What does human being taste like?

[MooseIBe]

In his book about the Andes crash survivors, Piers Paul Reed quotes them as saying that human tastes 'softer than beef, but with much the same flavour.' In all other references I have come across to the taste of human meat however, it has been described as being rather like pork. Does anyone know for definite? (not that, I hope, any of you have tasted it ;)). Also, what sort of texture and consistency does human meat have?

[Dingfod]

In the book Survive: Stories of Castaways and Cannibals, Pacific islanders refered to English sailors as "long pork", implying a similarity to pork. Considering there are enough similarities biologically between humans and pigs to use them for various medical tests and heart valve implants and such, then I would think that might well be true. The only human flesh I've ever tasted was the dead skin around my fingernails. It tastes nothing like pork, in fact, it tastes like nothing.

[MooseIBe]

Hey I thought I was the only person who ate the skin round my fingers! :)

I'd be interested to know what 'bush meat' like chimp and gorilla taste like because I would imagine there's a similarity between that and human meat .. especially between chimp and human, given that they're omnivores too.

[Dragoon]

I have no moral objections to anyone eating the flesh of dead (but not murdered) companions under extreme survival conditions. I wouldn't hesitate (much) doing the same nor would I want friends to not eat parts of my dead body if it would sustain their lives. After all, isn't organ transplant just a form of high-tech cannibalism?

I think that if I would be forced into some extreme situation requiring cannibalism, I would not cook the flesh and would pinch my nose to try to prevent any sensation of taste because, in fact, I wouldn't want that memory to remain with me. I certainly wouldn't want to develop a "taste" for it. In that regard I guess I'd have to say that it would probably taste just like raw chicken.

[MooseIBe]

I doubt that anyone would develop a taste for it, even if it did taste pleasant .. after all, lots of other meat tastes pleasant ;). And neither would I eat it other than, as you say, in an extreme survival situation. In that situation though I would have no problems with people eating ME (well provided I was good and dead, of course) as long as they didn't, you know, make jokes about what they were eating ;).

I wonder ... has cannibalism always been a taboo among human beings? Has any society (as opposed to individual sickos) ever routinely practiced it even when there was no need to? I've heard tell of cannibalistic societies but I've never been able to work out whether they really existed or were just some form of urban legend.

[LadyShea]

Everything I have read about actual cannibalism involved ritual or survival. Never heard of it as being a major source of food.

[BracesForImpact]

I think that if I would be forced into some extreme situation requiring cannibalism, I would not cook the flesh and would pinch my nose to try to prevent any sensation of taste because, in fact, I wouldn't want that memory to remain with me.

Shit, not me. If I have to eat some poor schmuck to survive, I hope there's an ample supply of spices and Catsup. Maybe some A1 sauce or mustard. Something to smother it in. :eek:

[Skep]

Soylent Green.

[livius drusus]

Shit, not me. If I have to eat some poor schmuck to survive, I hope there's an ample supply of spices and Catsup. Maybe some A1 sauce or mustard. Something to smother it in.

Worcestershire sauce. Definitely Worcestershire.

[Ymir's blood]

Shit, not me. If I have to eat some poor schmuck to survive, I hope there's an ample supply of spices and Catsup. Maybe some A1 sauce or mustard. Something to smother it in.

Worcestershire sauce. Definitely Worcestershire.
Not a good idea according to South Park.

:zombie:

Speaking of which, Ex-Zombie could probably tell us what brains taste like. :wink:

[JoeP]

In the book Survive: Stories of Castaways and Cannibals, Pacific islanders refered to English sailors as "long pork", implying a similarity to pork. Considering there are enough similarities biologically between humans and pigs to use them for various medical tests and heart valve implants and such, then I would think that might well be true. The only human flesh I've ever tasted was the dead skin around my fingernails. It tastes nothing like pork, in fact, it tastes like nothing.
Pork scratchings?

No, mine don't either.

[Beth]

Ug, I just hope I never end up in a situation to find out. I think I would rather do what Lisa Simpson did and eat slime off of rocks.

[Dragoon]

... ... ... Shit, not me.
I'm sorry, but that, Master Yoda, is exactly what we will have to do with you. I mean, we can only hold you in for so long. :dump:

... ... ... If I have to eat some poor schmuck to survive, I hope there's an ample supply of spices and Catsup. Maybe some A1 sauce or mustard. Something to smother it in. :eek:
Actually, as the wife to Sancho, Theresa Panza so accurately observed: "hunger is the best sauce and so the poor eat with gusto." Under the circumstances I think the A1 sauce will be long gone. :meatcook:

Everything I have read about actual cannibalism involved ritual or survival. Never heard of it as being a major source of food.
AND
I wonder ... has cannibalism always been a taboo among human beings? Has any society (as opposed to individual sickos) ever routinely practiced it even when there was no need to? I've heard tell of cannibalistic societies but I've never been able to work out whether they really existed or were just some form of urban legend.
From numerous archeological sites, it appears that our Homo erectus and Homo s. ancestors, before leaving Africa, practiced cannibalism on a very regular basis. In those times of hardscrabble existence, why let good meat go to waste and attract predators? I think that shipwrecked whalers in the South Pacific could certainly expect to be killed and eaten as cannibalism was universally practiced by the Polynesians. :toothpick:

In my own neck of the woods, there is irrefutable evidence that in the waning years of the Anasazi civilization, people were hunted down and eaten on a regular basis. There are masses of coprolites containing unambiguous quantities of human mioglobin and there are innumerable fragments of human bones (the ends of which) showing that they were cooked in ceramic stew pots. I understand that in Mexico "man-corn" was regularly on the diets of the warrior elite. It was the supposed migration of this Mexican culture up to the Anasazi lands that accounts for the cannibalism, BTW. :hungry:

No, for a species that was supposed to be made in the image and likeness of the Abrahamic God, we belong to a pretty disgusting race as higher vertebrates go. :sadangel:

[livius drusus]

I understand that in Mexico "man-corn" was regularly on the diets of the warrior elite.

Huh. I wonder if there were clearly discernible chunks of man in their morning craps.

[Dingfod]

Everything I have read about actual cannibalism involved ritual or survival. Never heard of it as being a major source of food.Even the Pacific islanders I mentioned did it out of ritual, believing that if they ate their enemies they received all their powers.

[Dragoon]

Huh. I wonder if there were clearly discernible chunks of man in their morning craps.
Yes, human myoglobin.

[livius drusus]

I was thinking something a little more noticeable to the naked eye, Dragoon. ;)

[Dragoon]

... ...did it out of ritual, ...
Warrenly, you may be right, but you know, sometimes I wonder where "ritual" ends and "finger lickin' good" begins. I wonder if we tend to use this ritual thing to excuse the "Noble Savage" for practices that are actually part of our shared human nature, but we don't like to admit it. How many people do you know that mostly take everything for granted, treating the most profound things without any reverence and how many people actually ritualize or even appreciate much of anything? :(

[Dragoon]

I was thinking something a little more noticeable to the naked eye, Dragoon. ;)
Well no. THAT gets chewed up pretty thoroughly, I would think. :D

[latinijral]

Also, what sort of texture and consistency does human meat have?

The same sort of texture and consistency your BIG FAT ASS has!

:wave:

[Penni]

As for the taboo against eating our own kind, I think of it like the natural instinct we have against incest. There's a good biological reason. In fact, in the book I was just reading (Lucifer's Hammer, which I recommended in the books thread), there was a group that had started in on some cannibalism, but people kept dying. A doctor they kidnapped made them stop eating raw human flesh and only eat humans he approved (he decided whether they were healthy enough to eat or not). He specifically said that if they find beef, they could eat it raw, pig they needed to cook, because we catch pig diseases a bit easiert han cow diseases. but, human needed to be nice and cooked AND healthy to start with.

[Petra]

Hmmm, the people I've tasted have all tasted a bit salty and kinda ocean-tasting, like oysters or something. :innocent:


The Maori were cannibals when they first arrived in NZ and in fact decimated the earlier Moriori civilisation by inviting them to dinner. I think in part there was the ritual aspect - gaining the strengths of those they eat in ceremony - but there was also a callous disregard for the peoples they were killing and feeding on. It's like the ultimate powertrip if you like - a kind of "you are so insignificant that you are beneath me in the food chain and I will devour you because I am mightier" kinda thing. Of course, I could be talking clean out of my ass here, but those are my random lunchtime thoughts on the Maori/Moriori thing, anyway.

[The Lone Ranger]

Lots of societies have practiced ritual cannibalism, to be sure. In some cases, it has been part of their religious rituals; in some cases, people have believed that you aquire the admirable qualities of your victim by eating him/her (in fact, in some societies, it was considered proper to eat the bodies of particularly revered leaders when they died, to "keep alive" their desirable traits); and in some cases, cannibalism has been used as a desperate way to gain protein.

Cannibalising people who died of natural causes or were killed in warfare seems to have been quite common historically. After all, why let perfectly good meat go to waste?

Still, I know of no societies in which cannibalism was practiced as a way of life, and in which humans provided the major source of protein. As anthropologists have pointed out, there are two very good reasons to expect that there have never been any human societies in which other humans served as the major source of food -- at least, none that survived for very long.

1.) Eating other humans (unless thoroughly cooked) is a bad idea, as all sorts of diseases (e.g. kuru) can be contracted that way. 2.) Any tribe large-enough to provide a reliable source of food for a cannibalistic tribe is large-enough to fight back, thus making cannibalism as a way of life a poor choice indeed. (The Second Law of Thermodynamics comes into play -- the population of food animals must be larger than the population of consumers, else the food animals will soon be rendered extinct.)

Cheers,

Michael

[Dragoon]

How charming and gracious of the Maori to have the Moriori over for dinner.

Lunachick, I think you are absolutely correct about this "callous disregard for the peoples they were killing and feeding on" thing because it appears that the very same thing went on toward the end of the Anasazi civilization. Quality protein was scarce, the newcomers were hungry, they were used to eating human flesh and the Anastazi were nothing to them but food.

[Dragoon]

OK, time for me to be the smart-ass nit-picker.


Actually Kuru is a prion disease in the same class with Bovine Spongiform Encelopathy and is a form of vCJD. Cooking the infected material (particularly neural matter) would have no effect on rendering it safe.

I'm sure you are right about the major source of protein thing, but if you will allow that for hundreds of millennia cannibalism was a regular and not unusual source of protein, indeed practiced regularly here and there within the lifetime of old geezers like me when available, I'll buy that.

With regard to this Second Law thing - you could say the same things about those who raise pigs. Take for example the Solomon Islanders. If they existed on nothing but their pigs, they and their pigs would soon become extinct. Naturally they have many other sources of food energy with the pigs as a source of quality protein when available so the Second Law doesn't apply.

[The Lone Ranger]

True indeed -- cooking does little to protect against kuru. It has been argued that kuru has decimated and perhaps even killed off some tribes that practiced regular ritual cannibalism.


The total food supply must always outweigh (generally by a factor of at least 10-to-1) the consumers, which is why there has never been a society (as far as we know) in which humans provided the major source of protein. There have been plenty of societies though, in which they were a regular source of it.

Cheers,

Michael

[Dragoon]

Roger. I mean Michael. I mean Roger, Michael. :2thumbsup:

[MooseIBe]

I understand that in Mexico "man-corn" was regularly on the diets of the warrior elite.

Huh. I wonder if there were clearly discernible chunks of man in their morning craps.


Not if they chewed the requisited 23 times!

[MooseIBe]

1.) Eating other humans (unless thoroughly cooked) is a bad idea, as all sorts of diseases (e.g. kuru) can be contracted that way. 2.) Any tribe large-enough to provide a reliable source of food for a cannibalistic tribe is large-enough to fight back, thus making cannibalism as a way of life a poor choice indeed. (The Second Law of Thermodynamics comes into play -- the population of food animals must be larger than the population of consumers, else the food animals will soon be rendered extinct.)

That's very interesting .. I didn't know that we were disease ridden! It's strange that some creatures can be eaten raw with no ill effects and others (chicken or pig for instance) will make you very ill if you do that.

[Dingfod]

How charming and gracious of the Maori to have the Moriori over for dinner.I think they were the invited guests, much to the dismay of the Moriori.

Lunachick, I think you are absolutely correct about this "callous disregard for the peoples they were killing and feeding on" thing because it appears that the very same thing went on toward the end of the Anasazi civilization. Quality protein was scarce, the newcomers were hungry, they were used to eating human flesh and the Anastazi were nothing to them but food.Really? I did not know that.

[Crumb]

I did not know that.
"That is weird, wild stuff." :carson:

[Dingfod]

Anasazi cannibalism. (http://www.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/anasazi.html)

[seebs]

I think we should rename Kuru and all the other prion diseases "long trichinosis".

[Dingfod]

trichinosis is a worm, right? Isn't a prion a protein?

[The Lone Ranger]

trichinosis is a worm, right? Isn't a prion a protein?

You're correct. Trichinosis (also called trichinellosis) is a parasitic infestation by nematodes (roundworms) in the genus Trichinella.

Prions are infectious, self-replicating proteins.

Cheers,

Michael