What Does Human Flesh Taste Like? The Answer Depends on Who You Ask

Luckily, very few people have any desire to actually eat human flesh. But perhaps some idly wonder what human meat looks and tastes like. Reliable sources on the subject are hard to find, but, for the macabre among us, the taste of human meat isn’t a total mystery.

Gizmodo’s Robbie Gonzalez explained in 2014 that human flesh firmly falls into the red meat camp. Gonzalez wrote that beef is visually the closest meat. “Muscle’s red color 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 around 2 percent, much higher than in pigs, sheep or cows, so beef would be the closest visual equivalent of a human fillet or rump roast. But, according to the testimony of people who have actually eaten other people, the taste of human meat does not reflect its beef-like appearance.

Both serial killers and Polynesian cannibals have described human as being most akin to pork. For example, German criminal and cannibal Armin Meiwes gave that opinion in a 2007 interview after he was imprisoned. “The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger,” he said. “It tastes quite 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 man-flesh in great detail in his book Jungle Ways.

According to him, human flesh tasted like veal. “The roast,” Seabrook wrote, “from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”

This account is the one of the most descriptive to date, but it has also been called into question. As Slate’s Brian Palmer wrote in 2012, Seabrook “later confessed that the distrustful tribesmen never allowed him to partake in their traditions.” Instead, the author insisted that he attained samples of human flesh from a Parisian hospital and cooked them up himself.

Regardless of Seabrook’s credibility, however, Slate pointed out that, like any meat, the flavor of human flesh would likely depend a great deal on how it is prepared and what cut is sampled. The Azande tribe’s human stew likely tasted entirely different from the deep-fried, parsley-strewn human genitals a Japanese exhibitionist artist served at a dinner party in 2012.

But not all incidences of eating human tissue are so transgressive. Biologist and science writer Bill Schutt partook in a dish of prepared placenta as an example of “medicinal cannibalism.” The resurging practice of placentophagy—eating placenta—is just the latest example in a long line of medical ingestion of human flesh that remained popular in Europe into the 20th century, including eating powdered mummy to stanch internal bleeding and bits of skulls to relieve headaches.

When asked by Scientific American’s Ryan F. Mandelbaum what placenta tasted like in 2016, Schutt had a somewhat unexpected answer. “A lot of people have claimed that it tastes like pork or veal,” Schutt said, “and everything tastes like chicken, I guess. To me, it didn’t taste like any of those. And I’ll tell you, I cleaned my plate. It’s something I’ll never forget.”

Rachel Nuwer | | READ MORE

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.

Rudy Molinek | READ MORE

Rudy Molinek is Smithsonian magazine's 2024 AAAS Mass Media Fellow.