Tasting Human Flesh: Taboos and Self-Cannibalism

👃 Eating your own boogers can be beneficial for your immune system.

🍽️ Human meat has been consumed in times of famine and out of curiosity or art.

❌ Cannibalism is considered taboo and goes against the dignity of a human being.

Artists and individuals have cooked and consumed human flesh, both legally and illegally.

There are distinctions between taste and flavor - taste is the chemical reaction in taste buds, while flavor is a more complex experience involving smell and information from the trigeminal nerve.

The question of what human flesh tastes like remains unanswered.

🍖 According to a description by William Seabrook, human meat tastes like fully developed veal with a mild and good flavor.

🤔 The taste of human meat is not strongly defined or characterized, unlike other meats such as goat, high game, or pork.

🍽️ Although no recipes or flavor recommendations were provided, the taste of human meat is accurately comparable to veal.

👅 Human cuisine only features a small number of recipes compared to the possible combinations of flavors.

🔬 Researchers created a flavor network to analyze the combination of ingredients and their flavor molecules in different cuisines.

🌍 North American and Western European dishes tend to combine ingredients with shared flavor compounds, while East Asian cuisine avoids them.

👅 Toothpaste can affect the taste of orange juice due to the presence of sodium lauryl sulfate.

🧬 The elements and molecules we ingest become a part of our body through a process governed by DNA.

🍊 Cats cannot taste sweetness but can taste ATP, which may indicate the taste of meat to them.

👅 We are constantly in contact with and tasting human through our mouths.

🐟 Sea squirts engage in self-cannibalism by digesting their own nervous system.

🧠 The sea squirt's self-cannibalism suggests that the evolution of the brain was driven by the need for movement.

Swallowing and digesting our own body weight every three months

Being the mythical ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail

We are what we eat and also things that we eat