It smelled delicious.
Two or three minutes later, William plated my placenta osso buco and passed me the dish. Without hesitation, I took a forkful—making sure to skewer two of the four bite-sized pieces. Placing Claire Rembis’s placenta into my mouth, I started chewing.
Before experiencing placentophagy firsthand, I had done some research into what human flesh might taste like. I was somewhat puzzled at the scarcity of credible reports, although a number of notable cannibal crazies had been perfectly happy to discuss the topic.
The term “long pig” has become the most popular reference point to describe the supposed porklike taste of human flesh. The oldest reference I could find comes from a letter written by Rev. John Watsford in 1847, describing the practice of ritual cannibalism practiced by the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands, a group of approximately 15 Polynesian islands located around 850 miles northeast of Tahiti. But while the letter does represent the translation of a Polynesian term for the use of human flesh as food, there is no real mention of how it tasted.
The Somosomo people were fed with human flesh during their stay at Bau [a tiny Fijian islet], they being on a visit at that time; and some of the Chiefs of other towns, when bringing their food, carried a cooked human being on one shoulder, and a pig on the other; but they always preferred the “long pig,” as they call a man when baked.
More reliable support for the pork hypothesis came from the infamous cannibal Armin Meiwes, who is currently serving a life term for killing and devouring Bernd Brandes. The latter, a 42-year-old computer technician, answered Meiwes’s cannibalism chat room post in 2001. It was the perfect match, with Meiwes obsessed with cannibalism and Brandes fixated on being eaten. Shortly after entering Meiwes’s dilapidated house in Rotenburg, the new friends decided to sever Brandes’s penis, which they reportedly tried to eat raw. Finding it too tough and chewy, they set out to cook the schnitzel but overcooked it—Meiwes eventually feeding it to his dog. Brandes, nearly unconscious from a combination of blood loss and the pills and alcohol he’d swallowed, eventually died—helped along by the knife-wielding Meiwes. The Internet’s first cannibal killer then dismembered his suddenly former pal. He stored the body parts in a freezer and consumed them over the course of several months.
“I sautéed the steak of Bernd with salt, pepper, garlic, and nutmeg,” Meiwes told interviewer Günter Stampf. Reportedly Meiwes ate more than 40 pounds of Mr. Brandes during the months following the killing. “The flesh tastes like pork, a little more bitter,” he said, noting that that most people wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “It tastes quite good.”
The pork comparison, however, was not shared by all.
Issei Sagawa, an unrepentant Japanese cannibal, who murdered and ate a female Dutch student in 1981 (and got away with it because of powerful family connections), compared his victim’s flesh to raw tuna.
While we’re on the topic of Meiwes and Sagawa (albeit briefly), some readers may be wondering why I’ve essentially steered clear of the criminal cannibalism typified by this pair and their ilk. One reason is that the topic has been covered in sensational (and often gory) detail in a number of previous books. More importantly, though, several of these psychopaths are still alive (or recently deceased) and out of respect for the families and loved ones of their victims, I have chosen not to provide these murderers with anything that could even vaguely be interpreted as acclaim.
In the 1920s, New York Times reporter William Seabrook set out to eat a chunk of human rump roast with some Guero tribesmen in West Africa. Upon returning home he began writing a book about his adventures. Depending on what source you believe, either Seabrook discovered that the tribesmen had tricked him into eating a piece of ape, or they had simply refused to share their meal with him. With the validity of his book in jeopardy, Seabrook set out to procure some real human flesh—this he claimed to have gotten from an orderly in a Paris hospital who had access to freshly dead patients. Seabrook says that he cooked the meat over a spit—seasoning it with salt and pepper and accompanying it with side of rice and a bottle of wine. It did not taste like pork, he said, “It was good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.”
Back in Plano, Texas, the Rembis family stood by waiting for my reaction, I took my time, chewing Claire’s placenta slowly. The first thing that came to mind wasn’t the taste—it was the texture. Firm but tender, it was easy to chew.
The consistency was like veal.