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Man Discovers What Human Flesh Tastes Like In Unusual Experiment [Video]

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 01:45 PST, Mar 24, 2016

Scientist Greg Foot was keen to find out how human flesh tastes as compared to other meats. He did this by cooking a muscle from his own thigh. While it is illegal to eat human flesh – even your own – Foot did manage to experience the flavor without actually chowing down on his own leg.

As part of the BBC’s Three Secrets of Everything, Greg Foot decided to discover the taste of human flesh by taking a small biopsy of the muscle of his own thigh under local anesthetic and cooking it. However, while this might sound cannibalistic and rather gruesome, he didn’t actually eat his own human flesh.

The popular BBC series is all about science — but definitely not as we know it — with Foot running several highly unusual experiments including, in this particular case, finding out what we actually taste like.

Cannibalism is, quite rightly, illegal, but Foot found a way of mimicking the taste of human flesh in order to run the experiment.

It turns out that 80 percent of our enjoyment of food comes from our sense of smell. For instance, if we don’t like the taste of a particular food item, we tend to hold our nostrils with our fingers to deaden the smell.

Using this hypothesis, the piece of his very own human flesh was cooked in a small container in a lab, and all the aroma of the cooking flesh was stored inside that container.

When Foot took a sniff at the cooked leg meat, he said the scent was “really meaty,” and it was a lot richer than pork or chicken. He compared the aroma of cooked human flesh to beef and ale stew.

Scientists then ran a chemical analysis of the aroma of the cooked thigh muscle and compared it to various different types of animal meat that we frequently eat. With this scientific comparison, researchers then came up with a “recipe” of different meats that would taste most like human flesh.

Using the results of the investigation, Foot then created a burger using the “recipe” and then enjoyed tucking into the snack. In the process, he found out what his own “flesh” would actually taste like.

Foot said, “It’s good. It’s really beefy… a bit lamb-y. I think that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to tasting human. But I’ll tell you what – it’s pretty good.”

Foot went on to say that we are actually a lot more like the animals we eat than you would think. In fact, we are probably pretty delicious. You could almost say we taste a little like chicken, but with a side of beef and lamb thrown in.

“Analysis of my leg revealed it’s about half the same type of muscle found in chicken breast, but it also contains similar muscle fibers to those found in cuts of beef.”

You can watch the whole process in the video included below. However, there’s a warning – the content might upset more squeamish viewers.

In the same episode of Three Secrets of Everything, Foot reportedly also visited the Reading Festival to find out if the human race could actually shift the planet by jumping at exactly the same time.

Foot also experimented to find out if a belly flop could kill you. Along the way, Foot gets struck by lightning and reportedly “goes to the moon” using helium balloons. Sounds like a whole load of fun, well, maybe without the eating your own leg bit. You can also watch more of his “crazy scientist” experiments on YouTube.

[Image via YouTube]

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