High-Class Cannibal

"This isn't cannibalism...It's only cannibalism if we're equals."

"'That being said, it's not a particularly even divide,' Dr. Warren continued. 'You know, it turns out that having access to eating people without getting in trouble is a pretty privileged pastime. And at the end of the day, even cannibals identify as rich before anything else.'"

— Hard Drive, "Wealthy Cannibal Conflicted On 'Eat The Rich'".

Sometimes you get to Eat the Rich. Other times, the rich eat you.

Rich characters usually enjoy Conspicuous Consumption and have to screw over the poor and lower classes to be successful. Sometimes, that consumption is taken very literally and they eat human flesh. If they deliberately prey on those lower classes, expect it to overlap with Kill the Poor, though this is not necessarily the case. The cannibalism also doesn't need to be by choice, but it often is.

The other association is with Snooty Haute Cuisine. After all, the logic goes that rich people eat so many weird things, so why would eating human flesh really be any different? Sapient Eat Sapient is virtually guaranteed to be in play when this trope comes up. Sapience is often needed to grasp the concepts of wealth and poverty in the first place. Plus, the ability for the wealthy cannibals to taunt their sapient dinner with their impending fate is too good to pass up.

Contrast Devoured by the Horde, which can often involve a crowd (generally associated with the poor) eating another person. At times, it can overlap with Wicked Cultured, but it doesn't need to. The Human Traffickers would be under their employment. Compare Vampires Are Rich, when another form of consumer is associated with wealth, and Exotic Entree, another type of food dish it's inherently evil to enjoy. It can also overlap with Consuming Passion, because rich suitors are generally portrayed as more attractive. Contrast Cannibal Tribe, which associates cannibalism with stereotypes of low culture and savagery. Frequently paired with Aristocrats Are Evil.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Eat the Rich (2021): The rich residents of Crestfall Bluffs not only ritualistically kill and eat their staff at the end of their contracts, they enjoy it and are physiologically unable to return to non-human meat. Astor later implies to Joey that this is in fact a global operation. Inverted at the end when Joey leads the staff in an uprising against the rich people, who are then feasted upon.

Films — Live-Action

• The Cannibal Club is a Brazilian movie about an upper-class couple who eats lower-class people.
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: Played with. Spica is an ignorant oaf lacking in class, but he's an extremely wealthy gangster and fancies himself an intellectual (especially where food is concerned). Georgina falls in love with Michael, who has a genuine appreciation for books and culture. Spica kills Michael when he learns of their affair, but Georgina gets her revenge by cooking Michael's body and forcing Spica to eat some of it at gunpoint. This is portrayed as Laser-Guided Karma not only for Michael's murder and Spica's violence, but more in keeping with this trope, due to Spica's mistaken belief that money makes him classy or cultured and his bullying desire to rub it in everyone's faces.
• In Eat the Rich, a disgruntled waiter kills the wealthy clientele of the high-end restaurant he works at and feeds them to the other patrons.
• Fresh (2022): Steve is a wealthy doctor who always had a cannibalism fetish, then procured women for "the 1% of the 1%", cuts off their body parts and sells their meat to this sizeable network.
• The Neon Demon: Jesse flees from the fleapit motel to a gorgeous mansion where Ruby is apparently housesitting. Ruby, Sarah. and Gigi then kill Jesse and cannibalize her for youth. It's left ambiguous how wealthy they really are, but it's a common theory that Ruby is much older than she seems and that was her house.
• Parents: Downplayed. Nick and Lilly are a wealthy upper middle-class couple who move their family to spotless suburbia, and they're also cannibals.
• Society: Billy's family, and the rest of their Beverly Hills elite, are revealed to be a "variant" species who eat humans, or at least suck all the nutrients from their bodies. Billy was kidnapped from ordinary people and raised by a family of them for this express purpose.
• The Theatre Bizarre: The "Sweets" segment features a secret club of high-class gourmets who regard dining on human flesh as the ultimate culinary experience.

Literature

• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Tigris and Coriolanus saw the Impoverished Patrician, Nero Price, cannibalize his maid during the Dark Days. He is still regarded as one of the most wealthy and important Capitol citizens, as is his daughter Persephone, to whom he's implied to have fed human meat without her knowledge.
• Dorothy Daniels, the protagonist of A Certain Hunger, is a celebrated food critic who can lecture at length on the qualities of any gourmet meal, raised in Connecticut upper-middle-class privilege and able to indulge her palate across the globe. The book is told as her memoirs after she's been imprisoned for killing and cannibalizing a series of people.
• The short story "Excerpts from the Records of the New Zodiac and the Diaries of Henry Watson Fairfax" by Chet Williamson details a tycoon starting a fancy dinner club with other rich industrialists, hoping to broker peace among them. It goes awry when another member declares that being wealthy gives them absolute power over others... and demonstrates by serving several valued employees at his turn to host dinner. The club members then try to one-up each other at their own turns, murdering and serving more employees, loved ones, and their own family members. Eventually the founding member takes matters in his own hands, and buys out all their companies one by one, then ends the club with a delectable solo meal... using all the other members as ingredients.
• The Fifth Season: During the Seasons when the planet becomes a Death World, it's a grim fact that "you don't ask about the meat". Some of the Sanzed elite, however, developed a taste and quietly continued the practice into peacetime, to the disgust of outsiders who know.
• Rupert Wong, the protagonist of Food Of The Gods by Cassandra Khaw, is a professional chef who's frequently stuck preparing human flesh for his boss, a wealthy, powerful ghoul. He notes that it's more about the consumption than the sustenance.
• Hannibal Lecter is a Wicked Cultured "pure sociopath" famed for eating people. He's arrested early in Red Dragon for eating the "sweetbreads" (thymus and pancreas) of several people, including an annoying flute player, confesses to eating the liver of a census taker with Amarone in The Silence of the Lambs, and eats a man's brain while the poor fellow is still alive in Hannibal.
• Horowitz Horror: In "Harriet's Horrible Dream", spoiled rich girl Harriet is sold by her parents to a restaurant called the Sawney Bean, which serves human meat to rich patrons "who have tried everything else, and want to try something different."
• Inheritance Trilogy: The Arameri Dynasty rule the world with the power of four enslaved gods and enjoy whatever hedonistic pleasures they want in the palace of Sky. Some of them revived the old tribal practice of cannibalism, more or less For the Evulz.
• Downplayed in Lu Xun's A Madman's Diary. The "madman" realizes that cannibalism is a normal part of society. While it's not explicitly associated with enormous riches, the only way to escape cannibalism is to become homeless and drop out of society altogether.
• Jonathan Swift's satirical essay A Modest Proposal advances the idea of impoverished Irish people selling their babies to the British aristocracy as food. For bonus humor, the essay concludes with a list of reasonable solutions to Irish poverty, all of which Swift sarcastically dismisses as ridiculous.
• Played with in the Skeleton Crew story "Survivor Type". The narrator is an apparently great doctor who resorts to Autocannibalism out of desperation after being stranded by the sinking of a yacht. However, he repeatedly insists that this is proof of his much stronger will to live than ordinary people.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: For Lord Ramsay Bolton's wedding to an impostor girl posing as "Lady Arya Stark", Lord Wyman Manderly has his cooks prepare three massive wedding pies the size of wagon wheels, filled with chunks of seasoned pork and vegetables swimming in a savory brown gravy. The "pork" is implied to be the flesh of Rhaegar, Symond, and Jared Frey, served up to their relatives and allies as retribution for the perfidy and heinous violation of Sacred Hospitality of the Red Wedding. Downplayed, though, as the Freys are a very important family, but are viewed as the odd one out of the Westerosi noble houses and uncouth by the other aristocrats.
• Referenced in the Neil Gaiman short story "Sunbird" when Crusty reveals that a past incarnation of the Epicurean Club had tried human flesh, which was apparently legal at the time it had happened, provided it came from someone sentenced to death in the electric chair, and that it was nothing special and prompted no one to pursue cannibalism regularly, save for one member who was already prone that way.

Live-Action TV

• Atlanta: "Terrare" reveals that Van is involved in a particularly extreme version of French Cuisine Is Haughty, running hands backwards and forwards for an extremely fancy private chef who works for Alexander Skarsgård.
• Hannibal: Dr. Lecter is a Man of Wealth and Taste, a Supreme Chef, and, of course, a cannibal who sneaks a lot of human flesh into his Fancy Dinners. It's all linked to his sense of superiority:
  Hannibal: This isn't cannibalism... it's only cannibalism if we're equals.
• I, Claudius: Caligula might be despised by everyone, but he is still the third emperor of Rome. He impregnates his sister, Drusilla, and eats the fetus. However, in opposition to Kill the Poor, Caligula does this because he fears the child will be more powerful than him (with the implication that he may believe he's absorbing the fetus's power by consuming it).
• Inside No. 9: Feigned in "The Riddle of the Sphinx". Tyler forces Squires to eat a piece of Nina for revenge, to make it look as if the snooty Cambridge academic had lost his mind and believed that he was the Riddling Sphinx (who ate her victims).
• In this Saturday Night Live parody of Annie, Mr. Warbucks is part of an exclusive club that ritualistically dines on human flesh. The provider tries to reassure Annie that it's adult meat only; she's not on the menu.

Music

• Evillious Chronicles: In the song "Evil Food Eater Conchita," a noblewoman named Conchita makes a deal with the Demon of Gluttony and becomes able to eat anything. Every night, she enjoys a supper consisting of the most disgusting, inedible dishes her chef can come up with. When her fifteenth chef asks to take a vacation, she eats him, and then proceeds to eat the rest of the servants. Finally, when no one is left, she declares, "There's still something I haven't eaten," and eats herself.
• The video for "Sick Sick Sick" by Queens of the Stone Age has the band performing for a gorgeous, wealthy woman who's also a cannibal. She has the band shackled and performing for her at dinner. One by one, she has each member sent to the kitchen to be cooked so she can eat him in front of the other members. Eventually the lead singer is the only one left, but she cooks and eats him too.

Mythology & Folklore

• Classical Mythology: Kronos was once the King of the Gods. To avoid getting overthrown by his children he ate his daughters and sons (they survived, being immortal).
• Typically speaking, ogres were often depicted this way in Fairy Tales (while modern fantasy depicts them as barbarians). Ogres like those in Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots lived in castles and had ogrish royal titles, all the while kidnapping children to eat. Ogres often display Affably Evil traits in many fairy tales.

Tabletop Games

• Vampire: The Requiem: The Macellarius bloodline are Old Money even by vampire standards and claim to cultivate only the most rarefied tastes. Not content merely to drink human blood, they've also taught their undead bodies to digest flesh in tremendous excess.

Video Games

• In Digital Devil Saga 2, those infected with the Demon Virus have to eat human flesh or go insane, but has the unexpected upside of being able to withstand the corrupted sunlight that turns organic matter to stone. Madame Cuvier's plan to save humanity from the sun is to infect her chosen elite with the Virus. Her chosen elite live idle lives in the apocalypse, blissfully unaware that Cuvier's canned meat is made from the people of the slums.
• Fallout: New Vegas: The White Glove Society are a tribe who run the Ultra Luxe casino, wear tuxedos and evening wear, indulge in fine dining and generally maintain an air of being a cut above the common savages of the wasteland. They were a Cannibal Clan at some point in their history, but were made to swear off that lifestyle as part of a contract with Mr. House, owner of the New Vegas Strip where their casino operates. However, some of their members have reverted to "the old ways" and are trying to manipulate the rest into breaking the contract.
  Mortimer: There is a meat sweeter than the most cornfed livestock. Most of you have tasted it. All of you have coveted it. [...] For our society to be truly elite, we must dine on the most delicious, the most exclusive food known to us.
• Donald Love from Grand Theft Auto III is a wealthy businessman and has been photographed at a "morgue party". The prequel Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories confirms his cannibalistic tendencies with one cut scene showing him eating a clearly human corpse. One of his last missions involves stealing a couple of corpses (one of whom is Avery Carrington) to be eaten on his plane.
• Resident Evil Village: While Lady Alcina Dimitrescu needs to eat human flesh as a side effect of her mutation, the fact remains that she's a rich aristocrat who literally preys on her servants and appears to take sadistic pleasure in killing and eating people, torturing them to death slowly in the dungeons of her castle as well as making their blood into wine, and seems to view her victims as lesser compared to herself.
• Shadowrun Returns: Gaichu from Hong Kong was raised in a wealthy corporate family and is shown to be a very cultured individual. Forced into cannibalism by his condition, he still observes traditional Japanese culinary customs, going into detail on how he makes sashimi out of the flanks of his kills and treats them in saltwater to bring out the collagen before lightly seasoning his meal.
• This is the general hat of the Phamysht from Star Control: Origins, who are one of the only species in the game who show signs of high society: art, etiquette, et cetera. They are also cannibals who eat other intelligent beings alive and conscious. According to them, this is the highest form of fine dining in existence: to be able to talk to your meal as you consume it. You can take advantage of this by giving them a Remote Body to eat — they're willing to discuss some very important topics with their meals.

Websites

• The Hard Times: The spin-off Hard Drive has "Wealthy cannibal conflicted on 'Eat the Rich.'"
• SCP Foundation:
  • Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd., a club for the extraordinarily wealthy and utterly amoral, owned a table that transforms all food set on it into human flesh. It was introduced as a curiosity at Fancy Dinners but became popular enough to become a permanent installation.
  • The log of anomalous items mentions an illegal South American restaurant that caught the eye of the Foundation by offering snow leopard, chimpanzee, woolly mammoth, human, and SCP-███ meat as Exotic Entrees. It apparently catered only to the very wealthy, as it once held an auction selling a strange egg from an unidentifiable species to a rich Chinese stockbroker for at least a million dollars.
  • SCP-3288 are a collection of deformed humanoids descended from the royal Austrian Habsburg family. They kidnap "peasants" and take them to the sewers where they live and eat them.

Western Animation

• Hazbin Hotel: Alastor was a cannibalistic serial killer when he was alive, and he has not given up these habits now that he's in Hell. However, he's also an Affably Evil Southern Gentleman wearing a nice suit who places a high degree of importance on manners.
• The Venture Bros.: In "The Unicorn in Captivity", Dr. Venture is invited to an Eyes Wide Shut-style sex-party hosted by a cabal of wealthy elites that (allegedly) control the world from the shadows. When Venture helps himself to party snacks, he is told that he is sampling "orphan patee"; Venture nearly throwing up when told this.

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