Cannibalism - #3: The Body

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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 three – body mass”. (burp)

Can a cannibal know how long it would take to eat a human, if they don’t know their size or weight? I think not, especially as everyone’s limbs, torso, organs and even their muscle-to-fat ratio is different.

In 2015, Tamara Samsonova, the Granny Ripper of Russia was convicted of murder and suspected of cannibalism. Killing her friend in a row over dirty crockery, she drugged 79-year-old Valentina Ulanova, dismembered her body, and - said to have a fondness for lungs - she gouged them out by reaching into the body cavity, pulling them out through the dismembered neck, and then, allegedly, ate them.

She was caught because (even if you don’t plan to eat it) disposing of a body is hard work, as we’re all built different. For example, lungs, at birth they weight 40g and as an adult they weigh a kilo, but as her victim’s were heavy smokers, they would have been a smaller size and tasted of tar – oh yummy.

People are wonderfully diverse; Robert Wadlow, the tallest person was 8ft 11in and weighed 439lbs, making him 3 foot taller and twice as heavy as Mike Tyson when he was heavyweight champion. The shortest was Chandra Dangi, who at 1ft 7in and 31lbs was the length of a newborn baby but the weight of three. Jon Minnoch was the heaviest at 1400lb, the same as a 1960s Mini or a 1980s Toyota Carolla with the doors cut off. And the lightest was Lucia Zárate, at 4.7lbs or four footlong Subway sandwiches.  

And yes, a cannibal is unlikely to pick a person of such extreme proportions, but Issei Sagawa (the Kobe Cannibal) did try to eat Renée Hartevelt who was taller than an average woman at 5 ft 10 in, and yet, he was only a titchy 4 ft 9 in.

So, to work out if we could eat a whole human, we’ll need a willing victim. Let’s call him Steve. “Hello, I’m Steve”. It’s okay, he’s not real. “Oh, am I not?”. No, you’re entirely fictional… for tax purposes.

According to the Office of National Statistics, Steve is the average UK male; 5ft 9in (178cms) tall, 84kgs (13 stone 3lbs) in weight, with size 9 shoes, a size 16 collar, a 43-inch chest, a 37-inch waist, a BMI of 25, and like 67% of the UK male population, he’s overweight or sporting a pot belly. Legend.

Our victim isn’t a woman, as there’s no way I’d risk tackling the tricky issues of a lady’s weight, but if you think this is sexist, imagine that Steve is someone you hate, a boss, an ex-boyfriend, someone you’d love to squeeze out of your bum, look into the bowl and say “that’s what I think of you”, or a perhaps you’d consider nibbling on a similarly sized celebrity, like Jared Leto, Johnny Depp or Tom Hardy. Oh, so now you’re drooling. (slurp)

Albert Fish claimed he ate Grace Budd’s “entire body in nine days”, which was lie as her skull and parts of her skeleton were found buried with six years of decomposition having destroyed the rest. But even an ex-Army butcher like Dennis Nilsen had difficulty disposing of an average UK male without resorting to cannibalism, as the fat, skin and several small bones had clogged up his drain and led to his arrest.

According to the Royal College of Pathologists, the average UK male consists of 33.6 kilos of muscle, 11.7 kilos of bone, 9 pints of blood, 21 square feet of skin and 3 stone 7lbs of fat, with an 3lb brain, a 310g heart, two kidneys of 266g, a 1 ½ kilo liver, a 1 kilo set of lungs, a 170g spleen, 7 ½ lbs of intestines, and if that doesn’t make you hungry, why not wash it down with 5 million hair follicles… for starters?

Maybe your thinking, “ah, you know what, eating a human being isn’t for me”? Well, in addition to the 21,000 litres of saliva it is said you swallow in your lifetime, with us each shedding 500 million skin cells a day, if by some miracle you don’t swallow anyone else’s skin cells, simply by drinking tap water, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that – excluding urine - we each consume 109.5 grams of faecal matter a year, which isn’t our own  – that’s roughly a third of a sausage. Oooh tasty.

Even the German cannibal, Armin Meiwes, after his failed attempt to chow down on a chewy penis, struggled to eat the remains of his victim, 43-year-old Bernd-Jürgen Brandes. As across the following ten months, having stored body parts in his freezer, he claimed to have consumed up to 20 kilos (44 lbs) of the flesh - roughly two thirds of his victim’s muscle mass - having cooked parts of Brandes’ flesh with olive oil, garlic, pepper and nutmeg, and eaten him at a table with sprouts, potatoes and a bottle of South African red. And yet, most of Brandes’ bones, skin and innards were buried in the garden.

Issei Sagawa had a different issue, as he said he stopped eating Renne when she began to decompose, and he was arrested trying to dump her remains in a Paris lake. Dahmer admitted he had scattered the smashed bones in the woodlands behind the home. And although this was never proven Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover was said to have sold it in the black market as pork or horse meat, which was boneless, diced, ground up and said to have “an odd flavour and texture”.

For a cannibal to digest an entire body is difficult, but as many serial killers have almost proven, it can be done, given the right tools, knowledge, skill, and an average sized UK male called Steve. “Hello”.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll explore each body part, how long it would take to digest, how many calories are in them, as well as which cannibal ate or binned it, and we’ll even throw in some recipe tips.

Join me tomorrow to examine the body part most cannibals go for first – the muscles.