“Human Flesh” Burgers Come To London

This is it, we’ve reached peak pop-up burger gimmickry; the “human flesh” burger.

Chef, James Tomlinson, of London Mess, and Miss Cakehead, a freelance creative director, have concocted a burger that may require a strong stomach; even if it supposedly delicious. To mark the start of the fifth season of zombie television show, The Walking Dead, they have made burgers that apparently taste like human flesh. Using accounts from likes of the New York Times writer, William Seabrook, who convinced a medical student to give him some human flesh from a deceased patient to eat, and the Japanese cannibal, Issei Sagawa, who murdered and ate a Dutch woman in 1981, they believe they have created an approximation of what cooked human flesh tastes like. According to Seabrook, the cooked meat, which he had with rice, was like “good, fully developed veal” and that “no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal”. Sagawa, meanwhile, reported that human meat tasted like “raw tuna”. The burgers are being given away for free at a secret east-London pop-up restaurant, but there’s no need to worry about inadvertently eating what Polynesian islanders call ‘Long Pig’. James’ burgers are made from pork, veal, bone marrow and chicken liver.