humans.
Please note that in spite of what some former girlfriends may say, I am not a pig.
My vote is that human flesh probably does taste like pork, although as a couple of bloggers have noted above, that taste probably varies somewhat depending on the diet of the person and/or swine consumed.
Does anyone know if Jeffrey Dahmer ever gave a description of the taste of human flesh?
By the way, has anyone noted that two of the most famous cannibals in U.S. history (Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer) both come from Wisconsin? Maybe human flesh (at least in Wisconsin) tastes like cheese :)
Honestly, flies prefer meats that are really rotten and stinky to lay their little maggot eggs to grow into maggots and then flies. Generally I avoid the maggot meats for for tastiness and health reasons.
Judging from when our extra freezer stopped working and everything unthawed (unknown to us), they really LOVE rotten turkey sitting in a pool or rotten blood. One opening of the freezer and the resulting release of stench was enough to attract every fly within 2 miles and simultaneously make us all have nearly uncontrollable barfing sensations. The interweb seems to indicate they have special sensors for some chemical involved in rotten meat and can smell very small concentrations of it miles away from the rotten meat source.
By the way, trying to remove the squishy, rotten, maggot-loving turkey from the bottom of a top loading freezer was almost impossible without simultaneously puking. Also getting 3 or 4 people to move the dead freezer and dump out the maggot juice was pretty difficult since it was hard to carry it while not retching.
I feel pretty confident that flies/maggots and people like different tastes. Though I'm sure they would love human flesh if it was allowed to rot sufficiently.
Oh yeah, coffee grounds are one of the better de-oderants for rotted meat smell.
i have had human, i ate my dad. Its not very nice from expierience but when there is nothing in the fridge it does okay..
it goes well on a BBQ ( cook it like a kebab for best flavour)
My vote is that human flesh probably does taste like pork, although as a couple of bloggers have noted above, Prior learning - that taste probably varies somewhat depending on the diet of the person and/or swine consumed.Online University
It surely wouldn't be a crime to nosh a bit of your own flesh, Distance learning university - when it had been removed for good medical reasons. Business school And at least I'd know what I tasted like.Law school
I find it interesting that some religions will not eat pork. I wonder if this can be traced to cannibalism, and having a religious intervention that pork is not to be eaten.
And my silly thought:
Kevin Bacon may be able to pay off his debts after death by marketing a limited time offer item of a product labeled, "Kevin Bacon Bits".
Actually, Karl Denke was a German, too. Not a pole. He just lived in what today is Poland.
What is it with Germans and Cannibalism?