Cannibalism – On The Rise?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed an increase in the reports of cannibalism recently, I have. I’m not going to pretend it’s worrying me though, it’s still mercifully rare. I think I will still keep chavs as my main source of worry for now. Even on Sick Chirpse there’s been a couple of articles. In just the last few months there was the story of the bloke who went mental thanks to bath salts and bit off a tramps face and the tale of a Japanese fella who had his own penis surgically removed and fed it to paying guests.

This week there has been news of a New York cop – Gilberto Valle – now dubbed ‘Cannibal Cop’ who was planning to abduct a young lady and eat her for thanks giving. He’s in court at the mo, and although he hasn’t actually hurt anyone, he apparently had a database of details about the girls he planned to consume and police also found detailed messages regarding how he was going to achieve this sinister goal. He was caught thanks to some dodgy messages with a friend about eating “some girl meat”. Here’s his face, he doesn’t really look the type?:

Also this week there was the arrest of a 68 year old man in California who was found cooking parts of his dead wife whilst her head was chillin’ in the freezer. The Deputy District Attorney Katherine Flaherty says “there is no evidence of cannibalism at this time” – errrr how about the fact he was actually cooking her at the time? No?

These are just a handful of cases that I’ve noticed in the last few months, so I delved a bit deeper. I found an article which reports 7 recent cannibal style stories, only two of which I’ve covered above. FFS. At the bottom of this Huffington Post article here there is a slide show of another 8 cannibalism cases I haven’t mentioned. Maybe I am a little worried after all, at least chavs don’t normally bite, they’re more punchy and stabby in general.

Cannabilism is obviously nothing new. One of the most famous cannibal cases of all times was Jeffrey Dahmer who was accused of eating 17 people between ’78 and ’91. He also drilled holes in peoples head and dripped acid in to their brains to try and create real life Zombies. It didn’t work. They died. So he ate them. The strangest thing is, in interviews and reports, he comes across as well measured and balanced, and he clearly, most certainly was not in any way balanced at all. The two things they all have in common though, are either mental illness or drug problems, or both. Here’s one of Jeffrey’s mugshots. Bit of a looker actually:

Here’s a short section of an interview he did with Stone Phillips in 1994.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErB0R4wlB64′]

If we jump back even further, to the 1920’s, we meet an American adventurer William Buehler Seabrook. He went off on a mission to study tribes of cannibals in the uncharted regions of the world. He even tried some man meat himself while in West Africa, where he spent some time hanging with the Guero people. He said it tasted of veal surprisingly. But it turned out in the end that he was lying and the Guero people hadn’t let him take part in the ritual himself, so he procured a body from a French hospital and had a BBQ all of his own. Who knows what the poor hospital chap had died from? I don’t think Seabrook can be trusted.

There are tribes in the Amazon where relatives are eaten once they’ve died. To us westerners that sounds a bit loopy, but they think it’s disrespectful to dump them in the dirt like we do. They would rather their relatives souls become a part of them. It also makes sense if you are living in the wild where meat is hard to catch and you have this massive hunk of pork-like stuff, you ain’t gonna waste it surely? Apparently cannibalism is on the way out in most developing parts of the world, partly due to the brain diseases they were catching off corpses (no joke) and partly due to outsider’s new fangled ways of thinking. In the Western world however it seems like it’s trending. Gulp.

The morals of eating human flesh aren’t as clear cut as I once thought either. It’s clear to all people, present company accepted, that killing someone is wrong. But is eating human flesh in it’s self morally wrong? Like the Japanese incident where people paid to knowingly eat his wing wang. It’s weird of course, but everyone knew what was going on, I reckon it’s fine personally. I’d quite like to try human, we’re just animals too after all. As long as it’s consensual. It’s actually not illegal in most countries, so the Japanese fella eventually got done for ‘exposure’. I guess they thought he had to be punished somehow and that was the only way they could find. Here’s what the artist, Mao Sugiyama’s doo-dah looked like after plating up:

But what does it taste like? Cannibals who have been asked what we taste like have said anything from chewy to soft to fatty to sweet because a) they all cooked different bits in different ways, b) everyone is different as far as physique is concerned and c) they’re all loopy. You probably also remember the cast of that documentary about Rugby players called ‘Alive’ – they had to eat their chums to survive after their plane crashed in the Andes, but they ate the meat frozen so said it was tasteless.

I think most of us, if it was literally life or death, would eat a dead body, but put yourself in this situation: Someone you didn’t know and have never met, was dying imminently (of a non transmittable disease), and their dying wish was to be eaten after death. This person’s body would be cooked and served without you ever seeing the corpse. It would be prepared by an excellent chef, maybe Jamie Oliver, with your favourite ingredients. So here’s the question – Would you take a bite? Just to say you had? Just out of curiosity? Maybe you were a bit peckish anyway?

I would.

If you want to give it a go, here’s some information to give to your private chef: