What Does Human Meat Taste Like? This Guy Cut Out A Piece Of His Leg To Find Out


A presenter of the BBC series Brit Lab consumed part of his own leg in order to see what human flesh tastes like.

Greg Foot went to a laboratory, where he was anesthetized. While he was still conscious, a surgeon inserted an instrument into his thigh. Though he felt no pain, you can see him cringe as the instrument penetrates deeper and removes some of his muscle. “I felt that,” he said after the procedure was over.

Foot then takes a look at the small bits of flesh. The surgeon explains that, invisible to the eye, connective tissue wraps around the meat. Foot narrates a comparison of human and chicken meat:

“Analysis of my leg reveals that it’s about half the same type of muscle found in chicken breast, but it also contains similar muscle fibers to those found in cuts of beef.”

He goes to a Nottingham laboratory to research his samples. Notably, it’s illegal to eat human. Nonetheless, he has his cooked muscle analyzed by smell and projected taste. He has an interesting take on the smell of cooked human flesh:

“Actually, that smells quite nice. Really meaty, though. Like, a lot richer than pork or chicken. It’s like beef or ale stew, or something.”


The analyst projects that cooked human flesh tastes like a combination of lamb and pork. Foot says he’d rather like to taste it himself, so he opts for the closest possible approximation. He whips up a burger of lamb and pork and shares his thoughts:

“It’s good! It’s like, really beefy, bit lamby. I think that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to tasting human. I’ll tell you what… It’s pretty good.”

Predictably, much of the comment section on YouTube is filled with either expressions of disgust or disappointment that no human flesh was actually consumed.

Featured image by Dani Mettler, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.