What does human meat taste like? The answer depends on who you ask

Fortunately, very few people have the desire to actually eat human flesh. But some may idly wonder what human flesh looks and tastes like. Reliable sources on the subject are difficult to find, but for the macabre among us, the taste of human flesh is not a total mystery.

Gizmodo‘s Robbie Gonzalez explained in 2014 that human meat falls firmly into the red meat camp. Gonzalez wrote that beef is visually the closest to meat. “The red color of muscles can be traced to the presence of a richly pigmented protein called myoglobin and, more specifically, hemes,” he wrote, “the chemical compounds that myoglobin uses to bind and store oxygen as a fuel source for active muscles .”

The concentration of myoglobin in human muscle is about 2 percent, much higher than in pigs, sheep or cows, so beef would be the visual equivalent of a human fillet or loin. But according to the testimonies of people who have actually eaten other people, the taste of human flesh does not reflect its beef-like appearance.

Both serial killers and Polynesian cannibals have described humans as most closely related to pork. For example, German criminal and cannibal Armin Meiwes gave that opinion in a 2007 interview afterward he was imprisoned. “The meat tastes like pork, a little more bitter and stronger,” he said. “It tastes pretty good.”

But not all cannibals agree with this description. William Seabrook, an author and journalist, traveled to West Africa in the 1920s and later described an encounter with human flesh in detail in his book Jungle ways.

According to him, human flesh tasted like veal. ‘The roast,’ Seabrook wrote“of which I cut and ate a center slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell and taste reinforced my certainty that of all the meats we commonly know, veal is the only meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”

This report is one of the most descriptive to date, but it has also been questioned. If Slate‘S Brian Palmer wrote in 2012 that Seabrook “later confessed that the distrustful tribe members never let him participate in their traditions.” Instead, the author insisted that he obtain samples of human flesh from a Parisian hospital and cook them himself.

Regardless of Seabrook’s credibility, Slate pointed out that, as with any meat, the taste of human flesh is likely to depend largely on how it is prepared and which piece of meat is tasted. The The human stew of the Azande tribe probably tasted very different from the deep-fried human genitals sprinkled with parsley a Japanese exhibitionist artist served at a dinner party in 2012.

But not all cases of eating human tissue are so transgressive. Biologist and science writer Bill Schutt partook of a dish of prepared placenta as an example of ‘medicinal cannibalism’. The revived practice of placentophagyEating the placenta is just the latest example in a long line of medical ingestions of human flesh that remained popular in Europe into the 20th century, including eating mummy powder to stem internal bleeding and pieces of skull to relieve headaches.

At the request of Scientific American‘s Ryan F. Mandelbaum on what the placenta tasted like in 2016, Schutt had a somewhat unexpected answer. “A lot of people have said it tastes like pork or veal,” Schutt said, “and everything tastes like chicken, I guess. To me it didn’t taste like anything. And let me tell you, I finished my plate. It’s something I’ll never forget.”