Two Dutch television-show hosts said they had their flesh cooked by a top chef and then dined on each other before a studio audience.

“Nothing is really that special when you’re talking about the taste of the meat,”  host Dennis Storm told ABCNews.com. “But it is weird to look into the eyes of a friend when you are chewing on his belly.”

Yeah, so. Dutch cannibalism on TV. Nothing I can add to this.

[ABC News]

In North Korea, povery is rampant. People struggle to find shelter, buy clothing, and even find food.  Humanitarian efforts have been going on for a while, hoping to supply the poor Communist country with basic supplies. However, their bespectacled and very tiny dictator has been stopping these efforts from taking fruit. People have been trying to escape from this terror for a while now, but this new piece of news is definitely going to be forcing people to get the heck out of the country.

A recent document has been leaked to the Caleb Mission details 721 criminal cases, most of which deal with food. These run the gamut of crimes, leading from theft to assault, but the truly terrifying part of the story is that 5 cases of cannibalism have been recorded. That means that 5 cases of cannibalism have been found, there’s no telling how many more cases there are. One particular story tells of how a hungry guard took an axe, killed a colleague, ate some of him, and then sold off the rest of him as mutton. Kind of like a modern day Sweeney Todd.

Remind me to never visit North Korea.

[Global Post]

Justin Robert Young recounts his harrowing ordeal in the Forest with a Million Eyes. Brian, Andrew and Justin then step into the treacherous mental playground of a loyal listener and reveal their most deep-seated primal motivations when they are faced with surviving in a post-Zombie Apocalypse. One of them will become a ravenous fiend roving the ruins of civilization in search of fresh brains. Another will unleash his inner amoral self and cackle in delight as the world burns and search out female survivors to indulge his earthly desires. The final member of the trio will rise above tragedy and seek out vengeance for the horrific fate the befell is family and adopt a heroic new identity, and another, and another.

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Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Murders ever committed.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “Eat your heart out…”. As in, “Eat your heart out Google, there’s a new iPhone in town,” or “Eat your heart out Thierry, I just ate your lung.”

Right, well…something like that.

Want more explanation? I thought you’d never ask.

In 2007, Nicolas Cocaign’s lawyer TRIED to explain that the French attempted rapist was crazy. He TRIED to get the dude shipped to a psych ward. Unfortunately, when the prison officials refused, it was up to Cocaign to provide the actual proof.

That’s where Cocaign’s cellmate, Thierry Baudry, comes in…or exits rather. After stabbing Baudry repeatedly in the chest with a pair of scissors Cocaign finished him off by suffocating him with a plastic bag. (Why a crazy rapist had access to a pair of scissors and a plastic bag I leave up to you to try to figure out.)

Apparently satisfied with his attempt to prove his insanity Cocaign then set out to prove that he also had no anatomical knowledge whatsoever.

In an effort to absorb Baudry’s soul by eating his heart, our buddy Cocaign, managed instead to eat a lung AND two chest muscles. (I like to think that after finishing the lung he looked down, saw another one and with a quiet sigh, said to himself, “crap.” Before resigning himself to chowing down on the more centrally located albeit no more heart-shaped chest muscles.)

Fun fact: At his subsequent murder trial the lead juror announced the verdict by standing up and singing:

He’s a plight,

He’s a plight,

He’s a plight,

COCAIGN.

(Shoot. I promised myself no more Eric Clapton jokes.)

Your thoughts? Have any other weird cannibal/murder stories? (Or Eric Clapton jokes?)

Thanksgiving’s over, your bowels are weeping to grief counselors and Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with the last installment of a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. It’s a Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes). Monday we looked at the Wendigo, Wednesday we explored the deleted human eating element of fairy tales.

Today: Hard, Cold Facts and Soft, Chili Fingers – Modern Cannibalism Terror

A few lingering, neo-primitive cultures still employ cannibalism as a means of honoring the dead and dominating enemies. Meanwhile, the civilized world has spent centuries building cannibalism up into one of the cardinal cultural taboos (along with incest – another primal form of indulging in one’s kin), a mission that’s been so effectively carried out that even accidental cannibalism has become an object of fear. In America alone, a bevy of urban legends and contemporary folktales hinge on the hair-raising premise that soylent green has already arrived.

A classic: The body in the wine (or beer, soda, etc.) vat. Usually set in a impoverished country where an American vintner has outsourced production of cheap wine, the story goes that several shipments of wine have just left the facility when a man’s pickled corpse, complete with a knife sticking out of its back, is found lulling in the dregs at the bottom of the storage vat. The company decides it would be too expensive to recall the product, so, well, you’re the one who just wanted to buy the cheap stuff.

In this story, as well as many others, the incident is the result of low safety and cleanliness standards in the food production industry. These stories are cut from the same cloth as all the “KFC comes from headless mutants” and “chocolate milk is regular milk with too much cow blood” legends. It’s all paranoia and distrust of a modern culture to which we’ve ceded control in exchange for convenience (and the illusion of civility – people are so concerned with supposed modern sophistication, they’re no longer comfortable with meat looking like meat; hence, the nuggefication of chicken and the fingerizing of fish).

The worst food fear, then, combines our ancient aversion to people meat and our modern fear of corporate malfeasance. Just look at the woman who planted a human finger in her Wendy’s chili. She could have scammed the restaurant just as hard (and more believably) with a rat’s foot or a roach’s head, but, in her mind, the finger was the most disgusting of all readily available food contaminates. There are also cases in which minor production anomalies result in wild accusations – in 1987, a beef ligament in a can of tripe was mistaken for a finger, and in 2001, a mold growth in improperly sealed fruit punch was initially reported as a human penis. Clearly, cannibalism is as prevalent a nightmare to the modern subconscious as it was among the snowed-in Algonquians.

Now, enjoy your leftovers.

This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes). Monday we looked at the cautionary tale of the Wendigo.

Today: Once Upon a California Cheeseburger – Cannibalism in Fairy Tales

It’s no secret that the blank-stared march of supposed social progress hasn’t been kind to fairy tales. Declawing. Sanitizing. Neutering. Whatever wince-evoking action verb you prefer, the children stories of yesterday have been pain-stakingly redacted to excise the rape, bloodshed and murder that were what made the concise narratives sufficiently cautionary in the first place. Along with all the forced, violent sex and baby murders, a requisite amount of cannibalism used to be a dependable bedtime story trope.

Before getting into the really gruesome stuff, I want to briefly respond to the gross number of people who cite “Hansel and Gretel” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” as examples of stories that retain cannibalistic overtones. I’m not including these stories because their respective threats – a blood-sniffing giant and feeder fetish witch – clearly exist external to the boundaries of human society. The giant obviously isn’t human. The witch is inhuman based on her narrative function as a spell-casting monstrous figure whose desire to eat porky little Hansel is, in itself, used to underscore her inhumanity. It’s kind of like how in Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” they specify that the zombies aren’t cannibals because they don’t each other. This witch ain’t ever gonna eat other witches.

Okay then.

In early variants of “Little Red Riding Hood,” before disrobing and going eat crazy on Red, the wolf tricks her into drinking a cup of her grandmother’s blood (a story point that was only removed when illustrators repeatedly refused to depict it). This theme of inadvertent cannibalism via sinister subterfuge can also be found in the Grimms’ telling of “The Juniper Tree,” in which a jealous step-mother turns her step-son into pudding and feeds it to her husband. Likewise, in an early version of “Sleeping Beauty,” soon after the titular sleepy-head is abandoned, she’s discovered by a traveling King, who hangs out for a while, repeatedly rapes her and then goes on his way. Upon learning of his infidelity, and two resultant bastard kids Beauty birthed mid-snooze, the King’s wife demands Sleeping Beauty’s children be kidnapped and cooked into a stew to be eaten by the King.

Mitochondrial versions of “Snow White” feature the vain step-mother demanding receipt of Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box so that she could eat the organ and inherent White’s youthful beauty. The Robber Bridegroom, which is also featured in the Grimms’ compilation, centers on a roving band of cannibalistic thieves who kidnap beautiful young women solely to butcher and eat them.

Obviously, in all of these examples, cannibalism is used as a thematic device to demonstrate the complexities of human (especially familial) relationships, and the ways in which we all emotionally chew each other down to the bone. I’m not saying the stories don’t work without all the people eating – I’m just saying they feel a bit anorexic.

(rimshot)

This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes).

Today: The Legend of the Wendigo – America’s Original PSA

The gaunt, emaciated creature that Algonquian Indians knew as the “Wendigo” was almost certainly not the first imagined antagonist invented to enforce a cultural taboo – but it’s probably one of the more awesome. Basically, the tale states that a person who ingests human meat will be gripped by a powerful and insatiable hunger for seconds, thirds and beyond. This hunger will drive them to kill, butcher and devour all those around them, but they will never feel satisfied. All emotion, all morality – all humanity – will be lost to the gastrological void and an excruciating urge to consume. The person becomes the Wendigo – starving, ferocious and unstoppable.

Keep in mind, the Wendigo wasn’t created to stop folks from gallivanting around and snacking on each other just for poops and smiles. The Algonquians lived in the Northern Unites States and Canada. They faced unpredictable weather, limited food availability and, one would imagine, intermittent morale shortages. Basically, there were plenty of dark, freezing nights when an Algonquian warrior looked over at his friend, saw a giant, steaming beaver leg, thought of the horrific Wendigo and opted for death by starvation. (The Wendigo was also used as a catch-all poster boy for gluttony and greed in discouraging selfishness and promoting tribal unity and resource sharing. After all, the bogarters of today are the cannibals of tomorrow.)

Even more interestingly, the threatening tale of the Wendigo, and its less-than-subtle discouragement of cannibalism, wasn’t created solely out of tribal nobility or some consensually acknowledged moral imperative – the tale’s description of the monster and it’s meat-fueled creation, embellished as it is by hyperbole and requisite awesomeness, isn’t wholly fictional. The Algonquians had a limited cultural history of necessity-based cannibalism. The problem became that tribe members who indulged out of need during harsh times often found themselves craving succulent friend chops even come prosperous seasons. This culture-bound syndrome, known as Wendigo Psychosis, was almost certainly a psychological consequence of post-noshing guilt. It’s unclear whether these cases actually served as the genesis of the Wendigo story, but there are several reported cases of Wendigo-aware, famine-driven cannibals who begged to be executed out of fear of transformation.

And here we are, a nation of pregnant kids all high on drugs, smashing eggs with frying pans and calling it education. Where did all the monsters go?