Eating human flesh is one of the biggest taboos in our society, however no matter how hard the human civilization tries to stop this from happening, there are people who have tasted human flesh. There are even some tribes who are known to be cannibals, and there is even a horrible disease that is associated with a cannibal tribe: Kuru Disease. One doesn't have to be even remotely interested in cannibalism to be curious about how these people review the human flesh. Let's hear it from them!
The story of Peter Bryan started when he got fired from the store he was working at for stealing. Bryan, first of all, beat the 20-year old daughter of the owners to death with a hammer. Then he attempted suicide by jumping off the balcony. After this incident, it was decided that he was mentally unstable and he was put in a maximum security asylum in 1993.
Having 'completed his treatment,' he was released from the hospital after 9 months. The same night, he went to the flat of a 43-year old man named Brian Cherry. He beat this man with a hammer and cut his arms and one leg with the help of a saw and some knives. When the police showed up, they found the brain of the victim in a pan on the stove.
When questioned, Bryan confessed to frying the man's brain with margarine and eating it, adding that it tasted quite good. He also said that he had eaten a part of Cherry's arms and legs and that it had tasted just like chicken. Bryan, who was naturally arrested after this, was put to back into the asylum; but he killed one of the patients there. Later on, he said that he also wanted to eat that person, but didn't have enough time to cook his victim.
The 21-year old Norwegian art student Alexander Selvik Wengshoel had to have his hip operated on because of a hereditary disease in 2010. He convinced the doctor to give him his femur once it was taken out. Wengshoel was still undecided about what to do with this bone, but he wanted to somehow find a way to use it in an art project.
After getting back home, he started boiling the bone in a pot and scraped off some of the remaining flesh. Thinking that this is a once-in-a-life-time opportunity, he decided to eat it. Finding his own flesh pretty delicious, he went on to prepare a dish using the rest of the flesh that was left on the bone. He roasted the meat with some potatoes in the oven and opened a bottle of wine. According to Wengshoel, his hip tasted like wild sheep.
Shawcross killed a young boy and girl in Watertown, New York, in 1972. He was sentenced to prison for 15 years, but this wasn't enough to 'rehabilitate' him: he then went on to kill the prostitutes around his neighborhood and took eleven lives before the police got him.
After he was captured, he explained what he did to the people he killed and confessed to eating their flesh. He said that he had tried human flesh during the war in Vietnam, and that he had eaten a young boy's heart and the genitals of four prostitutes after he got back to the USA. This confession couldn't be confirmed because the bodies were already decayed. According to his testimony, human flesh tastes like the burnt part of pork roast.
Tobias Schneebaum was an American Artist, who got a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Peru in 1955. When it was time to hit the road, he decided to hitchhike from New York to Peru. During his trip, he heard of a tribe named Arakmbut, who lived in the jungle and used bows and arrows to hunt, so he decided to find these people.
Although this tribe was known to be savage, they welcomed Schneebaum. What he most liked about this tribe was that they were very accepting of homosexuality. As he had problems about this when he was still living in New York, after a while, he decided to stay and spend the rest of his life with the tribe.
However, his ideas about this tribe changed on the first day that he joined them to hunt; because the members of the tribe attacked a nearby village and killed six people. Later on, they started dancing around the fire and cooking the bodies. Schneebaum was terrified by what he saw, but as he was too scared, he had to play along. He danced with them around the fire and ate with them.
After this incident, he decided to leave the tribe and wrote his memoir 'Keep The River On Your Right.' The book turned out to be a big success and lots of people asked him what human flesh tasted like. The artist, who initially said that he was too terrified to remember at the moment, later confessed that it tasted like pork.
Omaima Nelson was a woman born in Egypt who migrated to USA with the hopes of becoming a modal. She met 56-year old William Nelson in 1991, and the couple got married after two months. However, they weren't happy in their marriage and after a while, Omaima accused her husband of beating and raping her. It was only after three weeks after they got married that Omiama snapped and killed her husband. She decided to eat the body to destroy the evidence.
She divided her husband's body in pieces. She first boiled his hands and head, and then cooked the ribs and ate them with BBQ sauce. When she asked a friend to help her dispose of the body, she got caught. She was given a life sentence.
Jeffrey Dahmer, the famous Milwaukee cannibal, was held responsible for the murders of 17 young men. After he was captured by the FBI, he confessed that he had cut the bodies into pieces, and that he had chopped the flesh and organs and eaten them afterwards. According to him, the human flesh tasted like filet mignon. Dahmer, who was arrested in 1992 and was given a life sentence, was killed by another prisoner two years later
William Seabrook was a reporter with the New York Times, however what made him famous was actually the extraordinary travel books he wrote. The most popular one of his books was 'Jungle Ways,' which was published in 1931. The book was about the Guera tribe Seabrook came across during his West Africa trip. The reporter, who learned that the tribe was cannibalistic, decided to try human flesh as well.
He explained his experience in his book: '“It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no other person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.”
Jorge Negromonte Da Silveira, his wife Isabel Cristina Pires and mistress Bruna Cristina Oliveira da Silva were arrested in connection with the murder of a homeless woman in 2012. During the interrogation, they confessed to having killed two other women before. This trio cooked and ate all three bodies and sold some of the meat.
Da Silveira also said that the human flesh tasted like beef and that he, his wife and his mistress tried many different recipes to cook it. They consumed some of the dishes they prepared and sold the rest to neighbors. De Silveria was given 23 years in prison, and the two women each 20. Da Silveria thought that the prison sentence was the right decision because otherwise he would surely continue killing people.
Another notorious cannibal of near history is a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa. Sagawa met a woman from the Netherlands, whose name was Renee Hartevelt, while he was studying in Paris. On June 11th, 1981, while Hartevelt was visiting Sagawa in his apartment., he shot her in the back. After she was dead, Sagawa spent the next two days cooking and eating various body parts of the young woman.
According to his confession, he first ate the meat off her buttocks raw. Then he fried the rest of the buttocks in a pan, adding salt. He described this part as flavorless and odorless. He also baked parts of Hartevelt's breasts, but he didn't like it because it was too greasy.
While he was trying to dispose of the rest of the body three days after the incident, he got caught. He was declared insane and put into an asylum. In 1985, he was sent back to his home country, Japan. After the interrogations in Japan, he was declared sane. When French authorities rejected the sharing of evidence with the Japanese, Sagawa, who couldn't be put in prison or asylum, became a free man. After his release, he wrote a book and became famous in Japan. What a life!
Armin Meiwes, a German man whose name we've heard a lot during the past few years, posted an ad on the Internet. He was seeking 'a well-built person between ages 18-30 to be slaughtered and consumed.' Meiwes stated that around 200 people replied to this ad. After a young man he met changed his mind after a while, Meiwes moved on to meet 41-year-old Bernd Juergen Brandes, who volunteered to be eaten.
These two men, who got together on March 9th, 2001, had sex first. Later, Meiwes cut Brandes' penis off, which they ate together. They initially tried to consume the penis raw, but it was too rubbery. Meiwes then decided to fry the penis with butter and garlic,but ended up burning it.
After waiting for 10 hours for Brandes to bleed out and die, Meiwes decided to kill Brandes instead. He hung the body on a meat hook and started carving off meat. Meiwes ate 18 kilos of Brandes' meat during the next 10 months and said in later interviews that he used salt, black pepper and garlic to cook the meat.
According to Meiwes, human flesh tasted like pork, but with a stronger and bitter flavor. Meiwes insisted that Brandes' death was not a murder, but rather an assisted suicide, as Brandes chose to be killed himself. He was initially given eight and a half years in prison, but after losing the appeal, he was sentenced to life in prison. By the way, he is a vegetarian now!