In my Arctic travels, an Inuk I met told me that human flesh tasted “like inferior polar bear meat.”
In my Arctic travels, I once met an Inuk who told me that he’d eaten another Inuk during a period of starvation some years earlier. On a whim, I asked him how the person tasted. “Like inferior polar bear meat,” he replied.
For the next few weeks, I couldn’t help but think “inferior polar bear meat” whenever I encountered one of my fellow human beings. Likewise it was all I could do to keep from greeting my friends by saying “How’s it going, Inferior Polar Bear Meat?” After a while, I developed a curiosity about human meat. Since I’d had all sorts of other interactions with people, why not try to determine how they tasted?
Easier said than done. For where would I get the meat? Probably not at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or even Walmart’s. When I googled the subject, one of the first hits I got was a perhaps jocular recipe for Ed Gein’s head cheese. Another google brought me to the so-called Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer and another to Ugandan president Idi Amin, who ate several of his followers and said they were a bit too salty. These individuals might be described as celebrity diners, for they became famous by eating their own kind. Myself, I had no desire to be regarded as a latter-day Jeffrey Dahmer.
Of course, there were once cannibalistic cultures, such as the Fijians, who delighted in dining on the occasional Protestant missionary (might they have had a rather dour flavor?). Certain indigenous groups in the Caribbean often evaluated Europeans based on how they tasted, with the French near the top and the Dutch near the bottom. But since my own culture did not happen to be an anthropophagous one, I could find no practical information whether online or elsewhere about casually dining on one’s fellow humans. A shame, for this deed, if performed with some regularity, would be a great service to our grossly overpopulated planet.
So what to do? Since it would be a bit risky to kill and eat a living person, I thought about eating a recently deceased one. In the 1940s, the writer Hassoldt Davis (author of, among other books, The Jungle and the Damned) was given a human hand from a mortician, cooked it in herbs and garlic, and liked it so much that he asked the mortician for the hand’s “mate.” Following this example, I went to a pathologist friend and asked him for a chunk of an unclaimed corpse so I could see whether or not it tasted like polar bear meat. “Have you gone nuts?” he shouted at me. Times seem to have changed since the 1940s.
This was one remaining possibility. Yours truly. For I assumed that it wouldn’t be against the law if I dined on myself. Not on one of my briskets, mind you, but simply a tidbit of my thigh. Thus I took my pocket knife, and from my left thigh gently removed a small piece of my skin as well as some subcutaneous tissue. A relatively painless procedure. Then I cooked this hoped-for victual and ate it with a garnish of my blood. My conclusion: as cuisine, I didn’t have much flavor. All right, I thought, I’ll try a piece of my thigh a la tartare. So I ate an uncooked tidbit, and once again I didn’t seem to have much flavor.
In the end, I had no choice but to eat some polar bear meat, which I did during a trip to East Greenland. A local hunter cut off a chunk from the flank of a polar bear he’d recently killed, boiled it for rather a long time due to trichinosis risk, and then offered it to me. Did it taste inferior or superior? you might wonder. The latter. In fact, it tasted so good that I ended up with a positive feeling about my fellow human beings… at least for a while.
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