Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Eating your own boogers is gross, but it might be smart. Assuming you have clean fingers, lung specialist
Friedrich Bischinger points out that snot contains antiseptic enzymes that kill or weaken bacteria. Reintroducing those crippled microorganisms may allow
your immune system to develop antibodies in relative safety. Now, that is good to know- -nose. But is eating your own snot cannibalism(?) Self cannibalism. Just like a cow or chicken or
fish or fruit or vegetable you are made out of alot of edible things. The meat on an average human
body contains 77,000 dietary calories worth of nutritional energy. Yum(!) If you decide to
become a cannibal, just don't show up late for dinner or you'll get the cold shoulder. Jokes aside, cannibalism is a major taboo. It's off-putting at a visceral level. Humans have dignity, they are more
than just skin bags full of organs. They're more than just something to put on a plate.
But human meat has been put on plates... and in bellies.
There are reports of cannibalism occurring in times of famine as a last resort, and because of curiosity and art. In the late 1980s, artist Rick Gibson publicly ate human tonsils and other donated human parts in London and Canada. In 2006, artist Marco Evaristti cooked and canned meatballs prepared with his own body fat, removed via liposuction. In 2011, Dutch TV presenters Dennis Storm and
Valerio Zeno cooked and ate pieces of each other on a TV show whose title meant "guinea pigs".
Because both of them lived, and both consented to the act, they didn't do anything illegal. One year later, a Japanese man posted this tweet. Five diners took up his offer
and on April 13th, 2012, they were served a $250 per plate meal consisting of his genitals. A darker story occurred in 2001, when Armin Meiwes ate and killed a volunteer he found on the now defunct Cannibal Cafe. Although his meal ostensibly consented to the menu, Meiwes was convicted of murder and now, serving a life sentence in prison, has become a devout vegetarian. Disgust aside, one question remains. If you were to use your taste buds to taste your bud, what would it taste like? To be clear, taste is a sensation caused by something
in your mouth chemically reacting with receptors in your taste buds. Flavor is the even more complex experience of taste, combined with smell, and
information, from the trigeminal nerve about things like temperature, texture, pain and pungency, as far as the cooked but otherwise unadulterated spice-less, sauce-less flavor of human meat. The late William Seabrook provided, in my opinion, the best description. While in West Africa, Seabrook
interviewed members of the Gear tribe, people who had eaten human flesh and found their
descriptions unsatisfactory. So, when he returned to Paris he struck a
sneaky deal with an intern at the Sorbonne and obtained a chunk of human meat from an otherwise
healthy body recently involved in an accident. He carefully prepared
the meat and wrote that, quote, "It was like good, fully developed veal. Not young, but not yet beef. It was mild, good meet with no other sharply
defined or highly characteristic tastes, such as, for instance, goat, high game and pork. The steak was slightly tougher
than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from
which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender and in color, texture, smell as well as taste
strengthened my certainty that, of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which at this meat is accurately comparable."
Seabrook never gave us any
recipes or complementary flavor recommendations. But that brings us to this video's
title's second meaning. What does human taste like? What does the human palate prefer?
Interestingly, of all the possible combinations of identified flavors we consume, human cuisine only features a relatively small number of recipes. A couple of years ago scientific
reports published a great paper on the chemistry and networks behind food pairing. Researchers took 381 ingredients used in
five global cuisines and 1,021 molecular compounds known to
contribute to their flavors and created a flavor network. The size of the bubble represents the
ingredients prevalence in cooking. The thickness of the lines connecting
ingredients reflects the number of flavor inducing molecules they significantly share. The researchers' flavor network backbone spans fourteen different food categories
and is quite interesting. By comparing this network to tens of
thousands of recipes they found that North American and
Western European dishes tend to combine ingredients that share flavor compounds, while East Asian cuisine avoids them. But that trend was caused by a few out lighters in each cuisine, that,
if ignored, caused the difference in amount of sharing to lessen. Those few ingredients tend to be the most authentic. They tend
to be the most responsible for the taste palette of a regional cuisine and contribute to this illuminating visualization.
But some flavors don't go together in any cuisine. For instance, orange juice and toothpaste. Why does orange juice taste
so disgusting right after brushing? Well, most toothpastes contain sodium
lauryl sulfate - a chemical that helps the paste get sudsy and frothy during use. That action helps pull brushed off
debris away from your teeth, but sodium lauryl sulfate also
suppresses sweet receptors in your mouth and destroy phospholipids that inhibit your bitter receptors, making sweet orange juice taste not so sweet and grossly bitter, for up to an hour after brushing. What interests me the most about flavor
is the fact that the things that cause it eventually become you! You are what you eat, scientifically. Your body is always losing dead cells
but the elements and molecules you ingest are processed by your body into new body. Here's a fun way to think about it. Under the direction of DNA, a cat is made out of air, water and cat food. That's it. Cats have less varied diets than humans. We can taste sweetness but cats lack the gene required to do so.
However, they can taste ATP, a molecule that moves around
chemical energy for cells to use in the body, which may be a sign to them that they're tasting meat. The point is, sights and sounds and textures and shapes and smells are the names we give to things that
eventually become our memories. But flavor is the name we give to the
experience of things that eventually become our bodies. Contemplating the flavor of human meat is gross. But think of it this way: you're currently tasting human,
you're tasting human right now. Your tongue and taste buds are in
contact with your mouth almost constantly. Now, granted, it's more
of a passive thing - your mouth just happens to contain your tongue. You're not actually eating yourself... but you kind of are. Your body is constantly swallowing
your own mucus and digesting pieces of your body like
dead cells from your tongue and cheek. But that's nothing
compared to the self cannibalism of the sea squirt.
The sea squirt lives a sort of self-cannibalistic 'Flowers for Algernon' life. When born, it resembles a tadpole
and has a notochord, putting it in the same phylum as humans.
It swims around until it finds a nice place to adhere. A rock, a plant. Once stuck, it begins retrogressive metamorphosis. Literally digesting its own
nervous system, eating the closest thing it ever had to a brain and lives the rest of its life in a
sensile un-locomoting clump. It is a bit of a downgrade, but they are prime evidence that the
evolution of the brain was spawned by the need to move as soon.
As these guys don't need to move around, they eat their brains.
That is way more extreme than the self-cannibalism you participate in every day by swallowing. But don't feel bad.
About every three months or so you swallow and digest your own body weight worth of you. That means that every day you are a
little more than one percent of the mythical ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. You are what you eat but you are also a thing that you eat. And as always, thanks for watching.
SLS has also been linked to causing canker sores.