According to all medical metrics, my wife and I are both in very good shape but we don’t compare well to most cuts we see in the grocery store.
My wife is very thin for a woman, but at 20% body fat, she would be on par with a hamburger. I have ~14% body fat, barely low enough to be called “lean” for beef, let alone extra-lean poultry.
Are humans naturally fattier than the animals we farm or are the leaner cuts all that make it into the meat section? How do pork loin and human loin compare?
Human meat supposedly doesn’t taste bad at all. It is very similar to pork and cannibals sometimes refer to it as “long pig”. I can’t say that I have ever tried it myself but there have been cases of murderers/cannibals feeding humans to others in cooked dishes without them noticing it. It is more about the overall recipe.
Unfortunately, cannibalism has a long history due to mental deviants, necessity like the Jamestown starving time or survivors from a disaster or tribal tradition. I have never heard of any of them complain about the taste. A dead person is just a very large slab of meat. How well you prepare it is up to you.
A typical American is going to similar to a younger pig (Wal-Mart shoppers may be closer to a mature pig) but both can be prepared quite appetizingly if you do it right.
You’re mostly talking about fat external to the major muscles, the fat that you can poke with a finger. A pig has a whole bunch of fat on it’s belly where we get bacon, but very little in the hind legs where we get ham. I suspect a ham made of a human thigh wouldn’t be any fattier than a pig ham.
From what I can find online (no idea about the distribution of fat in a human), grain-fed cows for slaughter in the US have, on average, have around 27% bodyfat overall, and grain fed around 19%.
It’s not the most detailed of cite but look here. There’s also this cite which says about 28% for USDA choice, yield grade 2 or 3, so the numbers are similar.
So you’re doing fine. I imagine there are cuts of you that are extra lean, and cuts of you that are quite fatty, just like in a pig or cow.
I agree. This is one of the more morbid questions ever posted on the SDMB but it really does have a factual answer so it is still in-bounds as far as I know. The short answer is all it takes is good butcher to render a typical person into perfectly edible meat. Most of the unwanted fat can be trimmed off but some fat is not a bad thing in general when it comes to any meat. You need some for flavor and being too lean is undesirable. That is why they fatten up everything from hogs to Kobe cows before they are processed.
Shouldn’t this be in Cafe Society?
In the tradition of pointing out that we have an answer or anecdote for anything, we have a Doper that was the coworker with someone that decided to be killed and eaten by a cannibal. It became an internationally famous case because the Germans didn’t know quite to do with it. They had a signed agreement that showed it was consensual (the cannibal eventually got a manslaughter charge and now advises other potential cannibals not to go through with it; the convicted killer is a vegetarian now).
Apparently, there really is a lid for every pot.
My God, I was thinking the exact same thing!
But to answer the OP, one has to first define what one means by “naturally”. Farm animals are bread specifically to have a certain fat content, and certain cuts of meats are defined to have certain fat contents, so it’s not even clear what comparison is being made. But if you went out and found you “average” Hunter/Gatherer human, he’d probably be pretty lean. Unless he was an Arctic H/G, in which case he might be a bit fattier. Mmm. Eskimo bacon…
Is this a true thing? I thought “long pig” was a joke by travel writer Paul Theroux.
Can we assume you’re using the word “good” as a synonym for “skilled”?
That is correct. Thankfully the Church of Euthanasia has a a detailed online guide for do-it-yourselfers.
As far as I can tell, “long pig” is a fairly accurate English translation from some Polynesian languages in areas where cannibalism was once practiced. There are references to the term all over the place and sites like Wikipedia give secondary sources that do not appear to be a joke.
"European explorers and colonizers brought home many stories of cannibalism practiced by the native peoples they encountered. The friar Diego de Landa reported about Yucatán instances,[66] and there have been similar reports by Purchas from Popayán, Colombia, and from the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia, where human flesh was called “long pig”.[67] "
You’re comparing 2 different types of fat measurement to each other. Medical body fat measurements estimate* overall body fat, which as pointed out includes a lot of visceral and subcutaneous fat, whereas the fat content of grocery store meat only includes what’s been left on/in the cut after butchering and trimming.
So if you’re starting at 14% total body fat, your meat cuts will likely be quite a bit leaner, unless you selectively trim them to include a lot of fat.
do we develop intramuscular fat like you’d see in a well marbled steak?
I looked up the Paul Theroux book and see that it was published in 1992. I also remember the first time I saw the term “long pig”. It was in 1983, in a caption of a late 1800s photo of headhunters and a human body, their victim. The photo was on display in the Bontoc Museum, in the Mountain Province of Luzon, where cannibalism was still practiced until the early 1900s by the indigenous people, the Ifugao, despite government attempts to suppress it.
From the column you linked to: The joke was not that certain cannibals referred to human flesh as (a word or words translatable to English as) “long pig”, but rather that said cannibals relished the taste of Spam because it tasted like human flesh.
Many, many years ago when teen I asked a family friend who was a Statlingrad survivor the great question of what did human flesh taste like. Because I was not being a brat I was an all too inquisitive teen asking a serious, respectful question that wasn’t easily answered by a trip to the local library, she answered seriously. In her opinion, we taste like pork though not the gourmet varieties more like the cheap factory farm stuff.
Holy crap. And I thought it was amazing we had a Doper whose actual job it was to fix grocery cart wheels, and when he spoke EVERYBODY shut up in a long thread.
My thought here is perhaps similar to the one above, but the facetious “Holy crap” turns into some kind of real appeal to the sacred, on the reality and the horror. The Prophets lament similar astonishments and recognitions.
Have you seen a series about 600+ lb. people? (who are trying to lose weight but that doesn’t come into play in the answer) Yes, I’d say some human meat can be VERY fatty.
Thanks, this answers my question. Based on your sources, cattle body fat percent is roughly the same as (healthy) humans. As others have posted, the cuts I see in the butcher aren’t very representative of the whole animal.