Cannibalism - #25: The Other Bits

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

Is it anger or ignorance which causes a cannibal to chop up a human body into bits?

Baltimore, 1996, Joseph Metheny confessed that of the 13 victims he claimed to have slayed, at least 3 he had dismembered, minced-up, mixed with pork, and having set up a roadside barbeque stall, where he sold these sizzling patties, later stating “if you mix it together no one can tell the difference”.

Too often, cannibals destroy a body or dispose of it, rather than considering its culinary merits. But is this down to anger or trauma, a lack of education or emotional intelligence, as although some have a high IQ, being smart enough to join MENSA, doesn’t that they’re good at making rational judgements.

There are several parts of a body that an uneducated cannibal may miss or may eat by mistake.

The spleen is a purple fist-shaped organ behind the left ribs, measuring 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, 1 ½ inches thick and weighing 170 grams, it’s part of the immune system. With a texture and taste like liver, it’s low in calories (79 per 100g) and it’s high in vitamins B and C, iron and selenium. Essentially being “a bag of blood”, chefs state “the spleen crumbles in your mouth like a coarse blood sausage”, and with only a small elastic membrane, it requires little preparation, and is best served fried in oil.

As a 15-cm-long leaf shaped organ under the liver, the pancreas is part of the endocrine system and one of the sweetbreads. Only 160 calories but packed with vitamin B and selenium, it’s sweeter than muscle but with a slight savoury aftertaste. And although it requires preparation (by soaking it in milk) as it’s full of digestive enzymes, eating raw pancreas has been trialled as a treatment for diabetes.

You see cannibals, instead of getting angry because mummy didn’t love you, try reading a cookbook, as there are many potential delicacies in the human body, you won’t learn about in Guns n Ammo.

The auricular muscles surround the ear and are an ancient part of our anatomy, which in animals make their ears to swivel, but defunct in humans, they can make your ears wiggle. The plantaris is a 5-10cm leg muscle with no primary use except to aid the knee, which has a tendon nicknamed the freshman's nerve as medical students mistake it for a nerve. And the palmaris longus is a wrist muscle, only found in 20% of people, and is thought to be hangover from the days where – as apes – we hung from trees.

If a cannibal filleted and sautéed those bits, wouldn’t we be less likely to see them as uncouth yobs?

And yet, without the know-how, they could end up in hot water. In 2023, Georgie Piano of Washington went into hospital to have his appendix taken out, instead they removed part of his large intestine.

As we know, the lobe of a liver can be mistaken for a heart, but what might a cannibal unwittingly eat.

The prostate. Weighing 25 grams, this walnut shaped gland wrapped in muscle fibres and connective tissue produces seminal fluid. Oddly, unlike penises and testicles, the prostate is not an aphrodisiac. The gallbladder is toxic, as it’s a veritable stockpile of bile, used for digesting fats and removing toxins. And although the tonsils look a little tasty to some weirdos, they are a bundle of lymphatic tissues.

Which is useful to know for any cannibal, or if you’ve had a body part removed by surgery, and wanted to turn your leg into a doorstop or your winkle into a coat hook, or maybe to eat it. I mean it is yours.

Currently in Britain, depending on the hospital, patients are free to do whatever they want with their amputated limb “as long as there is not a public health issue" according to the Human Tissue Authority. With written consent, you can take your severed appendage home with you, but you can’t cremate or bury it until you have also died, there’s no law against you eating it, but it’s illegal for you to sell it.

2023, Pennsylvania, Jeremy Pauley sold the bones and body parts he’d stolen from a mortuary, with three buckets containing two brains, skin, fat, a heart, a kidney, livers, lungs, and a child’s jawbone. He was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to a charge of abuse of a corpse.

But if a cannibal isn’t feeling peckish, how much could they get by selling the body parts, either legally, or on the black market? Legally, in America, you can donate your whole body to the Anatomy Gift Registration, a non-profit with a rigorous application process which uses limbs for medical procedures.

On the dark web, kidneys go for £150,000, livers for £120,000, hearts for just £90,000 (as pacemakers are a super reliable replacement), corneas for £21,000 and the small intestine for £1800. Eggs go for £6000 and sperm for £60 a pop but you’ve got to make the donation in person. A foot of human hair goes for £100, blood plasma for £200 a month, the pharmaceutical industry buys body fluids to test drugs (like “£1750 for 1ml of blister fluid and £1,600 for a gram of earwax”), and on fetish websites, you can sell everything from saliva to scabs, and breast milk to bum fungus. Everything had a price.

2023, Colerado, funeral-home owner Megan Hess was sentenced to 20 years in prison “for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 corpses and selling body parts without permission”, as although it’s illegal to sell organs for transplant in the US, these were sold to surgical training companies which are not regulated by federal law. They also charged the grieving relatives for cremations which never occurred, and handed them an urn full of mixed ashes from a bin, along with a bill for their services.

We may see cannibals as deeply unethical, but are they any worse than those we supposedly trust?

Join me tomorrow as we explore the side of meat-eating that a cannibal often forgets till it’s too late… decomposition.