Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(65)
More reliable support for the pork hypothesis came from the infamous cannibal Armin Meiwes, who is currently serving a life term for killing and devouring Bernd Brandes. The latter, a 42-year-old computer technician, answered Meiwes’s cannibalism chat room post in 2001. It was the perfect match, with Meiwes obsessed with cannibalism and Brandes fixated on being eaten. Shortly after entering Meiwes’s dilapidated house in Rotenburg, the new friends decided to sever Brandes’s penis, which they reportedly tried to eat raw. Finding it too tough and chewy, they set out to cook the schnitzel but overcooked it—Meiwes eventually feeding it to his dog. Brandes, nearly unconscious from a combination of blood loss and the pills and alcohol he’d swallowed, eventually died—helped along by the knife-wielding Meiwes. The Internet’s first cannibal killer then dismembered his suddenly former pal. He stored the body parts in a freezer and consumed them over the course of several months.
“I sautéed the steak of Bernd with salt, pepper, garlic, and nutmeg,” Meiwes told interviewer Günter Stampf. Reportedly Meiwes ate more than 40 pounds of Mr. Brandes during the months following the killing. “The flesh tastes like pork, a little more bitter,” he said, noting that that most people wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “It tastes quite good.”
The pork comparison, however, was not shared by all.
Issei Sagawa, an unrepentant Japanese cannibal, who murdered and ate a female Dutch student in 1981 (and got away with it because of powerful family connections), compared his victim’s flesh to raw tuna.
While we’re on the topic of Meiwes and Sagawa (albeit briefly), some readers may be wondering why I’ve essentially steered clear of the criminal cannibalism typified by this pair and their ilk. One reason is that the topic has been covered in sensational (and often gory) detail in a number of previous books. More importantly, though, several of these psychopaths are still alive (or recently deceased) and out of respect for the families and loved ones of their victims, I have chosen not to provide these murderers with anything that could even vaguely be interpreted as acclaim.
In the 1920s, New York Times reporter William Seabrook set out to eat a chunk of human rump roast with some Guero tribesmen in West Africa. Upon returning home he began writing a book about his adventures. Depending on what source you believe, either Seabrook discovered that the tribesmen had tricked him into eating a piece of ape, or they had simply refused to share their meal with him. With the validity of his book in jeopardy, Seabrook set out to procure some real human flesh—this he claimed to have gotten from an orderly in a Paris hospital who had access to freshly dead patients. Seabrook says that he cooked the meat over a spit—seasoning it with salt and pepper and accompanying it with side of rice and a bottle of wine. It did not taste like pork, he said, “It was good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.”
Back in Plano, Texas, the Rembis family stood by waiting for my reaction, I took my time, chewing Claire’s placenta slowly. The first thing that came to mind wasn’t the taste—it was the texture. Firm but tender, it was easy to chew.
The consistency was like veal.
The taste, though, had none of the delicate, subtly beefy flavor of veal. Definitely dark meat—organ meat, I thought, but it wasn’t exactly like anything I’d ever eaten before. It had a strong but not overpowering flavor. I swallowed Claire’s placenta and picked up another forkful.
It tasted very much like the chicken gizzards we’d fried up as college students. “It’s very good,” I told the assembled Rembis clan and they responded with a chorus of moans, groans, and giggles.
A few minutes later, I had cleaned my plate.
As expected, the Rembis kids were full of questions.
“Can I hold your iPhone now?”
“Can we ask Siri a question?”
“Do you want one of my Pringles?”
I squatted down to kid height, pulled out my phone and got on with the important stuff, hoping to avoid one of the of the side effects of placenta eating I’d read about: unpleasant burps.
So is there any real benefit to the practice of placentophagy? If one were to gauge the benefits by the number of societies that engage in it, the answer would be a resounding “Nope.”
Maggie Blott, a spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (UK), believes that there’s no medical justification for humans to consume their own placenta. “Animals eat their placenta to get nutrition—but when people are already well-nourished, there is no benefit; there is no reason to do it.’
But what about the alternative scenario—that consuming placentas could possibly have detrimental effects?
According to Mark Kristal, “The sharp distinction between the prevalence of placentophagy in non-human, non-aquatic mammals, and the total absence of it in human cultures, suggest that different mechanisms are involved. That either placentophagia became somehow disadvantageous to humans because of illness or sickness or negative side effects, or something more important has come along to replace it.”
Ultimately, though, the possibility of negative effects and the lack of evidence for beneficial effects doesn’t faze folks like Claire and William Rembis and, similarly, it didn’t prevent Oregon representative Alissa Keny-Guyer from sponsoring bill HB 2612, which was passed unanimously by the state Senate in 2013. The new law allows Oregon mothers who have just given birth to bring home a second, though slightly less joyous, bundle when they leave the hospital.