On the release of The Walking Dead’s fifth season, British chef James Thomlinson, in partnership with food artist Miss CakeHead, concocted an unusual dish: ‘The Human Flesh Burger’. This mixture of fresh veal, chicken liver, pork and bone marrow is enough to make a cannibal’s mouth water. Indeed, Thomlinson managed to establish the recipe by following scrupulously the advice of experts and even reading real accounts of cannibalism.
The chef revealed to The New York Daily News that he had read Jungle Ways by William Seabrook, a journalist and explorer who in the 1920s had persuaded a young medical student to give him a piece of flesh. He declared upon his first tasting, “It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.” Thomlinson also drew his inspiration from the killer and man-eater Issei Sagawa, dubbed ‘The Japanese Cannibal’, who killed and ate a Dutch student in Paris in 1981. Sagawa had described human flesh as something that “melted in his mouth like raw tuna at a sushi restaurant.”
Many cannibal accounts evoke the taste of veal and pork, rather soft and sweet. Thomlinson reports without hesitation that: “The combination of veal and pork gives the impression that you have never eaten meat like that before.” You are probably ‘drooling’ now.
The tasting took place on September 30 at the Terminus Tavern in East London, causing great excitement on social media. Many curious people made the trip to taste this unique burger, creating a queue worthy of Harry Potter film premières. This is a great publicity stunt for the famous zombie series of which the fifth season’s first episode will be released on October 13.
If you are upset at having missed the event, or want to discover how to make ‘The Walking Dead Human Flesh Burger’, James Thomlinson revealed his cooking secrets (keep them to yourself) on his Facebook page London Mess. But be careful! Don’t develop a taste for it!