Supposedly, a cannibal term for human flesh translates as “long pig”, former cannibals love Spam & people who have been forced into cannibalism report there is a porcine taste.
I’ve always been wondering what occasion would give me cause to use this cite: Butchering the human carcass for human consumption
Neat! If your generation ship is something like an O’Neill cylinder, then since you’re running a biosphere anyway, the various biological suggestions make the most sense. Composting or feeding to scavengers. But an O’Neill cylinder as a generation ship needs a substitute for the Sun - it isn’t particularly energy efficient.
If your generation ship is something more restricted, as you imply, you still need a food source for your crew. This is likely to be biological, perhaps based upon fungii or blue-green algae cultures, but still goop in a vat, flowing past lighting tubes with carbon dioxide bubbling through it. It seems to me that all your organic waste is eventually going to have to pass back through such a system in any event. Autoclave your corpses and feed them right back in.
Are you running a game, writing a book or just playing with ideas for the fun of it?
Ewww…
I hate chowder. I want mine chicken-fried.
Just idly curious, as usual.
Human jerky would be delicious, tastes like pork!
This will completely work in my human jerky process.
Now I wonder, are obese people nicely marbled? Are there any med students around here that can confirm the appeal of aged fat American?
Isn’t jerky made by air-drying raw meat? If so, I would imagine that you’ll have all sorts of prion and viral issues because they will most likely survive the manufacturing process.
Why do you hate me so?
::sniff::
Yeah, statements like that belong in the Pit!
If you’re using them as fertilizer, can you actually get much more efficient than just burying them under your fields?
I like the woodlands burial thing, but with a twist.
Like the old ‘plant corn with a fish’ method, we can recycle bodies in an Orchard method. Plant the body, plant a fruit or nut tree above it. Rows and rows of trees, just like a cemetary, but a lot more productive.
[tongue in cheek]
Then instead of “May contain Nuts” or “Contains Peanuts” warnings, we can label them “May contain Bob Smith.”
[/tic]
No, it’s Granny Smith.
:eek: 
All glory to the Hyno-Toad!
Even if I did give you the perfect set-up.
OBEY.
As to the OP, I’m not hot about using dead folks as food since they DIED. I mean, there was* something wrong with them*. Do you really want to ingest something that was in such bad shape that it DIED? fertilizer seems like the best use. We need fertilizer anyway and if the body isn’t embalmed in any way, it’s pretty much good organic material. But I just remembered someones concerns about the medicines in bodies. So THAT may be an issue.
My thoughts exactly. Sort of a “When You Pass, Turn into Gas” philosophy. Needs a religion though. “Gas God”? Maybe a church of the ethonol saints?
Boggles the mind, it does.
You mean spirits?
I would imagine that grinding them up to a powder would be far more efficient than burying whole - I use fish, blood and bone meal on my vegetable garden - if I just buried whole dead animals and fish, some patches would be too putrid for anything to grow, plus I think more of the nutrients would tend to be lost by soaking away downwards that way. Finely ground dead people could be applied quite lightly to the top few inches of soil - and they’d go quite a long way.
But the lipids are not so good for that - so I think you’d have to render the corpses first - use the fats to provide or contribute to fuel for rendering the next batch, also to run the machinery that dessicates and pulverises the remains.
But the medicines would cancel out whatever pathology they had, so no problem.
Now this is a man Hannibal Lecter would be pleased to have over for dinner with fava beans and a nice chianti.
Yeah, I think you are right. I’ll have to toss in a post processing heat cure to destroy the prions. My human jerky will probably be a little bit tougher, but less likely to cause mad human disease. Avoiding any human meat near the brain or spinal cord will surely mitigate the danger.