Food is fashion these days. A symbol of your 'lifestyle'; a token gesture of the kind of culture and upbringing you were formed from. We adaptable humans eat everything, even substances not considered compatible with our digestive processes are shoveled into stomachs across the world in ever more sophisticated and recombined forms.

But one widespread consumable remains taboo: the primeval salvations induced by eating human flesh. Maybe humanity's longest surviving, self inflicted terror. The ultimate delicacy?

As with most deeply significant human taboos, time buried our cannibalistic urges only to have them resurface, reborn through the democratically-shared, social-consciousness that is the internet:

"...come to me, I'll eat your delicious flesh" - link

And the world reeled in disgust as though a new horror had been discovered. But before you pass judgement on the cannibal and their inappropriate desire for man-flesh, consider that maybe their actions can be justified under certain circumstances:

... Eating someone who has died in order to survive is incorporating their substance, and it is quite possible to compare this with a graft. Flesh survives when assimilated by someone in extreme need, just as it does when an eye or heart of a dead man is grafted onto a living man. - link

...and once a justification has been found, surely then mankind should assimilate that justification, morph it into new forms. Modern society is ultimately a machine towards homogeny, to simulation. In other words - we shall continue to abhor eating human flesh, but surely to taste it is something altogether different:

Old ones are tough. Young men and women taste better. And babies taste like fish. The flesh is very soft... - link

And so, today's Mu Haiku mission, if you choose to accept it...

The taste of flesh made modern:

How would media spinners and advertising executives turn the unique flavour of human into a brand-able, mainstream product? What place does mankind's most primal taboo have in today's globalised world? Once human taste is free from taboo its simulacrisation is inevitable:

His famous diet
Old Atkin's forgot - Human:
The other white meat

That's my first attempt. Where is yours? It's all a bit too much for some people:

"There is no rational basis for asserting that a human being has special rights: A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" - link

Mu to that!

Categories: Mu, Haiku, History, Human, Food, Weird, Humour, Culture, Fun, Meme, Simulacrum, Cannibalism

Labels: Mu Haiku

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