I started working on my PhD back at Cornell [University] working on bats, focusing on vampire bats. I wrote a lot of papers and had the opportunity to write a book about the nature of blood-feeding, Dark Banquet. I was looking for a follow-up to the natural history of vampires, and cannibalism seemed like a natural progression. There was a big gap in between the sensationalized cannibal crime books and the really academic stuff like scientific papers.
The book was really funny. How did you go about using humor with a subject like cannibalism? I have no interest in offending anyone. You also talk a lot about the mainstream press distorting popular science. How do people and the media get things wrong? For example, there are all these incredible pictures of polar bears dragging bodies of the dead cubs they were cannibalizing, which headlines blamed on reduced polar ice.
While that may be so, climate change deniers were really quick to jump on the fact that, guess what, polar bears have been eating cubs for millennia, and so do other bear species. In reality, the scientists themselves hinted at the fact that we might be seeing some of the first responses by animals to global warming because of the stresses it causes. Apparently somewhere between veal and pork steaks. Unless you'd rather take the word of an NEC food-testing robot , which when a reporter placed his hand against its taste sensor deemed him to be "prosciutto".
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Both serial killers and Polynesian cannibals have described human as being most akin to pork. But not all cannibals agree with this description. William Seabrook, an author and journalist, traveled to West Africa in the s and later described an encounter with man-flesh in great detail in his book, Jungle Ways.
Human, he said, in fact tastes like veal. Here's Seabrook's description :. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. Last year, Explainer examined the question of what human flesh tastes like. In his book Jungle Ways , American adventurer and journalist William Buehler Seabrook provided the world's most detailed written description of the taste of human flesh.
Seabrook noted that, in raw form, human meat looks like beef, but slightly less red, with pale yellow fat. When roasted, the meat turned grayish, as would lamb or veal, and smelled like cooked beef. As for the taste, Seabrook wrote, "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. There are reasons to question Seabrook's account. He traveled to West Africa to get the inside scoop on cannibalism from the Guero people, but he later confessed that the distrustful tribesmen never allowed him to partake in their traditions.
In his autobiography, Seabrook claims to have obtained the body of a recently deceased hospital patient in France and then cooked it on a spit. His description of man-eating in Jungle Ways came not from his experiences in West Africa, he said, but in Paris.
Despite this credibility issue, Seabrook's description remains the most useful. Many commentaries on the taste of human flesh come from madmen — serial killer Karl Denke, for example, or the German murderer Armin Meiwes — and are therefore patently unreliable. Most of the others are vague and contradictory.
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