It’s been a weird week in culinary news. A guy in Florida, naturally, decided that a little trip on LSD would be great fun and ended up eating the face of a stranger after he stripped naked. Because, as any connoisseur knows, if you’re not naked when you’re literally sucking face you don’t get the full enjoyment of the cuisine. Of course, in the non-Floridian universe cannibalism is rare. Or so I thought. I mean it never comes up in my daily routine. Never once have I sat in the WNC offices and heard anyone say “Hey, who wants to go eat Bob in accounting?” Not even after the Bourbon Brunch fiasco. Since some legal actions are still pending in that case, I can say no more.
However, I do feel safe mentioning that I will never think of a unicycle in the same way again.
Anyway, people who eat people. That’s the topic at hand.
As it were.
Dan Amira of New York Magazine has noted that people eating people is becoming a popular trend.
In just the past week, a naked man ate a homeless guy’s face in Miami, a New Jersey man threw his intestines at police, a Canadian porn star killed a man and ate parts of his body before mailing other parts to government officials, a Maryland man killed his roommate and ate his heart and brain, and a Staten Island pizza parlor owner nommed a dude’s ear. It seems clear that this sudden burst of zombie activity points inexorably to the beginning of the end for mankind. But we started to wonder this morning — from inside our fortified, WiFi enabled, mountainside bunker — whether the only thing that’s changed is that, in the wake of the headline-grabbing Miami incident, we’ve suddenly started paying a lot more attention to zombie-esque stories than we had in the past. After digging around, we found that while the frequency of cannibal stories over the past week is unusual, this kind of stuff happens fairly regularly. Here is a rundown of what we’ve found from just the past six months.
**************
May 25
“Police in southwest China have detained a man suspected of murdering more than a dozen boys and young men, chopping up their bodies and selling the flesh to unsuspecting consumers, reports said Friday.”
May 8
“A Swiss politician has been accused of advertising for cannibals to kill and eat the mother and daughter of a policeman friend going through a ‘tricky’ divorce.”
April 14
“Police have arrested three people for allegedly killing at least two women, eating parts of their bodies and using their flesh to make stuffed pastries known as empanadas that they sold to neighbors in their northeastern Brazil city.”
April 7
“A 79-year-old man accused of killing his wife ate some of her flesh and was found sitting in a rocking chair in their Shrewsbury apartment, covered in blood, a prosecutor said Friday.”
March 27
“Russian police have arrested a man who admitted killing at least six people before eating their hearts and livers, media said.”
March 26
“A Russian man killed a drinking partner after he and his friends ran out of snacks at a vodka party – then sold the leftovers as pork at a market. The 35-year-old admitted stabbing his fellow drinker, 41, to death before slicing flesh off the corpse, which he cooked and ate, police said.”
March 24
“Serbian gangsters allegedly beat a traitorous associate to death with a hammer before cooking and eating his remains in Spain, police said.”
January 27
“A Florida man has been arrested for allegedly hacking to death a Connecticut man and eating the victim’s eye and part of his brain.”
January 12
“Police say a man in Indiana accused of stealing a car threatened to hunt down and eat his arresting officers, their families and police dogs.”
**************
In a weird way, it’s kind of a relief. The world isn’t ending! People actually eat other people all the time! Of course, the bad news is that people eat other people all the time.
And we can’t forget fun people like Canadian whack job Rick Gibson who once publically dined on human testicles. Nor can we forget the fun folks had when Mao Sugiyama, of Japan, served his own penis, after cooking it, to volunteers.
Quick warning here, that second link has pictures. Lots of them.
Which reminds me, I should really check back in on the various penis festivals and musuems around the world. If for no other reason than the cleanse my mental palette of the aforementioned imagery.
I just can’t wait to see the next Zombie movie with the theme song “People, people who eat people … are the happiest people …..”
Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.