What does human meat taste like? | Science

What does human meat taste like?

Recent reports suggested that a German restaurant was looking for diners willing to donate body parts that it said it would turn into gourmet meals - that annoying spare finger or testicle that you've been lugging around all these years, for example. Although exposed this week as a publicity stunt, many people (well, me) are curious to know what human would actually taste like. So in the spirit of public service, I tried to find out.

One company supposedly started selling a "Healthy Human Flesh Alternative" based on Tofu - Hufu - back in 2005. They described the taste of their dubious product as follows:

"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."

Unfortunately it turned out to be a spoof, 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. If we want to get the true flavour of cannibalism, we need to find out from people who have actually tasted human flesh.

Of course, there is one form of human meat that's considered just about acceptable to eat. Many people choose to eat the placenta after childbirth, a practice known as "placentophagy". To prepare it, you need to remove the umbilical cord and membrane, and then treat it in a similar fashion to liver, which according to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is roughly what the result tastes like. You can chop it up and fry it, or mince it to make quite a rich Bolognese. That's all very lovely, as you can see from the video below, but like the liver the placenta probably isn't that representative of the general taste of human flesh.

Similarly unhelpful is the opinion of a cute little robot developed by 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 human reporters, it identified one as bacon and another as prosciutto. We're homing in on pork again here, but unfortunately the reporters didn't bother to skin and cook their hands before placing them in the robot's jaws.

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."

Does his opinion 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 nearly a century ago. 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 part: it turns out that many people may have eaten human flesh unintentionally.

I'll start with infamous Pole Karl Denke, "a devout, peaceful, generally respected citizen of Ziębice" who "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 Wrocław 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 whose throats he bit while sodomising them (yes, I've been trying to work that one out too). Rumours suggest he too sold his victims as pork on the black market, before his execution by beheading in 1925.

Another German serial killer, Karl Grossman was arrested in 1921 having enthusiastically murdered his way through the Great War. Grossman (no relation) sold the meat from the estimated 50 women he killed on the black market, and even ran a hot dog stand where he offloaded the flesh, throwing the inedible remnants in a nearby river.

Ultimately, without actually eating some of the stuff ourselves, all we have are the subjective evaluations of a collection of murderers who may not be the most reliable of 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 through the meat markets and hot dog stands of 1920s Germany and Poland.

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.

If any readers have eaten any human flesh recently, do feel free to let us know in the comments.

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