Artificial Cannibalism - TV Tropes
- ️Thu Oct 08 2020
This is the civilized sub-trope of I'm a Humanitarian: rather than eating flesh that used to be part of an actual person, people eat Artificial Meat that closely resembles human flesh.
Some works present this as being an extreme or outrageous thing to do, while others explore the conflict between the Squick factor of cannibalism and the logical point that this is a completely harmless activity, so why not? Works with magical settings also include this as a solution for beings who need to eat human flesh.
In hard science fiction, the meat is usually cultured from human muscle biopsies. Works at the softer end also use other methods of production, including Matter Replication, magical materialisation and "human-flavoured" vegetable protein.
This is a speculative trope for now, but given the progress being made on cell culture for food production it may be only a matter of time.
This trope also includes the following edge cases:
- Other sapient species which either practice artificial cannibalism or eat the artificially produced flesh of another sapient species (even though the latter isn't technically cannibalism).
- Human (or non-human sapient) flavoured products, such as salt-and-human crisps.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Buso Renkin: Once a person becomes a homunculus, they get an insatiable lust for human flesh. However, the Vegetarian Vampire Victoria eats her mother's cloned brain flesh.
- Fire Punch often features human meat that is technically natural, but came from people who can quickly regenerate what is taken from them — willingly or not. Luna and Agni fed their whole village with severed limbs, while Behemdorg extracted a kind of starchy liquid from people strapped to medical beds. Doma burned Agni's village down when he found their Cannibal Larder. Doma actually did know where the meat came from, but killed the villagers because he assumed they'd resort to regular cannibalism — this despite working for Behemdorg.
Comic Books
- Transmetropolitan: The future Mega City setting has a popular fast-food chain, Long Pig, that specializes in cloned human meat. It's played for gross-out humour in-universe.
Film — Live-Action
- Antiviral: Celebrity worship is such that fans are willing to shell out serious cash to eat the cloned tissue of big stars from licensed, mainstream "meat markets". The company "Astral Bodies" is one such provider, selling items like sausages, bacon bits, and "1st Grade Stem Cell Meat" taken from movie star Hanna Geist.
Gamebooks
- In one good ending of the Star Challenge book Dimension of Doom, a Cyborg in the alternate universe asks for food to feed the dinosaurs present on his planet (long history). Since they're carnivorous he asks for a sample of human genetic code to produce artificial meat for them, which gets slapping your character in the face.
Literature
- Accelerando: "Long pork" gets served at a party. It isn't explicitly stated that this was artificial meat, but the setting would imply it.
- The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump: Artificial human tissue is used as a substitute in modern Aztec Human Sacrifice. Some people still use real humans.
- Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: "Tastes-just-like-human" meat products (mostly derived from chicken or pork) become a vital commodity to ensure peaceful human/Unnatural relations in the wake of the Big Easy.
- In "The Food of the Gods" by Arthur C. Clarke: People stopped killing animals for meat long ago and instead grew it in vats. Indeed, the idea of eating the flesh of dead animals is enough to turn people's stomachs. Then one company hit upon the idea of cloning and growing meat cloned from humans, which proved a wild success. However, their competitors insinuated there was something wrong with the food, and when the Senate decided to investigate, they were only too happy to explain the problem:
Yes, Triplanetary's chemists have done a superb technical job. Now you have to resolve the moral and philosophical issues. When I begin my evidence, I used the archaic word "carnivore." Now I must introduce you to another: I'll spell it out for the first time: C-A-N-N-I-B-A-L...
- Project Hail Mary: Ryland Grace ends up subsisting on what he calls "me-burgers", which is meat made from his own cloned muscle tissue. He acknowledges the ickiness of it, but given that he's living on a planet unsuited to humans or their nutritional needs, it's not like he has many other options.
- Rule 34: The Morningside Cannibals are a club of middle-class people who held dinner parties where they served meat cultured from each other. The police wanted to charge them but couldn't find a law they had broken. Then the press got hold of the story.
- The State of the Art: While a Contact ship visits Earth, one of the crew arranges a feast including the power figures of 1977:
Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Con Carne ... General Stroessner Meat Balls and Richard Nixon Burgers ...Ferdinand Marcos Saute and Shah of Iran Kebabs ... Fricasseed Kim Il Sung, Boiled General Videla and Ian Smith in Black Beans Sauce...
- Strata: The Shand are ritual cannibals. At one point, Silver goes insane from hunger and is fed meat cultured from her own cells because there is no other meat with a compatible biology to use as a pattern.
Live-Action TV
- Nightflyers: The Nightflyer comes across a rundown old ship whose crew have survived by cloning human meat as a food source.
Religion & Mythology
- Christianity: In Catholic theology, the bread and wine served in the Eucharist are miraculously changed into the body and blood of Christ, although they still appear to be just bread and wine.
Tabletop Games
- Shadowrun: People infected by the HMHVV III virus turn into ghouls, who must eat metahuman flesh in order to survive. One of the bequests in the will of the dragon Dunkelzahn was to give 2 million nuyen to anyone who developed artificial metahuman flesh that could satisfy a ghoul's hunger.
- Transhuman Space: One of the weird subcultures that have sprung up is "Clonabilism", in which people eat cultured protein cloned from themselves. The frontispeice of Toxic Memes shows a man cheerfully eating a duplicate of his own head, which looks equally cheerful.
Video Games
- Fallout: New Vegas: The side-quest "Beyond the Beef" involves a former Cannibal Tribe who, in an effort to become more sophisticated, has given up eating people and made the act punishable by death. One member, however, seeks to return the tribe to the old ways, and plans to host a banquet where they all unknowingly eat human flesh under the reasoning that if everyone eats it, then no one would have the moral high ground to punish anyone else, plus it would theoretically make them more receptive to eating human flesh again in the future. One option to foil his plan is to obtain a recipe that emulates the taste of human flesh with ordinary brahmin meat and have him unknowingly serve that. Then, when he makes his big "reveal" during the banquet, you trot out the would-be main course right in front of him, to his utter shock.
Webcomics
Websites
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: "Her Parents": Lady Rainicorn's parents introduce Finn and Jake to the delicacy "soy people". Humans have seemingly been extinct for centuries in Ooo, so Rainicorns can't actually taste the real thing, but the soy version apparently has an identical taste. Finn hesitantly takes a bite and ends up enjoying the taste.
Real Life