Culinary Taboos: Exploring Cannibalism Through the Eyes of a Chef

Many Species of Animals Consume the Flesh of their Own, We do not.

As a chef, I often think about meat. I think about the evolution of animals such as lamb, cattle, bison, etc., and how they became food for us. I have a very nerdy interest in animal butchery and the different cuts of meat you can get from the variety of livestock that populate our planet.

Wild game, farmed livestock, it’s all captivating to me. However, in the spirit of the Halloween season, and this spooky time of the year, I am thinking about a different kind of meat, the truly forbidden kind. The human animal, the long pig. Whatever you want to call it, I’m talking about cannibalism.

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

Can you imagine being so hungry or having such a lack of food source that a group of people would collectively choose to cannibalize each other? It’s hard to imagine but it has been done.

When most of us think of having to eat someone to survive we usually think of the famous Donner Party. With this comes to mind images of people gnawing on someone’s arm or leg, but from a chef’s perspective, I think of cannibalism, a little more technically.

Think of it like this, you’re in a survival situation, you have exhausted all other food sources and you now have decided to eat one of your friends or family members, you’re first going to have to “process” the protein. I know this sounds gruesome but somebody’s gotta do it right? Someone has to survive!

For digestion’s sake you’re probably going to want to cook your buddy before consumption, this means butchering and cooking, if this individual has succumbed to the elements, then the hard part has already been done for you. If not, then you are going to have to finish the task at hand.

Okay, now that we’ve taken care of that, you’re going to have to break down this chunk of protein into manageable pieces that are easy to cook. My recommendation would be to approach this job like you would a pig as seen in this video here,

Hopefully, you have brought a good sharp knife with you on your adventure but I can’t blame you if you didn’t, nobody expected to be committing cannibalism today after all.

I am fairly certain that if I were ever to get stuck in a Donner Party kind of situation, I would be volunteered to handle this task, it only makes sense, I am usually the one that does the cooking for family gatherings or other events, so why not this one?

For me this is a catch-22, on one hand, I am not going to be served for dinner any time soon, but I now have the unthinkable duty of cooking a person! This all sounds like a bad day to me.

Now that you’ve broken down the protein into cookable cuts you have got to figure out how you’re going to cook the different cuts of meat. Like with most mammals, the arms and legs would be more muscular, tougher, and require longer cooking periods while the back or loin would ideally be more tender.

The tougher cuts of meat such as the shank or shoulder are going to need to be cooked slowly at a lower temperature in a pot with a bit of liquid, known as braising. The loin and tenderloin can be roasted over an open fire to tender perfection.

The other option would be to quarter the carcass and roast whole big chunks of meat such as the leg, or depending on the size of the crowd you’re feeding you could go ahead and roast your friend whole hog style.

If I was the one being cooked, this is how I would want it to go down. Roasting the whole body is time-consuming, as this requires a pretty big fire and tools like a spit. My preferred method for cooking whole hog style would be to cook the protein similarly to the famous Yucatec Mayan slow-roasted pork dish called Cochinita Pibil.

There have been a couple of cases in recent history where survival cannibalism has taken place, most notably, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 where the survivors of this plane crash resorted to cannibalism out of sheer desperation, and some of them lived to tell the tale.

I am in no way condoning any kind of criminal cannibalism, and I would like to think that I would never consume another human being. On the other hand, I have never been that hungry. Happy Halloween!