Cannibalism - #18: The Waste

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TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE: Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? (munching) With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part eighteen – waste”. (burp)

If a human was made only of meat, a cannibal could shave them like a rotisserie of tasty kebab meat and dine like a king. But they aren’t, as 46% of the body is used to process various forms of waste.

2013, Italy, Lino Renzi beat his mother Maria to death, cut her into pieces with a saw, froze the meat, and the neighbours only became suspicious when the intestines he’d popped on the grill caught fire. Being Italian, it was suggested, he was making the local dish - Torcinelli, a sausage stuffed with offal, tomato, onion, basil and parsley. Only this time instead of using lamb’s intestines, he used momma’s.

What parts of a corpse a cannibal eats is dependent on their culture, as although we may retch at an eyeball being burst by the Bedouin, they’d rightly retch at what we put in a haggis or a hotdog.
So, the waste? Excluding the skin, kidneys, liver, lungs and blood which we’ve covered, the excretory or urinary system includes the bladder and the intestines (as well as the rectum and colon). Delicious.

As a passive biological system, which unlike walking and talking, requires us to consciously do nothing, our excretory system expels waste products like solids, liquids and gases. Each day, the average person expels a minimum of 3 litres of sweat, 3 ½ pints of urine, 1500 millilitres of gas, and 400 grams of poo, so across the year that amounts to 320lbs or 145kgs – in effect, we poo the weight of an adult panda.

So, can we eat those organs which process our waste?

Weighing 3 ½ kilos, 15 to 20 ft long and made of a 3-5mm fibrous muscle and a layer of mucus whose wave-like contractions move food through the GI tract, the intestines could provide a cannibal with 6300 calories, enough for 2 ½ days. Described as “tender and fatty with a chewy resistance” and a slightly sweet taste, they have no urine or faecal smell, if they’re cleaned and washed properly.

Chitterlings, cow’s intestines stuffed with offal, herbs and vegetables, and boiled or fried are common across the world. So, with one human’s intestines enough to feed five cannibals for a day, if we made use of the 167,000 people who die daily, the dead could feed the citizens of Charlotte, North Carolina.

The bladder is a tough piece of protein to prepare, so most countries only use it as casings, and at just 32 grams with a wall just 1mm thick, it only contains 12 calories, unlike a cream cracker which has 15, and contains uric acid, ammonia and a parasitic worm which can be transmitted person to person. Or, if you want to go old school, from our annual dead, we could make 60 million 19th century footballs.

As for the rectum, with crispy pig’s rectum being a delicacy in South Korea, as “the red glistening tissue contains mucus glands”, oh yum, you could feed anus to the population of Seoul for 10 whole days. Which I’m sure they’ll love, as long as they ignore the fact that, according to a microbiologist Dr Gerba, even after the average human has wiped their anus, it still has a 10th of a gram of poo stuck to it.

Even in animals, rarely do we eat the waste system as part of our daily diet, so why should a cannibal?

Most unusable parts of an animal are turned into cattle feed, so although we balk at cannibalism, we’re okay with feeding dead chickens to live ones, cow corpses to active moos, and pig stiffs to their own relatives. But for the queasier cannibal, maybe enlisting a furry faithful friend isn’t a bad idea.

Humans are carnivores, whereas dogs are hypercarnivores, who produce 100 times the stomach acid we do, and as scavengers, they can rapidly digest the meat, bones and fat that we’d find impossible.

2018, Mexico, Juan Carlos Bejar & Patricia Martinez Bernal were convicted of 20 counts of torture and murder. With the bodies found in 20-litre buckets buried under concrete, many were missing organs, and although impossible to prove, the hearts were fed to their dogs and some said, other innards too.

But this is not uncommon, as dogs will eat anything. The inspiration for Mason Verger, Doctor Lector’s nemesis in Hannibal by Thomas Harris came from real-life. New York, 1970s, while high on PCP, a man known only as Michael smashed a mirror, sliced off the skin from his face, gouged out one of his eyes, and fed it to a German shepherd and her two puppies. The vet managed to get her to sick up his lips, nose and some of his face, but with her digestive system being so efficient, his face was beyond saving.

Phew! So, after all that grossness, you’re probably thinking “are we finished?” Nope. After the organs comes the waste products, as isn’t that part of a human too? Come on cannibals, don’t be cowardly.

The average human’s colon holds 8-25 lbs (or 11kgs) of faecal matter, and with the bowel never empty, every corpse has a little brown package in transit, containing bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. If you think a cannibal wouldn’t eat poo, as an example, Mark Redwine of Colorado killed his 13-year-old son Dylan after he found photos of him dressed in a sexy red bra and eating faeces from a nappy.

At 4 calories per gram, we expel 1200 calories down the toilet daily, and although urine can be sterilised to remove its toxins, its unlikely child-killer Albert Fish did this when he drank piss. Sweat comprises of water, salt and electrolytes, but a cannibal would burn more calories trying to drink it. And although many mammals and birds regurgitate food, the Butyric acid we produce in our vomit is highly corrosive to our nose, throat, eyes and lungs. Thank God, as that would be a real bummer at family mealtimes.

But why doesn’t a cannibal (outside of the Aghori tribe) eat human waste?

As said before, the eating of flesh is a sexual practice, the same way as those with coprophilia get an intense sexual arousal from faeces and defecation, and those with urolagnia get the same from urine. People are weird, with it said that 32% of men have fantasized about sex with wee or poo, and women more inclined to queening, or – as a humiliating act against a male man – sitting on the Smother Box. (Note sure what that is, Google it).

Criminal cannibalism isn’t about food, it’s about power, sex and revenge, with many cannibals eating human flesh in retaliation for childhood abuse and trauma. For example; Ed Gein made a skin suit, Dennis Nilsen slept with dead bodies, and Robert Black took snaps of himself with a wine bottle up his ass. So is eating waste any more embarrassing? Maybe they are appalled by it, or maybe like poo fetishists, they keep quiet about their dirty habits, as even for a cannibal, some perversions are a step too far.

Join me tomorrow as we explore if a cannibal’s stomach can digest another person’s stomach.