Meat is meat

There is finally a product that transcends the vegan and cannibal border on the shelves of all your local supermarkets.

It’s called Hufu, a tofu product that is designed to imitate human flesh in texture and taste.

Except it’s not. Hufu was a practical joke played on the media back in 2005. The creator and owner, Mark Nuckols, claimed that you’d be able to order it off his website two months after the public announcement, but never actually created the product.

Like many news stations and papers back in 2005, I was duped into believing the hype.

I was ready to try it, but a fair amount of my friends were disturbed by the idea of possibly knowing what human flesh tastes like.  I like eating all kinds of animals so naturally I was curious.

A lot of people have admitted that in a survival scenario they might eat a leg or an arm, but I haven’t heard anyone admit that they might try it under less dire circumstances.

Let’s say this: You’ve been accepted among a long lost tribe as one of their own.

Maybe you’re an archeologist, maybe an Indiana Jones type or just a tourist who’s extremely lost. The tribe has the custom of eating just a morsel of their recently fallen in a ritual of respectful consumption under the belief that the energy of the dead is being returned to the living.

It smells like barbecue, it’s covered in sauce, it looks like tenderloin and its name was Steve. Would you eat it?

I would.

Meat is meat. As an ex-biology major and somewhat of an outdoorsman, I’ve dissected and cleaned a large number of animals. The muscle tissue always looks the same because relatively the muscle tissues of all animals are created by the same processes.

If it’s all relatively the same stuff then why are we so scared to try our own species? Or even a tofu alternative?

I believe cannibalism is misunderstood through its negative association with tribes that the western world often labels as “savage.”  Possibly even deeper than that is the common human assumption that Homo sapiens are greater forms of life. To eat another human would be immoral.

This is an arrogant belief. 

I invite the invention of a Hufu-like product, not just because it would animalize humans to a more grounded and realistic self-image, but also because it has to taste better than tofurkey.

­— ktgragg@umail.iu.edu