Delicious is a German horror film, a genre that has a proud history, but it’s also a psychological and socio-political drama that examines the many ways the rich eat the poor, and the potential for revenge. It is written and directed by Nele Mueller-Stöfen in her directorial debut, although it as well made as a work from far more experienced directors.
The film starts with social and class-based unrest. In the opening scene, a rich German family are in a car fitted with bulletproof glass as protesters swarm the streets of Paris, jumping on the car and fighting with police. The father is unworried – “they’re not interested in us.” Perhaps that’s true, but the protests are about poverty and the cost of living, and others are very interested in this family.
As they settle into their holiday home in Provence, another group of young working-class people watch them, the serving staff, who live impoverished lives as they wait on the rich, in a hotel room where they are lying on rich people’s beds and pissing in their fancy mineral water bottles. They work at a fancy hotel nearby, and observe as the family have dinner and a few drinks. On the way home, somewhat tipsy, they appear to hit a young woman walking across the road. In fact, we know that her friend has deliberately cut her arm to make the accident more believable. She reopens the wound when necessary, to maintain her connection to their guilt.
The next day, she tells them she has been fired for not being able to work after the accident, and asks for a job as a maid, but she gradually infiltrates the lives of each member of the family. They have designs on her body, but she and her friends have designs on theirs, and (this being a cannibal blog) you can probably work out what is going to happen well before they do.
Serving the rich (in some novel senses) is definitely on the menu, as blood and meat (eaten raw) feature in the early scenes. Less gory versions of eating too, including cunnilingus.
I’ll avoid spoilers, because it’s on Netflix, which means a lot of people will probably watch it. It’s beautifully filmed and well acted, but does tend to drag in the middle, although that is not unusual for European films – they never seem to be in the same hurry as Hollywood, which may explain some of the appalling reviews. But by the time the wife goes to a party with the young ones, we are right into it.
The way of the world is usually the rich squeezing the life out of the poor, and while there are many films about that (think Fresh, The Cannibal Club or What You Wish For), there are not many that look at the retaliation which the exploited must often crave. Eating Raoul captured that anger and propensity to violence well, and this one does it too, without the humour, but with a cast of fine young cannibals for whom the viewer may well feel some sympathy. The family, beset with their own issues to do with work and relationships, does not see disaster coming, and that is the basis for most good horror.
“You have high gates, but your perfect world cannot be separated from ours.”
The plot unravels slowly and by the time blood starts to flow, it’s almost time to finish the film. If you like plots where the invisible reclaim their power, you may enjoy this. Think Parasite or Saltburn, but with the added spice of cannibalism.
At one point Teodora, the “maid” quotes the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, to her supposed boss.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”
In the time of the monsters, when humanity has turned the planet into a giant abattoir, assuming that some are edible and some are not is just a social construction, with little rational basis. Riding off on their motorbikes, the cannibals seem to have cast off such contingent social customs. But who, the film asks, are the monsters?
Kinds of Kindness is a black comedy drama, presented as a “triptych fable” – three separate stories which are nevertheless connected. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, has made many celebrated films, including The Lobster,The Killing of a Sacred Deer and most recently Bugonia. He has won a BAFTA and been nominated for five Academy Awards. Kinds of Kindness has his regular extraordinary cast, including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley.
When directors use ensemble casts, it usually means they use the same actors in a series of unrelated films, but this one is really three films in which the same actors play different roles. The one of interest to us is the middle section, “R.M.F. is flying”, which employs the theme of this blog, cannibalism. But the whole film is a entertaining (if somewhat lengthy), and there is a relationship between the three parts that makes an interesting, if somewhat disorienting and bewildering, whole. Life imitates art, in that the director and Stone have recently been involved in signing uninformed statements about international politics, an area in which they clearly are sadly ignorant. Imagined kindness becomes abusive behaviour, the theme of the film.
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t seen the movie, and plan to do so, maybe do that first.
The first part of the trilogy explores abusive relationships, particularly in the workplace, as Robert (Jesse Plemons) lets his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) control every aspect of his life. Raymond is loving and generous (a kind of kindness), but only as long as Robert obeys every order Raymond gives him, including his daily food regime, his sexual activities, and the order to kill a person known only as R.M.F. Kindness is presented as a toxic attachment.
The second story, R.M.F. is Flying, follows a police officer named Daniel, (Plemons), whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) has disappeared at sea while on a biology research expedition. Despite all predictions, she is found and flown back home by R.M.F., but Daniel believes she is an imposter – her shoes don’t fit, she does not remember his favourite song, and she suddenly loves chocolate which she previously could not stand, telling of a dream where dogs were the master species and fed their pet humans on chocolate.
Flashbacks reveal how she survived – by cannibalising the other members of the team.
At one point, the distraught cop Daniel shoots a suspect in the hand, and starts licking up the blood from the wound, just as a dog might do. Like the dogs in her dream, Daniel becomes Liz’s pack leader and she accepts his humiliation and cruelty like a “beta dog” would. Demanding she prove her love, Daniel asks her to cook him one of her fingers or thumb, and we see her cut it off and fry it.
When she reveals she is pregnant, he beats her until she loses the baby.
Finally, he says he is still hungry, famished, and says he wants her liver. She removes it with a kitchen knife, dying in the process, and we see the ‘real’ Liz appear at the door, to be greeted lovingly by Daniel.
The closing credits show dogs driving a car, a dead human lying by the roadside like roadkill. This story exposes kindness as vulnerability in intimate relationships. Daniel is determined that Liz be exactly as he wants her and rejects all her overtures of love, eventually leading to her death and rebirth as his ideal wife.
The final story examines a sex cult led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau) where followers are purified by drinking water cleansed by the tears of the leaders, and can thereafter only have sex with Omi and Aka. Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are paired and sent out to find a messiah – a woman who can revive the dead. Emily, like many converts to cults, has left her family behind, although she sneaks into her old house sometimes to sit on her little girl’s bed. Eventually she goes to visit her family, but the daughter is asleep and her ex-husband drugs and rapes her, meaning that she is now, to the cult, ‘contaminated’, and so ejected from the compound. She perseveres and eventually finds the messiah, a veterinarian named Ruth (Margaret Qualley) who heals a stray dog whose paw Emily has cruelly cut. Liz drugs Ruth and takes her to the morgue, where Ruth brings back R.M.F. from the dead. Triumphant, Emily drives the still dazed Ruth to cult headquarters after doing a victory dance that appears in the trailer at the top of this blog. As the credits roll, though, her reckless driving ends up with her driving her Dodge Charger into a wall, killing Ruth. Abusive kindness again, this time as spiritual devotion turned toward thralldom and abuse.
In all three stories, the characters seek fulfilment and, yes, kindness, going to excessive lengths to achieve it – Daniel kills a man to win his boss’ love, Liz cuts out her own liver to feed her husband and placate his repulsion, and Emily kidnaps her purported messiah to win back the love of her cult leader.
The film is an absurdist romp, reflecting the incongruity of human relationships and social behaviour. In each part, someone is being exploited and abused, a form of consumption, but the middle story makes cannibalism, inherent in all abuse, graphically apparent. There are many variations of cannibalism; Liz indulges in starvation cannibalism to survive as she waits to be rescued, Daniel becomes psychotic and licks blood from a wounded civilian, Daniel indulges in revenge cannibalism, ultimately killing Liz.
When he is convinced the woman that was rescued is not really Liz, he becomes contemptuous, and from that point, her death and consumption are inevitable. She has been, in his eyes, dehumanised, objectified like the animals sent to their deaths by the billions every year for human consumption. They are “de-animalised” – their flesh turned into commodities, made to look as little as possible as the living, feeling animals from which it came. For humans to be cannibalised, they must first be animalised, then de-animalised.
Thus, Daniel licks the wound of the man he shot like a dog might treat a wound; thus, Liz’s dream in which the dogs are in charge and feed the humans, not exactly what they want, but chocolate, of which there is plenty, probably because dogs cannot eat it (it’s toxic for them).
In relationships built on distrust and rage, we are animalised, and animals like dogs become the paradigm of civilisation. The humans are just wearing people masks.
Australian boxer Nikita Tszyu has revealed that he became a “cannibal” as he prepared to fight Lulzim Ismaili this month (August 2025). The boxer said he needed to be at his very best to win over his unbeaten opponent, and hoped that his new diet would boost his training.
Tszyu revealed that his change in nutritional sources was all thanks to his wife, Nikita Bedwell. The couple welcomed their first child earlier this month, named Curiosity after the NASA Mars Rover, and the birth allowed Tszyu to change his diet.
The Australian boxer is eating his wife’s placenta in capsule form as part of his training program, and feels like he is benefitting from the change in diet. He told a Sydney radio station:
“we freeze-dried her placenta and I’ve been supplementing on her placenta recently… in tablet form”
Does that make him a cannibal? Well, he thinks so. He added:
“I’ve technically become a cannibal. It’s actually like a superpower. I’ve done tests with my sparring – days where I’ve had it and days where I haven’t – and it feels like I got all this crazy amount of energy”
If you’re not convinced by that, he told the interviewers he is also including breast milk in his diet. Asked if he had tried it, he replied: “I have, I have… and it’s delicious as well!”
Consuming placentas is a growing trend in America, with mothers usually consuming them as part of their postpartum recovery. The practice dates back to Chinese medicine, though studies are yet to confirm that there are benefits to eating them.
The bout on August 20 was subtitled (based on Tszyu’s nickname):
THE BUTCHER IS BACK
So, is cannibalism the next big thing in athletic enhancements? Well, Tszyu knocked Ismaili, who was previously unbeaten, to the mat in just over one minute. The shaken opponent sat on his stool and refused to leave his corner, throwing in the towel before round two commenced.
Athletes often boast of eating meat to improve their fitness and stamina, although there are also plenty of vegan ones who swear that dropping meat and milk makes them faster, stronger and more alert. But if there is any truth in the meat myth, then I suppose we need to consider the words of Anthropologist Marvin Harris, who stated in his book Good to Eat: Riddles of Food Culture that, while humans are clearly not obligate carnivores,
“our species-given physiology and digestive processes predispose us to learn to prefer animal foods… strictly speaking, human flesh itself contains the highest-quality protein that one can eat”
There’s one to chew on, next time you enter the ring.
Family members of one of the victims of a gruesome murder of four college students in Idaho are furious that Bryan Kohberger has been offered and accepted a plea deal.
Kohberger was accused of stabbing Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, and Ethan Chapin to death in November 2022 in Moscow, Idaho. The students were found with fatal stab wounds in an off-campus rental home in the early morning hours. Investigators believe the four students, thought to be sleeping at the time, were fatally stabbed between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. According to the coroner, there was no sign of sexual assault.
A little over a month after the killings, Kohberger, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student and teaching assistant in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University, was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30, 2022, and extradited to Idaho.
Kohberger was facing a possible death sentence if convicted in a trial that was scheduled to begin Aug. 18, 2025.
A letter sent to families of the victims to inform them of the deal said Kohberger will appear in court Wednesday to enter his guilty plea and be sentenced in late July to life in prison, according to the Idaho Statesman. Kohberger will forfeit his right to appeal as part of the deal. The letter from Moscow Prosecuting Attorney Bill Thompson said:
“We cannot fathom the toll that this case has taken on your family. This resolution is our sincere attempt to seek justice for your family. This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and the other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals.”
Goncalves’s family had an angry reply on their Facebook page.
“We are beyond furious at the State of Idaho. They have failed us. Please give us some time. This was very unexpected. We appreciate all your love and support.”
The family issued a later post explaining what had been taking place.
“I would like to clarify a couple of things…we DID talk to the prosecution on Friday about the POSSIBILITY of a plea deal and it was a HARD NO from our family. It was very nonchalant and barely discussed as the majority of the conversation was surrounding the upcoming trial. NOTHING in our conversation prepared us for the next steps.”
A family member of one victim told NewsNation that upon hearing of the plea deal, she felt like “all the power had been given back to Kohberger.”
Why is this case featured in a blog about cannibalism? Well, A forensic psychiatrist told Newsweek after the arrest that Kohberger had battled with “cannibalistic urges“.
Reports then surfaced that Kohberger had followed a strict vegan diet, and had reportedly struggled with heroin addiction in the past.
Forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger’s “obsessive-compulsive eating habits” indicate he was afraid he would become addicted to meat if he ate it.
“He was not only vegan, he refused to eat off of pots or plates that had had meat on them. Psychologically, this represents his struggle against his cannibalistic urges. He was afraid that if he let himself go to taste meat once, he would become addicted to it—like he had become to heroin—and start killing and eating people.”
A relative told the New York Post that Kohberger’s dietary restrictions were “very, very weird” and that he seemed “very OCD,” referring to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The woman, who asked not to be named, but said she was previously married into Kohberger’s family, said:
“It was above and beyond being vegan. His aunt and uncle had to buy new pots and pans because he would not eat from anything that had ever had meat cooked in them.”
Casey Arntz, who was friends with Kohberger in middle and high school, said in a video posted on TikTok that he had been “a heavy heroin user” in high school. Kohberger’s struggles with drug addiction continued into his college years, a friend from Northampton Community College told Fox News. Criminal profiler John Kelly told Fox News,
“This kind of person has this volcanic rage inside that’s going to explode on its victim of choice.”
Lieberman told Newsweek that Kohberger had probably studied criminology both to “calm the demons inside him that were telling him to kill” but also to “learn how to commit the perfect crime.”
Kohlberger may have corresponded with Rader (a lot of criminology students do) but we don’t know that for sure. We have to wonder if Rader would have told him about working in the meat department of a Wichita IGA a few years before his murder spree began.
Kohlberger’s obsession with meat reflects a lot of issues considered in Cannibal Studies. Firstly, the question of human meat: there really is no significant difference between the meat of humans and other large mammals such as cows, pigs or sheep. Hannibal Lecter takes delight in feeding human meat to his guests, such as the flesh of the flautist of the Baltimore Philharmonic, whose Board members subsequently enjoy the meal immensely in the book and film Red Dragon, thus becoming “innocent cannibals”.
But the point is that once meat is prepared (cooked, seasoned, presented) it is very hard to tell its provenance. Cannibals who have been asked have mostly compared it to pork or veal, with Armin Meiwes telling an interviewer
“It would have made no difference in somebody else had tasted it; he wouldn’t have questioned the meat…. During preparation, it is not as dark, but bright and fresh as pork, and tastes so very close to pork.”
Kohlberger’s belief that he might like human flesh if he tried any meat at all therefore has some logic to it. Since Charles Darwin’s writings overthrew the special status of humans as closer to angels than other animals, anthropocentrism has been amended to offer a story of humans as the culmination of evolution and thereby continues, rather less successfully, to obscure human animality. Should such beliefs falter, as happens repeatedly in many cases of contemporary cannibalism, it becomes a very short step from eating other animals to eating the human one.
But why should he become addicted to any meat? Well, we know Kohlberger has an addictive personality, shown by his very heavy usage of heroin. But we’re not talking drugs of addiction but lumps of protein, aren’t we? Well, there are plenty of studies about that. Marta Zaraska, for example, wrote in her book Meathooked that meat is highly addictive on several fronts – genetic, cultural, historic and commercial, and coined the term “meathooked” for the incongruous compulsion to eat meat despite the pangs of cognitive dissonance – the repressed feeling of guilt when considering oneself an animal-lover while also paying big corporations to kill them. Then there is the mythology of the Wendigo, a creature from Algonquin legend who starts off as a human but becomes a being who can only live on human flesh, which makes him grow bigger and at the same time hungrier. If you believe in Wendigos, then the slippery slope from carnivore to cannibal seems reasonably clear.
This leads us to the issue of Kohlberger’s apparently very strict veganism. Most people seem to believe (or want to believe) that vegans are fanatics, obsessed with animal welfare (or the environment, or their own health) who therefore compulsively avoid meat. But in fact most vegans would certainly wash a pot thoroughly after a relative had cooked meat, but are unlikely to throw it out as irretrievably ruined, as Kohlberger purportedly did. Veganism is an ethical system that attempts to minimise harm to sentient animals, which includes humans (yes, Virginia, humans are animals). If there is a slippery slope from the flesh of other animals to the flesh of Homo sapiens, then the vegan is furthest from the edge of that slope. When Kohlberger killed those students, he was not following any known vegan code of ethics, even if he didn’t sample their flesh on the way out.
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.
“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.
With the release of another Lion King franchise film, Mufasa, this one a prequel to the earlier story, it is perhaps worth considering the subject of talking animals, and particularly whom they feel OK about eating.
The first film was released in 1994, and was a glorious animation, with music by Elton John and Tim Rice, but was clearly a cartoon, one that has earned almost a billion dollars since its release.
Although we can get into the plot and the emotions of the film, we don’t really feel obliged to believe in the anthropomorphic veracity of cartoon characters. Do we really care if a cartoon duck eats other birds? No, not if he wears clothes and speaks (a form of) English. It is clearly a line drawing that moves, and requires no ethical work.
But in 2019, the film was remade as a photorealistic animation. With a small dose of suspension of disbelief, the animals looked like they were real, roared like lions, but somehow spoke English, some of them, strangely, with an eastern European accent. It was a sensation, so far earning over 1.6 billion dollars.
This blog will appear around Christmas, so I guess it is not unreasonable to unleash my inner Grinch, at least when it comes to anthropomorphic representations of carnivorous virility. As far as we are aware, lions can’t talk, except in movies. They can certainly communicate though, and that communication, particularly the roar that can be heard miles away, is featured prominently in all versions of the Lion King.
If they could talk, would they say and do the things shown in the film? Would they, for example, let a mandrill take their cub and hold him, Michael Jackson-like, over a cliff for the other animals to worship and celebrate? I’m even less sure of how celebratory the prey animals would be about the birth of yet another predator, no matter how cute.
But the main thing that bothered me throughout the film was the food, and it wasn’t (just) because I watched it at lunchtime. We are shown a happy monarchy (the “pride land”) where the devoted subjects are summarily executed and eaten by the king and his family. This is later turned into a blasted desert filled with the bones of the prey animals by a usurper king lion, an evil uncle lifted from Hamlet and made leonine.
Those not privileged to live in the pride-land inhabit a shadow terrain, the “elephants’ graveyard”, where (dark-skinned) hyenas skulk, with little evidence of anything to eat and, we are assured, always hungry. We have the “circle of life” followed by a circle of hell.
Even further away, in a wildness to which the exiled lion cub Simba flees from his evil and murderous uncle, we have a sort of Garden of Eden II. Here, mammals take a pledge not to eat each other, an expanded ring of utopian privilege, which excludes only insects and their pupal forms, who clearly would have to exist in immense numbers to feed a growing lion, let alone his friends.
Listen kid: if you live with us, you’re gonna have to eat like us. This looks like a good spot to rustle up some grub. A grub. What’s it look like? Tastes like chicken.
What is the ecology here, and the ethic behind the food choices?
Simba, the cub and heir apparent, wonders about this too. He and his future wife (lions get married?) are the only ones to connect with all these environments, and Simba the only one to question the implicit ethos of each one. Early in the piece, as he surveys the kingdom where “the light touches” (as opposed to the darkness of the hyena shadowlands), he asks his father why they eat their loyal subjects, the zebras, antelopes and presumably anyone else slower than them. It’s a question most parents dread as they feed lumps of animal flesh to their children, and then read them books about happy animals. It’s the circle of life, says Simba’s Dad, clearing his throat for us all to join a singalong. We eat them, then when we die, our bodies feed the grass, and future victims eat the grass.
Now this is just absurd. I’m not sure how much grass the average antelope eats, but it would need an awful lot of dead lions buried underneath it to make it fecund. Photosynthesis, which combines carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrate and oxygen, is what makes the grass grow. Lion corpses (and presumably lion shit, now enriched with zebra fat) might add some trace elements, but they are hardly necessary. What lions actually do for the environment is thin out the number of herbivores so that they don’t eat all the vegetation and turn the area into desert, which is what inexplicably happens when the bad lion, Scar, and his army of hyenas, eat all the herbivores. Where does all the grass go? It should be a jungle without all those antelopes and giraffes.
Then we have the entemo-vegetarians of the land beyond the shadows where, you know, hakuna matata, there are no worries, unless of course you are an insect. If you search the internet, you will find learned articles on how many hours a day a lion would need to be chewing pupae (it’s a lot more than 24) in order to sustain his life, let alone progress from cub through puberty to full sized adult male. And why can the various mammals and birds talk, but the insects can’t? Jiminy Cricket could talk in the early days of Disney – when did he fall out of the circle of privilege?
It’s all absurd, of course, but it’s what we teach kids, and not just by taking them to see Lion King. When they ask questions like “I love animals, so why are we eating them?” talk of feeding grass with our bones doesn’t cut it, which is probably why so many young people go vegan. The correct answer, which won’t satisfy anyone, is “because we want to, and because we can”. We have the appetite, and we have the power. We arbitrarily decide who is within our circle of privilege.
In the film, lions and all mammals, and some other odd creatures, live without being eaten in a hippie paradise. In the pride-land, under good king Mustafa (Simba’s dad) certain animals are part of the elite and don’t get eaten, while the anonymous proletariat animals seemingly go willingly to their just deserts (or desserts). Contrast this with the hyena shadow land, where, according to a Disney comic book, the hyenas enthusiastically engage in cannibalism, as well as presumably eating the dead elephants who come to the elephant graveyard to die (which, BTW, elephants don’t really do). The human circle of life is less well defined, depending on the culture: in the West, humans consider chickens, pigs and cows outside the elite of the inedible, while dogs, cats and dolphins are inside, and we express moral outrage when these capricious lines are crossed. In other parts of the world, dogs and cats may be delicacies, or cows or pigs may be forbidden. And this blog has brought you many films in which humans are the preferred repast.
Animal activists are often accused of anthropocentrism, having the nerve, for example, to suggest that fish feel pain or dogs feel love. But truly toxic anthropomorphism appears in narratives of talking animals, where we offer temporary anthropomorphic capacities to other species, so that we can push ideological or commercial messages like a “circle of life” to an audience of minors, while pleading disingenuously that these are just cartoons. This cartoon lies to kids about the nature of nature, to promote the acceptability of carnivorous virility.
We don’t do our society any favours by lying to our kids. Lions don’t think about dying or the benefits their carcasses will bestow on the grass. They hunt because they are obligate predators and will starve otherwise, regardless of the available insect population. Humans, on the other hand, are closer to hyenas – scavengers who are never satiated. We don’t keep herbivore numbers in check by eating them; the opposite is the case – we deliberately breed them by the billions, often in appalling conditions, then slaughter them, in terror and agony, in industrial killing centres, polluting the land, degrading the water and filling the air with methane.
It’s not clear if Simba will impose insectivarianism on his kingdom after the credits roll – he may have to, insofar as the flocks seem to have been decimated. But Simba, if he really could talk, would be appalled by the way humans cynically misappropriate the role of predator in order to feed our insatiable appetites. I think perhaps even the hyenas would agree with him.
Cannibalism is defined by our good friends at Wikipedia as:
“the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food.”
Most dictionaries like to put “human” in there somewhere, but that is just another manifestation of anthropocentrism, a species-wide narcissism that believes everything is just about us. The same ideology also insists that human flesh is somehow different to that of other animals, and human suffering somehow more intense, or at least more important.
Now, we know that corn cobs cannot grow arms and legs and barbecue each other or indeed anyone of another species. As far as we know, they also cannot suffer, as pain is an evolutionary response to danger, and only useful to animals, who can seek to avoid that danger. The concept of corn cobs tormenting and killing other vegetables is absurd.
But that is exactly what humans do, confining, tormenting and slaughtering some eighty billion sentient land animals every year, and several trillion sea animals. We draw the line, usually at other humans, sometimes at dogs and cats in Ohio, but that line is arbitrary and can shift without much impetus.
If corn cobs could eat each other, they probably would. The objectification of the other, human or nonhuman, and the intensity of the slaughterhouse we have built in this world, sees that line between carnivore and cannibal increasingly porous, as we have seen in the hundreds of examples in this blog.
“…as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, foreword to ‘Vegetarianism, a Way of Life’, by Dudley Giehl
If you by any chance have watched any of the videos of the influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin), you may not have guessed that anything controversial was being shown. The Brazilian, from São Francisco do Conde, a city in the metropolitan area of Salvador in Bahiahad, had been gaining more and more followers on social media over the months before his arrest on July 23 2024, when he was apprehended after being caught desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count, in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, and stealing human bones.
Not just bones. The 22-year-old influencer used human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Both of which have been reported as tasting very similar to human flesh.
One of Pinguim’s videos, which went viral on social media, explained the secrets of adding meat to beans — and how to get the most out of the final dish.
“Treat and throw it in the beans. But you can’t eat it, no, you just chew it and then throw it away. You don’t swallow it, you just chew it and throw it away, you just taste it, it’s sweet.”
The remains were not only for use in his recipes. After being arrested, Israel led the local police to a mangrove swamp where he had hidden numerous bags of bones. He had been sending these to Salvador, the state capital, to be used in satanic rituals.
The suspect was caught after families of buried people reported that graves had been violated and several bones had been stolen.
Pinguim made a video confession to police which was later released to the media. He reported that he had spent hours at the cemetery to see which graves were the most recent; those with the freshest human flesh. He told police he had fried a piece of a person’s leg and seasoned it with lemon and vinegar before chewing on it.
Local reports say he told police that he stole the body parts to order, in exchange for a payment equivalent to about $US50 from three people who wanted to use the bones as part of a black magic ceremony. He used the money to buy shoes and sandwiches, as well as getting his hair cut.
Surprisingly, Pinguim was released on bail pending an ongoing investigation into charges of desecrating a tomb. His lawyer, Luan Santos, told local media his client suffered from mental health issues and was taking anti-depressants. He added that he would be demanding psychiatric tests to ascertain whether the accused was fully aware of what he was doing.
Pinguim’s social media accounts have been deleted.
Brazil has always been a fascinating area for students of cannibalism. One of the most famous tribes was the Tupinamba, who captured a German soldier and explorer named Hans Staden in the sixteenth century. He claimed to have witnessed their cannibalistic rituals and did very nicely from his subsequent writings, illustrated by the graphic woodcuts of Theodor de Bry. As a result, the Portuguese came to save the ‘savages’ from their sins, and through enslavement, assimilation, extermination and the introduction of Smallpox, managed to wipe them out completely.
The classic cannibalism film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês) is set in this period of imperial invasion, and tries to give a new perspective on the way colonialism used cannibalism as its pretext.
More recently, modern Brazilians have been involved in some of the more interesting cannibalism stories that have graced our news cycles, including the “Cartel” who sold pastries made from human flesh to unwitting customers, and the Brazilian who was arrested in Lisbon for eating a man who had tried to help him. Like most cannibalism films, the ones set in Brazil vary between seeing it as something savages naturally do, such as Emanuelle and the Cannibals, and those that see it as typifying the exploitation of the poor by the rich, such as The Cannibal Club.
The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed a ‘post-structural anthropology’ in his book Cannibal Metaphysics. De Castro sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that it was ‘exoticist and primitivist from birth’, denying that cannibalism even existed, and so transferred the conquered peoples from the cannibalistic villains of the West into mere fictions of colonialism. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism, which serves to either confront it or deny its existence. Accepting those parts of colonial culture that are useful (they speak Portuguese for example) can be seen as a form of reverse, cultural cannibalism.
But Pinguim demonstrates that even Brazilians have not fully embraced this philosophy, particularly when it involves digging up their relatives.
The Cannibal Guy 