Awarded PhD from the University of Melbourne for a thesis questioning how cultural manifestations of cannibalism challenge the assumed anthropocentrism of our relationships to other animals.
Be careful what you wish for! Aesop warned us of that over two thousand years ago, in his fable “The Old Man and Death.” In that story, an old man is so sick of picking up wood in the forest that he drops his bundle and calls on death to free him from his never-ending labours. But when Death appears, he reconsiders, and asks Death just to replace the bundle of sticks onto his back. In this movie, the sticks are gambling debts, and Death is a catering agency that pays chefs to kill people and cook them for rich people. Can his request be retracted like Aesop’s old man?
Look, many of us have sat in a restaurant, even (perhaps especially) the expensive ones, wondering what the hell we were eating. We rarely ask though – too polite, too squeamish, or too indifferent. If it’s on the menu, we figure, it must be OK. Once we’ve asked the waiter for the dish, it’s usually too late to retract. In Mark Mylod’s 2022 film The Menu, audiences speculated on whether the Chef (Ralph Fiennes) had served up humans in his exquisite banquets, including perhaps the Sous Chef and even his own mother, but it was never spelled out, so has not graced this cannibalism blog.
But in this week’s film, Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For, the cannibalism is much more open, particularly for the diners, who are willing to pay big bucks for this, shall we say, unorthodox cuisine. Nicholas Tomnay is an Aussie (like the author of this blog) who works out of Sydney, New York and San Francisco. His first feature film was The Perfect Host (2010) which also included a lot of dining, and What You Wish For follows in this vein, but with a lot of human flesh involved.
Ryan (Nick Stahl from Man Without a Face) arrives in Colombia (South America) at the invitation of his old friend Jack (Brian Groh). Ryan is on the run from massive gambling debts he has foolishly amassed. Although the debt collectors don’t know where he is, they do know where his mother is, and send him pictures to prove it. He needs lots of money and quickly. His friend Jack seems to have it all – a fancy house where he just has to cook one meal for the agency that contracts him, a fortune in his bank, and big pay cheques delivered after each meal.
But Jack is troubled by conscience, telling Ryan,
“The reward always matches the atrocity”
While Ryan is still coveting Jack’s lifestyle, Jack hangs himself. Recovering from the shock, Ryan realises that all he needs is a fake driver’s licence and a new password to become Jack and access all his money.
But when the agency people arrive – Imogen (Tamsin Topolski) and Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier) – they think he is Jack, and assume he knows what they want him to cook, are angry that he has not yet harvested the meat.
It turns out that his “ingredients” are local poor people, preferably ones who won’t be missed, and Imogen warns him that preparing and serving one bad course will be fatal not just to the person being cooked, but to the chef as well. The guests pay $1.5 million for the meal, including the exotic location, the private jets, and the specially sourced meat. They have special requests too – Imogen tells him “make sure you harvest the tongue.” So any thought of Ryan skipping out before the feast is extremely unpalatable (sorry).
The rationalisation is the same one found in most capitalist enterprises. It is the utilitarian argument in favour of the greatest good for the greatest number. Imogen tells Ryan:
“We kill on average fifty people a year, plus twenty-five in the clean-up. So, 75 deaths a year, and we generate over one hundred million dollars. We funnel 100% of our profits back into the communities. The farming, the infrastructure. We ensure clean drinking water for the entire population. You might say that’s simply self-interest. But we don’t eat everybody. Not even one percent. Now, you tell me what company makes that amount of money, has global presence, assists more than 99% of the people in the communities within which it operates, and their footprint has only ever killed 75 people a year? Oil companies kill on average 110 people a year, farmers are on about 250. Groundskeepers, truck drivers, roofers, they all thrash us in fatalities.”
The rest of the discussion is phrased in the same vocabulary as used by the meat industries. Old ones will taste disgusting, fear will taint the meat, the butcher will be covered in blood.
The victims are “produce” and become no more or less than “livestock”. Maurice, the agency killer who goes hunting with Jack, assures him “they won’t feel a thing”. When Ryan asks him if he feels bad, the reply is,
“Do you feel sad for a pig when you eat the bacon?”
Jack does what he has to do, after all his attempts to escape or alert the police are foiled.
Imogen sympathises with his nagging conscience, telling him what every soldier, assassin, slaughterhouse worker or meat eater is told at first:
“No one likes it at the beginning. But after a while, it does stop bothering you”.
There is a popular meme about “eating the rich”, and even a few movies about it (e.g. Eat the Rich and Eating Raoul). But the facts of nature, humanity and economics are that the rich and powerful get to choose what, and who, they eat. In the film The Cannibal Club, rich Brazilians watch poor people fight to the death and then eat the loser, in Fresh, the protagonist chats up young women then drugs them and sells their flesh and their underwear to the “one percent of the one percent” who want what no one else can have, and can afford to pay for it. Jeffrey Epstein had a similar gig, supplying sex rather than meat.
The people with the power, the rich, eat the poor: they swallow their surplus labour, they squeeze rent from them, they sell them their shoddy products paid for by lending them money at ruinous rates, and they send their children off to war. Why not go the next step and literally cook them for dinner? It’s what we do to other animals, purely because we can.
The film is sumptuously presented, the direction is assured and convincing, and the actors are all first rate, including the wealthy guests and the police who pop by and share the main course. The film is rated 80% “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes.
One reviewer opined, “What You Wish For will convert you to vegetarianism forever”.
In the year 2000, 44-year-old slaughterhouse worker Katherine Knight had a night of passion with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked parts of him. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate place-names for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but couldn’t do so. The police arrived before Price’s children so, as far as we know, none of him was consumed (by humans anyway).
Knight pleaded guilty to murder and the judge ordered that her papers be marked “never to be released.” An appeal was quickly denied, and she is still serving her life sentence at Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in Sydney.
Shoreline Entertainment planned to make a film of the incident based on Peter Lalor’s book Blood Stain, but so far it has not surfaced.
It appears that Knight was NOT a cannibal, despite one of the favourite media labels about her being “Kathy the Cannibal”. Other reports called her “The Woman Hannibal Lecter”, a comparison that makes no sense at all, since Hannibal did not use 37 strokes to kill people, definitely did eat parts of them, and did not (as Knight did) take a cocktail of sleeping tablets afterwards while lying in bed with the mutilated corpse.
Darren O’Sullivan, whose documentary is linked at the top of this blog, commented,
“this is possibly the most horrific thing I have ever discovered”.
Although the series is called “Real Twisted Tales”, I suspect O’Sullivan must have led a sheltered life. Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, recognised for her skills in knife work. She grew up in the NSW town of Aberdeen, where everyone in her family and most of the town were employed in the abattoir. Her job, from a young age, was to kill and cut up animals. She did to John Price what she was trained to do to other animals – slaughter them, cut them up, cook them. She did try to feed bits to his children, which is what farmers did in the UK (feeding cattle bone-meal to cattle), an act of cannibalism which led to Mad Cow Disease. But there is little evidence that she herself ate any of him.
The documentary above states that Katherine Knight is “one of the most evil people in the world”, because she was found sane enough to stand trial. But really, what she did was what she was paid to do every day, just to a different species than those who usually suffered and died under her hand.
Superstitious anthropocentric beliefs put humans on a tier somewhere between angels and animals, but really we are a species of Great Ape, closely related to the chimpanzee. Rationally speaking, there really is only a thin red line between killing and eating any species of animal.
The ultimate story of our sins coming back to bite us?
Amber Paige Laudermilk, a 34-year-old licensed embalmer from Texas, has been accused of castrating the corpse of a sex offender.
Laudermilk is behind bars at the Harris County Jail after turning herself in on Tuesday. She’s been charged with Abuse of a Corpse – a felony – and remains in jail on a $5,000 bond.
According to a press release from Harris County Constable Alan Rosen, Laudermilk worked for Memorial Mortuary & Crematory and is accused of, in January 2025, “mutilating the body of a dead sex offender.”
The 58-year-old registered sex offender, Charles Roy Rodriguez, had received 10 years of Deferred Adjudication after being charged with Sexual Assault in 2001. Rodriguez died from natural causes in January.
Laudermilk’s alleged action, according to charging documents, was brought to the attention of the funeral director by two employees who said they witnessed the crime. One witness said they saw her stab Rodriguez’s body twice in the groin with a scalpel, before cutting off his penis, after learning Rodriguez was a sex offender.
She then “stuffed it in his mouth,” and allegedly told a trainee in the cremation room, who saw it happen, that they “didn’t see anything.” The witness reported that Laudermilk’s demeanour was threatening. When other employees went to see the body, Laudermilk allegedly covered his groin area with a sheet and said he had “a lot going on with him.”
Precinct One Constable Alan Rosen said in a statement:
“This case is about two troubled people: the victim who was a registered sex offender and the defendant, who is accused of viciously attacking his dead body. No matter what one thinks of his life, the law requires that he be treated with dignity in death.”
Laudermilk’s license was suspended by the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and the Memorial Mortuary & Crematory confirmed that Laudermilk is no longer employed by them.
In their statement, they said:
“We are deeply troubled and saddened by the unlawful and horrifying actions of this individual ex-employee. Our thoughts are with the family and loved ones of the deceased.”
Now, why is this story on a cannibalism blog, I hear you ask? Well, cannibalism is not just about swallowing another person’s flesh or organs. It is also an act of dominance, and often revenge or intimidation. Gerald Linderman in his book on Americans at war in WW2 writes that the Japanese would disembowel captured Americans and leave the bodies “with their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths.” Tim Blackmore, in his book detailing modern military technology and its dehumanising effects, comments,
“Where there was a tongue, now there is a useless penis, a double castration and silencing. Putting flesh in the mouth also suggests that the enemy can be eaten. Cannibalism makes the soldier strong at the attacker’s expense.”
So this was, in a way, the embalmer expressing her opinion, her freedom of speech, using a scalpel instead of a keyboard (which would have been protected by her First Amendment rights I guess). Plenty of written opinions deny the dignity or humanity of the person being described. Does a dead sex offender deserve “dignity in death”, even though he may have had little or none in life?
The fact is that the dead human is just meat. Starving survivors of catastrophes, ship wrecks or plane crashes quickly realise this and soon eat the dead and sometimes even the living – think the Donner Party. Remember the words of a famished Chris Hemsworth saying to his dying crewmen “No right minded sailor discards what might yet save him.” Or the debate in the crashed plane as a group of young men slowly starve to death surrounded by snap-frozen corpses:
“if the soul leaves the body when we die, then the body is just a carcass… What’s there in the snow is just meat, Antonio. Food.”
There are thousands of people dying of starvation every day around the globe, and what dignity do we offer them, even in their last moments of life? As for dignifying the dead, we casually torment, kill and then mutilate the corpses of billions of other animals every year for our food, our medical experiments, our clothing or our entertainment. Yet we are expected to weep for this sex offender’s insentient corpse?
A South Carolina mental health facility is being sued by the family of an alleged victim of a man who has been accused of murdering and cannibalising patients.
A lawsuit filed by the family of 22-year-old Jared Ondrea claims Richland County’s New Hope Home Solutions, facility owner Brittany Reynolds-Jackson and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health (SCDMH) are responsible for his death.
According to documents, Ondrea suffered mental disabilities which led to his placement in 2023 into an assisted living facility, New Hope’s Harper Street facility, which had been recommended to his grandmother by SCDMH. Ondrea was meant to learn independent living and socialization skills there.
Ondrea’s grandmother noticed bruising on his neck and face when she picked him up for a visit in March of that year, but he did not divulge the cause. He also appeared to be “unkempt, his hair was not combed, his clothes were dirty, and his nails were long and dirty,” which seemed odd considering the facility’s undertaking to help him learn independent living skills.
Ondrea was dropped off at the facility later that evening, the last time his family saw him. When his grandfather arrived to pick him up for an appointment two days later, he was not there. The next day, the facility called to let his grandmother know that he had been missing since that night he had been dropped off. Staff was reportedly alerted to his disappearance by another patient who told them they “should be alarmed that Jared was missing.”
That patient was Marc-Anthony Cantrell, who has a violent history, including multiple instances of animal cruelty and arson, allegedly to cover up the torture and killing of his family’s three dogs. He was interviewed during the search for Ondrea and reportedly displayed strange behaviour, which was subsequently reported to law enforcement.
In July, a few months after Ondrea’s disappearance, another resident named Deshea Butler went missing. This time, Cantrell was caught on video removing that victim’s body from the facility. When interviewed, he confessed to the killing and told police that he also killed Ondrea, providing “specific, graphic details as to how the murder was conducted” including that he had strangled both men.
Cantrell reportedly told police that he was compelled by his “alternate personality”, called Robert Baldwin, to kill the victims and consume parts of their bodies “so he could gain their power.” While Ondrea’s body was never found, an autopsy of the second victim was consistent with Cantrell’s description of the killing.
The lawsuit alleges that Cantrell ate both the victims’ ears after killing them and,
…after he had strangled Deshea, he hit him in the head with his lifting weights so he could drink his blood, which he did over several days from a coffee cup.”
A grand jury indicted Cantrell for both killings.
The lawsuit brought by Ondrea’s family blames the facility and SCDMH for allowing what they describe as “a budding serial killer” to be placed in a home with vulnerable adults. Law enforcement and SCDMH were aware of Cantrell’s violent history, and attorneys argue that “SCDMH failed to take any appropriate steps to treat Cantrell or to otherwise prevent the obvious danger that he posed to the public and to those living in close proximity to him.”
The lawsuit also claims New Hope did not have the proper license to be operating as a mental health facility, and “had no business housing mental health patients of any sort — much less ones with the type of violent tendencies displayed by Cantrell.” It also faults staff for failing to notice Ondrea’s disappearance for three days, which was allegedly only brought to their attention after the man accused of murdering him told them they should be concerned.
The defendants are being sued for several claims, including negligence, gross negligence, and wrongful death. The plaintiffs offered to settle with SCDMH for $600,000, but the offer was rejected. A jury trial roster meeting has been scheduled for April 7.
Murder is not unusual in the USA, peaking at 2,000 per month in 2020. Although the rate has decreased a little, murder is still so quotidian that it is rare to see it reported widely in the media. Unless, like this one, it includes cannibalism, which Freud described as one of “the two original prohibitions of mankind” (the other, he thought, was incest). Cantrell believes he had an alternative personality, a wendigo perhaps, who maintained that eating human flesh bestows power. Such a psychotic belief stems from anthropocentrism, the faith in human transcendence, that we are somehow ‘more’ than other animals, so even our flesh must have magical properties. But there is nothing special about us, and no power is imparted by eating human ears, any more than eating a pig’s ear. We are made of red meat, like most mammals, and eating any animal causes appalling suffering, environmental catastrophe and quite often dangerous maladies.
Authorities said Matthew Hertgen brutally beat and slashed his 26-year-old brother, Joseph.
A 31-year-old man has been charged with murdering his brother in February 2025 at their luxury Princeton apartment in the Michelle Mews apartment complex off Witherspoon Street. Police said that Matthew Hertgen, a former college soccer player, allegedly beat and slashed 26-year-old Joseph Hertgen, ripped out his eyeball and then ate it. He also reportedly set the family’s cat on fire.
Afterward, Hertgen called the police to report a body and a fire inside the upscale complex, where units go for up to $2 million. Police discovered the brother’s mutilated body together with a bloody knife, fork, and plate, leading authorities to believe that the suspect had consumed part of his brother’s remains. They also found the charred remains of the cat.
Authorities arrested Hertgen at the scene. They believe he used both a blade and a golf club to kill his brother. His case will be heard on March 6 in Mercer County Superior Court.
The day before the killing, Hertgen posted a selfie with a cat toy.
Months before the attack, Matthew Hertgen had posted a poem on Facebook filled with references to knives, suffocation, and blood oozing from eyes – details that were mirrored in the crime scene.
“I can see the knives sharpening… Blood oozes out of his eyes… He convulses, and he doesn’t stop… He’s lost… He’s asleep… He’s dead.”
Joseph Hertgen was a former University of Michigan soccer player and an analyst at asset management firm Locust Point Capital. His brother Matthew, who played soccer at Wesleyan University, had a prior DUI conviction in 2017 but no other criminal history before this alleged murder.
The Hertgen family originally lived in a $1.1 million Jersey Shore home before moving to Princeton. Their father, David Hertgen Sr., is a high-ranking executive at WiLine Networks.
Authorities have charged Matthew Hertgen with first-degree murder, weapons offences, and animal cruelty. He faces life in prison if convicted.
One police officer observed,
“It’s incredibly tragic. Matthew Hertgen came from what appeared to be a perfect, all-American family. No one could have predicted something like this would happen.”
It seems that, while New Jersey like most states has no laws against cannibalism, they do strongly disapprove of murder and animal cruelty, particularly when done by or to the rich.
Children wandering door to door, sometimes unsupervised, is often likely to end in tears. In this film Sector 36, immigrant parents, struggling to survive, have not the time to keep a watchful eye on the kids, resulting in sexual abuse, murder, organ trafficking, and cannibalism.
The words “inspired by true events” allow for all sorts of poetic licence, offering the fascination of actual criminality without the need to prove the veracity of each scene. This one is fairly close to the facts, being based on the 2006 Noida serial murders, in which over thirty children disappeared from a town in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. Evidence was presented, in the trial of the two alleged perpetrators, that the children had been sexually abused and murdered, had their organs sold to traffickers, and in some cases were eaten. The charges included abduction, rape, murder, criminal conspiracy and trafficking. The two men involved, a rich man and his servant, were found guilty of murder in 2009 and sentenced to death but were later (2023) acquitted of all charges against them due to insufficient and largely circumstantial evidence, despite the servant’s recorded confessions, which included admissions of cannibalism.
Before the acquittals, the BBC released a documentary called The Slumdog Cannibal, which tried to examine the motivations of the servant who had admitted to the crimes. The legal position becomes a lot more complicated once convictions are quashed, so in the two-hour Netflix special Sector 36, the original names have been changed, and various details are embellished for dramatic effect. The twists and turns of the plot at the end are completely fictitious. But the direction is sure and never intrusive, the plot is taut and engrossing, and the acting excellent, from the smallest victim to the extraordinary interactions of the two main characters, Prem and Ram.
We start by meeting the hungry servant, in this case called Prem Singh (played by Vikrant Massey), who is looking after the house of his boss, Balbir Singh Bassi (Akash Khurana). He calls his family, tenderly tells his wife he loves her, and then goes off to a storeroom where he starts chopping up a dead woman.
We then we meet a policeman, Ram Charan Pandey (played by Deepak Dobriyal) who is also a loving family man, driving his daughter to school on his scooter, but he turns out to be corrupt and lazy at work, not bothering to investigate the reports of the many small children who have gone missing in the town. They’ll turn up, he tells the distraught parents. He believes it too, until Prem tries to abduct his daughter. Then he takes the cases seriously, only to be hindered and suspended by his superior officer who is a friend or perhaps employee of the rich man, Bassi. When the father of one of the abducted girls appears at Bassi’s house screaming about murder and rape, Bassi reveals that the father was the girl’s pimp.
But then, a child from a wealthy family is taken, a nationwide manhunt is launched, and the child is found almost immediately. One cop tells his colleagues that while Gandhi freed the country, the picture of Gandhi’s face on Indian banknotes will free this rich child. Eventually, Ram’s new superior officer reinstates him and lets him arrest Prem, but only because he wants his temporary posting in Delhi to become permanent.
Is everyone corrupt in this story? The theme, stated at the beginning, is Isaac Newton’s third law of thermodynamic: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which has become in social interactions a “system”. The system means that when a crook gives Pandey a box of cash, he is allowed to leave, while others who have no funds are beaten up and incarcerated. When a rotting child’s hand is found in a sewer, Pandey declares it is a monkey’s paw and gives a reward to the boy who found it.
This boy is then captured by Prem who has his own system, capturing little kids to be abused and then slaughtered for their flesh and organs. Prem tells the boy that the police will forget about him after a few days, and even his parents will eventually just replace him. But someone else, someone rich and worthy, will live longer through the appropriation of his organs.
Why, we wonder, is he like this? We have a flashback to Prem’s early life – he is working in his uncle’s butcher shop, chopping up goats and “servicing” his uncle, who enjoys raping little boys. We see him fight back, killing the uncle and then chopping him up, presumably getting rid of the evidence by bundling it up with the goat flesh, and eating his uncle’s liver, raw.
I cut that fucker up and fed him to the dogs. Had a few pieces myself!
As an adult, he has no scruples doing the same thing to kids (human ones), for his own pleasure and profit. Ram, the policeman, arrests Prem who immediately confesses, boasts, that he kidnaps kids, rapes them, chops them up after killing them, eats some of the meat, disposes of the rest, and sells their organs. His “business” involved all the missing children that the police have been ignoring. He tells the police,
Sir, the thing is that after killing Uncle, I got a taste for human flesh. I used to crave it. I needed it every couple of months…. I avoided it for a year, I tried to quit. But that craving wouldn’t go away.
He admits to abducting Ram’s daughter, but says it was an accident. He just didn’t know her father was a cop. Ram asks, “what’s the difference between them and my child?” Prem is outraged – there is no comparison, the kids he kidnapped and slaughtered were nobodies, who would never amount to anything.
While Prem is a bit naïve (one might say stupid), his question is real. No one cares about the sheep, goats or chickens that he chopped up in his Uncle’s shop as a child, nor would they be able to tell the difference if he added Uncle to the mince. Prem’s argument that he became addicted to human flesh is just an excuse – those who have tried the meat of humans report it is hard to distinguish from veal or pork. But poverty, homelessness and alienation is real, and if we can utterly disregard the moral value of any sentient being, we can do the same to those humans who seem, to criminals and authorities alike, outside our scope of care. Those whose lives don’t matter become disposable, and ultimately edible.
John Beagles and Graham Ramsay are artists who play with the concept of human exceptionality. They also add a new flavour to the old saying “Art is always a matter of personal taste.”
For two decades, the artists and performers have been making, cooking and sometimes eating black puddings made from their own blood. Ramsay says:
“There is a tang. And it is quite salty too.”
The pair have been collaborating since 1996 and making their “cannibal” sausages since 2004. They call their performance and exhibition a “black pudding self-portrait” or Sanguis Gratia Artis.
John Beagles and Graham Ramsay
They are staging the show again this year. Their meat products are on display in a fridge at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and they will be cooking them for a live audience on February 13.
Ramsay, who says he likes a good black pudding, stresses: “We do not usually eat them ourselves, but we have tried them.” He adds that his partner will not be sampling them:
“One of us has quite recently become a vegetarian, and it is not me.”
There are no plans to eat the sausages in Edinburgh. Previous performances have involved some harmless light cannibalism and have attracted some bizarre audiences.
In London back in 2007, Ramsay says, word got out that they would be eating the puddings.
“The performance got a bit of attention in advance; people knew it was happening. So there was a queue of quite gothic people — vampiric characters — outside the gallery and it was a bit weird. There was a kind of feeding frenzy then. As part of the performance, we put slices of the puddings on a silver platter and paraded them through the audience, just to show them, but people started grabbing them. The performance involves us in costume, in the gallery, and we’re basically chopping and frying the pudding, with audience watching.”
The sausages are made with a pint of blood from each man, combined to symbolise nearly thirty years of collaboration.
The process of getting the blood is not easy. They have had to convince nurses to extract small quantities — no more than a syringe at a time — over a long period, and then freeze it. The kind of equipment used by blood transfusion services is tightly controlled, so the artists have to endure sometimes painful extractions, over and over again.
Why do it? Beagles and Ramsay are both respected art academics, teaching at Edinburgh University and Glasgow Art School respectively. Heavily influenced by feminist criticism, they are challenging the old idea of the artist, especially the male artist, as a lone genius separate from the world. They are playing with the idea of self in self-portrait. Their mixed blood represents their joint work.
“We fuse ourselves, but we also use a daft form to present ourselves in. It’s not heroic. We have picked a mundane modest foodstuff to represent us.”
The performance feels different now than it did when they first had their blood extracted. Both men are in their fifties now, and aware of their mortality. “Age starts to creep up on you, waistlines expand, and you become more aware of death and people’s health around you,” Ramsay says.
The artists may not see themselves as heroes, but there is an edginess to their idea, even legally. They debuted their sausages in New York in 2004. Back then there was a lot of angst in America about meat products, mad cow disease and foot and mouth. They had to send their puddings in the post with fake customs descriptions, one batch wrongly labelled as second-hand books.
One the night of their big performance, officials became antsy about health and safety, and security was brought in to stop punters eating the human sausages. Beagles and Ramsay, in a diary of their escapades, called them “anti-cannibalism guards”.
Will they have to find a way to keep their puddings safe from the Edinburgh audience? Perhaps. People are fascinated by cannibalism, even as they claim to be repelled. A few months ago, we reported on a vegan writer and photographer who finally gave in to the demands of his relatives to eat animal products by making meringues from his own blood.
In the North West Province of South Africa, one of a group of illegal miners (zama zamas, or “those who take a chance” inZulu) in the Stilfontein mine (which closed in 2013) has disclosed that he and his fellow miners turned to cannibalism when they ran out of food 2km (1.25 miles) underground.
There are thousands of abandoned mine shafts where miners can search for a tiny remnants of the gold that made South Africa rich. While it is no longer profitable for mining multinationals, traces of gold remain. The miners were digging in the abandoned gold mine when, in August 2024, the police decided to “smoke them out” by cutting off their food, water and medical supplies as part of Operation “Vala Umgodi,” or “close the hole.”
Speaking to SABC, one of the miners told a news station that from the second week of August 2024, his fellow miners had to resort to eating flies, cockroaches and other insects. As their situation worsened, more drastic measures were taken. Video from the rescuers showed the emaciated condition of the miners.
He said the idea of eating human flesh started as a joke but proved prophetic.
“One man was told that he was going to be eaten as a joke, and it ended up happening … we did not think it would ever get to the extent where would eat dead bodies or corpses. It really happened. People were eaten.”
On 10 January 2025, more than two months after news of the crisis at Stilfontein had emerged, the Pretoria High Court ordered the government to launch a rescue operation. “We do not want a situation where this will be marked as the darkest point in our history,” the Judge said in his ruling. Allegations that the miners resorted to eating human flesh in order to survive were also made by other miners who were rescued in December, in statements submitted to the High Court.
This news comes as the world watches on. South Africa’s sanctimonious posturing in the International Court of Justice in the Hague does not conceal its abhorrent domestic maltreatment of immigrants and citizens. Activist groups claim that there were gross human rights abuses and State-sanctioned murder at Stilfontein.
It seems that the fact that most of the zama zamas are Mozambicans and Zimbabweans has been a major factor in the government’s hard-line approach. Many ordinary South Africans have been unmoved by their plight, with countless comments on social media platforms saying they should be left to die. In South Africa, it seems that Black Lives don’t Matter.
The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) stated that the deaths of the Stilfontein illegal miners bear similarities to the Marikina massacre in 2012, where 34 miners were shot in a premeditated act of state violence. The SAFTU general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, said:
“In Stilfontein, hunger has been used as a weapon to achieve the same deadly outcome”
The operation to retrieve the zama zamas ended up with 78 people declared dead and with 246 rescued. Some civic groups are calling for a commission of inquiry or even for murder charges to be brought against the state, but the police have vowed Operation Vala Umgodi will continue.
Specialized machinery was needed to lower a cage down to bring up the men and the bodies. No police or rescue workers would go down, saying the risks were too high, so it was left to volunteers from the local township to undertake the devastating task.
As the cage reached a depth of 1,280 meters, rescuers Mandla Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi were confronted with scenes that, they say, will haunt them forever. Hundreds of emaciated miners, some near death, lay together with dozens of dead bodies. Mkwayi said that the men he rescued were so frail that the rescue cage, only meant to carry seven healthy adults, could take 13 of them.
As Mkwayi was lowered into the South African mine, the first thing that struck him was the smell. Charles said:
“The smell of death was everywhere”
When he got home later that day, he told his wife he could not eat the meat she had cooked.
“It’s because when I spoke to the miners, they told me some of them had to eat other [people] inside the mine because there was no way they could find food. And they were also eating cockroaches”
Another reminder, if we needed one, that humans are made of the same flesh as other mammals. If you starve us, do we not die? If we die, do we not rot? And if you’re hungry, are we not meat?
“He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
This anecdote aroused plenty of outrage from PNG politicians who proclaimed that there was never, not much, or hardly any cannibalism in the good old days.
But now the story has once again raised its well-chewed head. 2025 is the 50th anniversary of independence for PNG, a year which was expected to be a celebration. Instead, the news is full of stories about nine people being killed in shootouts in Enga Province over that New Year period, as violence escalates in the highlands, a region that was hit by a catastrophic landslide last May.
That news was overshadowed by a video that soon went viral of armed gang members holding mutilated body parts in Central Province, 60 miles (100 km) from the capital.
Voices in the Tok Pisin language on the video said they planned to eat the victim, with one man making licking motions as they displayed a severed foot, saying,
“this is our meat, we will cook it and eat it”
There was an immediate furore over the claims of cannibalism. Police said the deceased was killed in a dispute in the remote Goilala mountains in the province, but there are conflicting accounts of when the video was made.
Prime Minister James Marape called for calm, and stated,
“Such acts of inhumanity are intolerable and represent a significant challenge to our shared humanity”
Marape had objected to Biden’s claims about cannibalism during the war, saying that PNG did not deserve to be labelled as a nation of cannibals.
Community leader Matilda Koma from Auga Dilava added,
“We do not eat people. Goilala people are not cannibals”
Fane’s Catholic priest Francis Pirit said that the video of the killing and youths pretending to eat human remains was a show of bravado, boasting because they had won a battle.
“There are no cannibals in the Goilala area. I sleep, eat and live amongst them. They do not eat human beings”
Despite the boast by the men, there is no footage of flesh being eaten in the gruesome video.
Cannibalism in PNG was largely a ritual practice by a small number of tribes and largely ceased by the 1960s after being banned by the colonial power, Australia. The suspicion that colonised peoples are inevitably cannibals has never completely disappeared; when the Australian soldiers of the 7th Division AIF began to find mutilated and cannibalised bodies in New Guinea in late 1942, they were not sure whether to blame the Japanese or local tribesmen. After a lengthy commission of enquiry, the Australian government in 1945 finally added cannibalism to the War Crimes Act 1945, the only nation to do so.
As recently as 2012, 29 members of a “cannibal cult” were arrested in Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast. Forensic reports and statements made by the accused led police to believe parts of the victims had been eaten.
One of the more persuasive substantiations of PNG cannibalism was Kuru, a rare, incurable neurodegenerative prion disorder that was found in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the last century. Kuru is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, related to the “mad cow” disease that cured people from eating beef for many years, and appears to have been spread by funerary cannibalism. It is often touted as a reason not to be a cannibal, appearing unexpectedly in films like Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are and many films about wendigos.
So, cannibalism remains a sensitive topic in PNG. President of the PNG Law Society Hubert Namani sparked outrage when his comments condemning the “barbaric killing, mutilation and cannibalism” over the festive season were reported by the Post Courier newspaper.
Meanwhile, Goilala’s local member of parliament, Casmiro Aio, pointed out this week that there had been no regular police presence in his electorate for 10 years.
The questions remain – did any of the dead people get eaten? And more interestingly, why would that be so much more appalling than the fact that nine people were killed?
‘There will be cannibalism, and rumours of cannibalism”
Yes, I paraphrased the Book of Matthew. Although not all that many people got eaten, the media was full of cannibal stories, and here are a few of them, sorted by their places of occurrence.
Australia
One of the men imprisoned for the so-called Snowtown murders (which mostly did not take place in the little town of Snowtown) was released. Mark Haydon was charged with assisting the men who did the actual killing and who ate part of one victim’s leg some 25 years earlier.
Brazil
Influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin) was arrested for desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, stealing human bones, and using human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Seems rotting human is a good substitute for pork.
Canada
Robert Pickton, the pig farmer convicted of six counts of second-degree murder (although he was charged with at least twenty others), was attacked by another inmate in prison and died a few weeks later. Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption.
China
Netflix released a new version of the classic science fiction book 3 Body Problem and ran into a storm of criticism from China for its depictions of the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution. Although most of the victims of the purges were killed by shooting, live burial, drowning, boiling alive, and disembowelling, there is evidence that several hundred had been cannibalised, as the ultimate in humiliation.
The General who presided over a Cultural Revolution massacre that included cannibalism of those deemed “enemies of the people”, Wei Guoqing, was reburied (or at least his ashes were) with full honours in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery – the resting place of China’s high-ranking leaders and revolutionary heroes. Wei’s name is most strongly linked in the public mind with cannibalism during the massacre period in Guangxi’s Wuxuan and Wuming counties and Nanning city. Researchers have found that at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands participating. “Paying tribute to a legendary gourmet,” wrote one wag on social media.
Cuba
Stories began circulating this year that the extreme food shortages in Cuba were leading to the danger, or actual occurrence, of cannibalism. This was bolstered by reports from 2022 of two hospital workers who had been stealing hearts and fat from human bodies and selling them as mince.
Haiti
Rumours circulated that the natural disasters and gang violence in Haiti was leading to starvation cannibalism. Jimmy Cherizier, a gang leader called Barbecue (“Babekyou” in the local parlance) was known for his penchant for burning people alive, and there was at least one video on Twitter/X of one gang member supposedly “tearing flesh from the leg of a burning corpse and eating it.” Such stories cannot be selfishly maintained by one little country, so of course it was not long before Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of joining the cannibal feast. To add to the hilarity, Elon Musk posted on his own site, X, that a picture of a man near a fire was evidence of cannibalism, only to have the post removed by his own team for violating community standards. The fact-checking website Snopes pointed out that videos of bodies in Haiti being roasted on spits had previously appeared as accusations against a Nigerian restaurant, and were in fact from a Halloween prank in China in 2018. Still, you know, voodoo and all. Meanwhile, Trump ally Laura Loomer supplied conclusive proof that Haitians were cannibals: apparently, if you Google it, you will see a lot of results. The Prosecution rests its case.
India
India’s top court put a temporary stay on the execution of a man convicted of killing his mother and eating her remains in what is being deemed as the “rarest of rare” cases of cannibalism. Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi of western Maharashtra state’s Kolhapur district was handed a death penalty by a lower court in 2021 for killing his 63-year-old mother in 2017. The High Court in October this year upheld the death sentence against Kuchkoravi, stating that the convict possibly has a “syndrome of pathological cannibalism”. The execution has been delayed until the case is reheard in April 2025.
Israel (and around there)
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, has been condemned for antisemitic rhetoric by the governments of the U.S., France and Germany among others. Albanese, known for accusing Israel of genocide (an odd charge seeing that the population of Gaza has increased in the last twelve months), wrote that the Israeli army was “rotten to the core”. A follower immediately introduced the classic blood libel: “Jews are capable of eating human flesh”, to which Albanese replied along the lines of “not all Jews”. Reassuring to note that a person paid by the taxpayers of the West, who finance the UN, can admit that some Jews are not cannibals!
A Yazidi woman was rescued from Gaza by Israeli troops. She revealed that, after being captured by ISIS in 2014 and forced to be sex slaves, the women were starved and finally fed meat which, they later told her, was from the bodies of a beheaded Yazidi baby, the child of one of the women. They told her:
‘We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate’.
Indonesia
Police investigated a suspected cannibalism case in West Java Province. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit confirmed that a video on social media showed the alleged perpetrator consuming a small portion of the victim’s flesh. He said that police had found 12 body parts of the victim at the crime scene.
Italy
An inmate in the notorious Poggioreale Prison in Naples tore the finger off another inmate and ate it. The Campania Guarantor, Samuele Ciambriello, observed that “it is now clear that the Poggioreale prison needs a structure suitable for hosting inmates suffering from mental disorders.” Seems like a good idea.
Mexico
A podcast called Mexico Unexplained revisited this year the story of Gabriela Rico Jiménez, a 21-year-old model from Mexico who disappeared some 15 years ago, after raging against the machine outside a fancy hotel in Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Ranting about the elites, including oddly the Queens of England and Germany (which is a Republic), she had shouted that “They ate humans! Disgusting!… They smell like human flesh!”
Nigeria
A man accused of being a sorcerer was blamed by villagers of the small town of Kirikiri for the disappearance of several children and elderly people. He was supposed to be “feeding on the flesh of the innocent.” Several claimed to have located the individual on the edge of a forest, wearing clothes “stained with blood” and mumbling mysterious incantations. A group of villagers beat the man and left him for dead.
Russia
Erkinzhon Abdurakhmanov, 47, intended to cure his own heart problems ‘after making a pact with the devil’, he told police. He killed a 65-year-old male pensioner in the Kuyurgazinsky district of Russian region Bashkortostan by striking him three times with an axe, according to reports. He then then cut out the heart and ‘ate the meal’ as he waited at a bus stop. He gave the uneaten remains to a woman also waiting for a bus ‘and asked her to bury it’. He was not arrested, however, until he headed into a liquor store and tried to steal some drinks. Cannibalism is not against the law in Russia, but murder and stealing alcohol is.
Vladimar Putin’s policy of giving pardons to criminals who agreed to fight in Ukraine in lieu of serving their sentences, was honoured in a pardon to a charmer named Denis Gorin, who had been convicted of at least four murders, and had eaten the flesh of his victims.
Another pardon involved Dmitri Malyshev. Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Neighbours seemed uneasy about his imminent return home.
South Africa
On December 26, 2024, eight illegal miners known as zama zamas emerged from Shaft 10 of a mine near Stilfontein, located in Northwest South Africa. They were taken by police, who confirmed that twelve bodies remained trapped beneath the ground, with miners reportedly resorting to eating human flesh due to severe food shortages.
[GRAPHIC CONTENT] Illegal miners have started eating human flesh. That's according to SANCO North West Spokesperson, Mzukisi Jam. The claims were made in Christmas Eve letters sent to the surface claiming that more miners have died. #DStv403#eNCApic.twitter.com/vqDodTXgmZ
Novosibirsk Archpriest Alexander Novopashin became notorious for claiming that Ukrainians are “cannibals”. Although conspiracy theories about cannibals are becoming more common, this particular Archpriest is taken seriously in Russia, and regularly lectures Russian security forces and soldiers.
UK
Marius Gustavson, who called himself “the eunuch maker”, offered a service where he charged men to destroy or remove their testicles, and then charged subscribers to his website to see him perform the operations. The court heard that that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”.
Meanwhile, a candidate from a party called Reform UK was suspended for saying that meat-eaters should “eat other humans” and said humanity should be “obliterated”. Just saying what many are thinking, perhaps.
USA
The cannibal story of the year was the President, Joe Biden, claiming that his uncle had been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea. The leaders of PNG took exception to the stereotyping of their people as cannibals. Apparently, only some of them had been.
Speaking of Presidents, Donald Trump embellished his rhetoric on immigration by pointing out that some of the undocumented people pouring over the border were from insane asylums, and called that “Silence of the Lambs stuff”. Trump had previously claimed that Hannibal Lecter had endorsed his candidacy, which is a bit odd since Hannibal is a fictional character, but by far not the oddest claim in the 2024 election.
In March, a homeless man in Kern County was arrested for picking up the leg of a person who had been killed in a train accident and chowing down on it. California has no laws against cannibalism, but he was charged with “mutilating the body” which is a bit odd, since the train had already done that.
In Utah, which also has no law against cannibalism (Idaho is the only state that does), a law was passed to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child’, which apparently regularly includes making the little ones eat “organic substance or material” (i.e. bits of people) before they are allowed to have their desserts. This in addition to claims that such rituals would sometimes involve eating the children instead.
A keen-eyed traveller pointed out that the road once taken by the Donner Party, which ended up in them getting lost and eating each other, was now signposted with a sign indicating dining was available. Much hilarity ensued on social media.
Conservative political commentator Candace Owens managed to link transexuals, Native Americans and cannibals, all in one sentence. No wonder she is so widely admired.
Much to the relief of the good people of Idaho (the only State in the Union with laws against cannibalism), the law was amended to ensure that giving someone else human flesh to eat was also prohibited. This led, on its long road to farce, to the accusation that bodies were being turned into compost which could be used to grow food for humans to consume. Rather than DNA test all compost, the law confined itself to banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person. The legislator who introduced the bill cited a disturbing case on the show TruTV, which she admitted might have been a prank (it was) in which diners were told they had been eating human flesh, just to whet their appetites perhaps.
Ariana Grande raised some eyebrows when she was asked on a podcast whom she would most like to dine, and named Jeffrey Dahmer. Not sure Dahmer would have agreed – he was more into man-flesh, and there’s not much meat on Ariana anyway.
In April, a man was arrested in Las Vegas for eating a victim’s eyeballs and ears. The victim was pronounced dead. What happens in Vegas stays – internal.
Talking of ears, Mike Tyson, famous for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield in a fight in (where else) las Vegas in 1997, released a line of marijuana gummies shaped like nibbled ears.
Allegations were raised that Gilgo Beach ‘serial killer’ Rex Heuermann’s family was involved in the murders, which took place near the remote beach town of Gilgo in Suffolk County, New York from the 1990s to 2011. His daughter, who likes to paint the odd Satanic scene including body parts and cannibal feasts, was accused of being involved in his depredations. Homicide experts said that was insane, a word that gets tossed around a lot in cannibal stories. Heuermann was charged with a seventh murder last week.
On October 9, a woman in Kentucky, Torilena May Fields, was arrested after a dismembered body was found behind a home in Northern Kentucky and cooked human body parts were found in the oven. The body, and its parts, turned out to have been her mother. She was also charged with cruelty in that she “intentionally tortured and killed a domestic dog.”. A contractor found the dismembered body of the mother, and told police the perp had been “casting spells.” Her bail was set at $1.5 million. Her next court appearance is set for March 10, 2025 in Robertson County. Some people just give cannibalism a bad name.
Another Kentucky woman, a former youth counsellor, was arrested for allegedly discussing cannibalism and other hobbies with a convicted murderer.
In Oklahoma, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed by lethal injection in December (on his 45th birthday, the press gleefully informed us) for killing a ten-year-old girl in a “cannibalistic fantasy.” The man admitted to luring the girl into his apartment and beating her over the head with a cutting board before suffocating and sexually assaulting her. He told investigators that he nearly beheaded her in his bathtub before abandoning his plans to eat her. So not really a cannibalism story, but near enough.
International
Citizen of the world, Donald Duck, appeared on the interview show Hot Ones on the Internet (which is global), where guests eat chicken wings with hot sauce. Turns out Donald is a vegan though, preferring cauliflower, and since ducks aren’t chickens, the controversy that ensued over whether he was (or would have been) a cannibal by partaking of chicken was just silly.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, and may your worst problems be mild gastro-oesophageal reflux.
The Cannibal Guy 