17. One cannibal reported that humans’ taste like fine veal
William Seabrook was a reporter and author who traveled to Africa in the 1920s, where he claimed to have encountered ritual cannibalism among some of the tribes. In a book based on his adventures entitled Jungle Ways, Seabrook described the taste of human flesh he discovered on his journey. He compared it to “fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef”. He went on to write, “It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal”. But Seabrook did not base his description on the output of an African cannibal chef.
As he later confessed, “the distrustful tribesmen never allowed him to partake in their traditions”. Instead, Seabrook obtained human flesh from a contact at the Sorbonne, and prepared it himself at home. As it is possible that the contact, a young intern, was appalled at what Seabrook intended to do with it and provided instead veal, easily obtainable in Paris, Seabrook might not have tasted human flesh at all. But he insisted that he did, further describing it as a roast, “from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste…veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable”.