TV hosts turn cannibal for their audience

Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno, hosts of the Dutch TV show “Preojfkonijen" ("Test Rabbits") ate bits of each other's flesh before a studio audience. There is no report whether it tasted like chicken. From NY Daily News:

“The punchline of the show is to get really simple answers on stupid questions, such as, ‘Can you shave with ketchup’ or ‘Can you drive blind?’” Storm told ABCNews.com. “And we wanted to find out how human flesh tasted.”
A chef fried a hunk of Storm’s buttocks, and a piece of Zeno’s abdomen, both carved off earlier by a surgeon, in a pan with sunflower oil, skipping salt and pepper to preserve the meat’s natural taste.
Then the daring duo dug in…
“It was just a few centimeters of meat,” (Storm said). “And now I have a good story about that scar.”

"Television show hosts eat each other’s flesh in front of studio audience"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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flowergardenslayer

Wow, this is sinking to a new low! (How did it taste?)
- awjt
  
  Almost as low as french kissing your mom in the high school gym in front of everyone.
  
  “Kiss your mom and eat a piece of her spleen.”
http://www.facebook.com/brianrazencain Brian Cain

I would totally do this..but no butt flesh.
- MrsBug
  
  Dude, roasts. Yum. ;)
  - jaddle
    
    Dude-roasts.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Short cut of rump! The best.
Michael Clerx

As freaky as that is I kinda envy them now :p

(and it’s “Proefkonijnen”)
Warren_Terra

A chef fried a hunk of Storm’s buttocks, and a piece of Zeno’s abdomen, both carved off earlier by a surgeon

I wonder if it’s possible to find out that surgeon’s identity, and to get their license to practice medicine yanked.
- firedup
  
  Why?
- marilove
  
  Uh, why? These people consented. The surgeon didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not like he/she killed or harmed anyone. Seriously, why would you want to get his/her license to practice medicine yanked? Talk about an overreaction.
  - flosofl
    
    Come now, Concern Trolls gotta troll.
http://www.facebook.com/brianrazencain Brian Cain

Wait, now they’re saying it was a hoax.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/12/20/Dutch-TV-cannibalism-stunt-a-hoax/UPI-58851324419437/

And this is why I never trust the Dutch.
- http://insight.pinkonbrown.org/ Dr P Fenderson
  
  This should be at the top. OH CRAP – I’m not on Reddit anymore…never mind.
ill lich

Hey. . . if it’s between two consenting adults, why not?

I wonder: are there Biblical prohibitions against eating human flesh, like for pork and shellfish?
- Tynam
  
  Yes, there *really* are. To be precise, the biblical prohibitions restrict you to cloven-hoofed ruminants. Which fortunately excludes most humans.
  - LinkMan
    
    From a Jewish law perspective, though, the prohibition on eating mammals that aren’t cloven-hoofed ruminants only applies to Jews. Although not strictly biblical (they were codified in the Talmud around 300CE), there are Jewish law dietary restrictions in the Noahide Laws that apply to non-Jews as well, namely no eating flesh taken from an animal that’s still alive.
    
    It’s unclear whether flesh taken from a living human would violate that (I don’t know whether a human is considered an animal in the Talmud). Also, it’s unclear to me whether eating the flesh of a dead human (as long as you didn’t murder him) would be acceptable or not.
http://www.epinardscaramel.com TokenFrenchDude

Wow I’d like to see what it tastes like ! I’m off to craigslist.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

One of my favorite Eddie Izzard jokes: if human flesh tastes like chicken then if you’re eating a nice piece of chicken you’re really enjoying something that tastes just like human.
http://twitter.com/dr_ultimately Iain Marcks

i would totally try that.
http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

I have it on authority that human flesh tastes like pork (henc e the phrase “long pig”).
- http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios
  
  and this is also why SPAM is so popular in the South Pacific.
Drabula

with 7 billion people on the planet I think this is a good idea.
- Felton / Moderator
  
  A modest proposal?
  - Mister44
    
    That was a Swift retort!
    - http://profiles.google.com/andrew.l.wood Andrew Wood
      
      I’m feeling soylent green about the gills.
Ralph Palm

Just a clarification: In Dutch, you’d use “Proefkonijn” the same way an English speaker would use “guinea pig”. As in ‘Hey, try my new human flesh recipe.’ ‘No way, I’m not going to be your guinea pig!’
IronEdithKidd

Fargin A, I’m squicked.

Also, when I became a pescetarian, it was my imagining that human tasted like beef that ended any future possibility that I would eat land animals ever again.
- teapot
  
  I’ve always wondered how people can rationalise that killing fish is OK (or at least acceptable), while killing walking meat factories is not. You have to end the lives of many fish to get a week’s worth of food, but you could probably survive for weeks on the meat from 1 cow.
  
  How about whale.. would you chow down on some of that? I hear the Japanese have years of the stuff in cold storage.
  - robuluz
    
    I can’t speak for IronEdithKidd, but I was a pisco for many years. Basically its just a very healthy diet to live on. However if you want to justify it ethically, the best strategy is to use the animal’s capacity for suffering. Most sea creatures that get served up for food are considerably more simple than their land counterparts, and can reasonably be said to have a lower capacity for suffering, and are accordingly a more ethical choice, if your main ethical criteria is reducing the suffering of animals.
    
    Arbitrary, true, but we all draw the line somewhere. Oh, wait….
    - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
      
      There is also the additional factor that as most seafood isn’t farmed it can be argued that the animals have lived “free” and “natural” lives. Of course other problems arise from this, such as overfishing, but its as “free range” as meat can be.
      - robuluz
        
        If sustainability is part of the justification for the diet, seafood gets complicated fast.
      - zebbart
        
        That is my justification for eating fish, as well as deer and other game, but not farmed meat. I still prefer to avoid fish though because of overfishing and the waste killing involved.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    One thing that I’ve had to constantly push back against over the last 28 years is baseless assumptions about why I don’t eat land critter. Just don’t. As it happens, pescetarian best describes how I eat. No more, no less.
    
    I don’t eat mammals due to squick factors. Ethics be damned.
    
    Also, whales are mammels.
http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

Oh god…now that they have a taste for it…THE DUTCH ARE COMING!
http://twitter.com/cpconstantine Conrad Constantine

This doesn’t count though.. what’s mostly eaten from an animal, is the muscle, not the skin.
Lobster

Somewhere, Rupert Murdoch is flipping tables and kicking chairs, asking his people why they didn’t come up with this first.

Also, obligatory: Proefkonijn Green is PEOPLE! IT’S PEOPLE!
http://profiles.google.com/philbert.de.zwart Philbert De Zwart

Apparently, it is a hoax to raise awareness for organ donation (see Brian Cain’s link). Note that these are the same people who put up a game show last year with kidney patients as contestants, and the winner would win a donor kidney. That was also a hoax.

As the son of a kidney patient (my mother now has one of my father’s kidneys) I applaud raising awareness for organ donation by any means.
EeyoreX

Meh. This is a bit of a ripoff.
Swedish gonzo entertainers Filip & Fredrik did this exact same stunt on swedish television over five years ago. Only difference is that they didn’t bother with no fancy surgeons:

http://youtu.be/uJDF_0wdVI8
hostile_17

Boys if you want to chomp on each other….. well… satisfy your urges, but don’t be so literal.
http://twitter.com/mjkoopman Matthew Koopman

Honestly, I fail to see the problem here.
And I’m a vegetarian!
mrsoreto

This was a hoax to raise awareness of the shortage of organ donors guys, they did this before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Grote_Donorshow
Mister44

Wait wait – is this MEAT or just their FLESH/SKIN? Because the two are going to taste very differently.
- bcsizemo
  
  I agree, outside of chicken I don’t eat the skin of any animal that I can think of… And even with chicken only when it’s seasoned/breaded and fried.
  
  I want to see what a bicep or quad taste like. I wonder if the glutes would be soft and tasty like filet (assuming you don’t work out and are fairly lazy.)
Bubba73

I’d love to meet the surgeon.

“Hi Everybody!”
- Mister44
  
  “Hi, Dr. Nick!”
http://artdonovan.typepad.com Art

This had “hoax” written all over it.
polossatik

the usage of “Preojfkonijen”shows the ingonrence (intended mistake) of the interweps
tubacat

I’m sorry, but am I the only person who was literally revolted (as in stomach-turning revulsion) by this headline? I’m not talking about making a moral judgment or concern-trolling. I’m talking about what I would have thought is a basic human prohibition (probably favored, obviously, by evolution) against eating each other.

And if the all the people who said they would like to try this were serious — well, let’s just say I’m glad Boing Boing is just a blog and I’m not likely to meet any of them in person…
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  Hey tubacat, remember me? We met the other week at that bar…
  
  /creepy
Halloween Jack

I’m not terribly surprised that this is a hoax. Usually, when someone refers to “meat”, they’re talking about muscle tissue, and unlike fat (which is removed from people surgically all the time, sometimes in large quantities; remember Fight Club), skin (excess skin is common in people who have lost a lot of weight), and even some organs (you can remove quite a lot of a healthy liver and have it grow back), there really isn’t any superfluous muscle tissue to speak of, even in bodybuilders, and it’s very difficult to remove some without impairing regular body function. I heard an interview of these people on the Beeb, and I found it very odd that they didn’t address the basic question that almost everyone has: how it tastes. (Most modern accounts of cannibalism are from people that are either crazy, like the serial killer Albert Fish, or from people that really don’t want to talk about it, like the sports team that was stranded in the Andes by a plane crash.)
http://twitter.com/BronzeWailer Eric Betts

It’s the other other other white meat
Max Dohle

I can report you from the Neteherlands that is was all a hoax.
- Herman Budde
  
  I suppose you’d have to be Dutch to remember the dead giveway clue:
  Last year’s “Great Donor Show” came from the same broadcaster.
  
  And I personally think this is an awesome way to put “Xmas animal bingeing” into perspective ;-)
D Wyatt

Disgusting to say the least. The comments from the usually educated folks on here are vile as well, jokes or not. A piece of a mans ass eaten on tv should be stomach turning to anyone without mental disorders. Looks like I wont be having breakfast after all.

Everyone should just go ahead and watch the movie Idiocracy, while reading the book 1984 and listening to the audio book of soylent green….to prepare for the immediate future.
Pluytje

Just for the record and in reply to everyone saying it was a hoax. I just heard one of the 2 guys on the radio and he was very adamant that it was NOT a hoax. He sounded quite upset that everybody was suddenly assuming it was, though he was also surprised about all the international fuss.
I’m inclined to believe him though, the channel was very clear about that donor show being a hoax, so it doesn ‘t make sense for them to deny this now if it were the same situation.