A tour bus packed with well-to-do, mostly older, passengers winds its way through the streets of a non-descript tourist town, down the main drag towards its destination. The bus pulls to a stop in front of a down-on-its-luck burger joint plastered with yellow signs warning customers away. The theme park Wonder Warf is just steps away, but these tourists are here for the burger bar. And they’re here because of the signs.
The health department signs covering Bob’s Burgers’ windows are lettered, unnecessarily. The graphic — a human form pressed between the two halves of a hamburger bun — is perfectly succinct. Although this scene is lifted from Fox’s new animated series Bob’s Burgers, given the resurgence of gastro-cliques meeting to eat the nasty bits of exotic game, it’s hard not to imagine Bob’s Burger garnering a small but devoted following.
In the interest of full disclosure: I would have been on that bus. If only it were that easy. The problems facing a would-be modern cannibal are two fold. Firstly, eating one’s peers is deeply anti-social. Given our historic propensity to eat one another, making cannibalism taboo seems a sensible base on which to build a large civilization. Secondly, it’s hard to find a good butcher.
Recent evidence published by PLoSONE.org, an online peer-reviewed science journal, shows that butchering a human corpse for consumption was common amongst the ancient Britons. In fact, it turns out they were quite adept at the practice. Although the art is largely lost today, like everything else, how-to-guides can be found on line. Bob Arson, of The Church of Euthanasia, warns that human butchery requires both ample space and time
Even if you decide to clean and process the corpse yourself, there is still the problem of supply. As a food geek (I loath the term foodie), I am obsessed with the freshness and origins of my ingredients, so necro-cannibalism (consuming the flesh of the already deceased) is out. Homicidal anthropophagy, the murderous option, isn’t much of a second choice, given the social stigma attached to hunting and eating people. Even if your livestock consents to being eaten, this defense will be lost on the courts, or at least it was for convicted German cannibal Armin Meiwes.
Advancements in medical science suggest that growing human organs for transplant is on the near horizon. However the possibility of ethically (and morally, for that matter) sourced human meat suffered a blow this past February. Vladimir Mironov — the scientist on the cutting-edge of biofabrication (literally the manufacturing of life) and champion of in-vitro feed animal flesh production as a solution to a growing food crisis — was suspended from his Medical University of South Carolina lab, for reasons unrelated to his research.
The Medical University of South Carolina vows to continue the work being done at their lab. Would-be cannibals can only hope that Mirinov’s replacement will share the same desire to both heal and feed the world, since the work being done at the MUSC lab represents our best hope at satisfing our innate, murderous hunger. Until then, if you notice an unusual number of people going missing in your neighbourhood, look for a well-fed person, with a murderous glint his eye.
