What does human flesh taste like?

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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 Ziebice" 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 Wroclaw 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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