I'm A Humanitarian - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Witchblade during the first transformation/takeover by the Witchblade Masane licks a strange substance that oozes out of damaged Excons and iWeapons. They are based on an imitation of the Witchblade's properties, including the transforming field, so this more or less resembles eating one's own cloned tissue. Considering how they were created, the subject is invoked twice. In 9th episode Masane controls herself and shows no desire to repeat this trick... nor is expected to do it, considering the situation.
Zetsu from Naruto is a cannibal whose job is to eat the bodies that the Akatsuki doesn't want to have around.
- Actually, he only does that once (well, twice, but no time for semantics)when he eats the bodies of the two mooks Pain used for his Shouten clone jutsu. He never, ever eats anyone again, and on that occassion was presumably just trying to hide the details of Pain's technique. Despite common fandom misconception, eating fallen Akatsuki does'nt seem to be in his job description.
The Mariages from StrikerS Sound Stage X of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha were revealed to have some taste for human flesh when Jail Scaglietti mentioned that the associate of his that planned to use them on various worlds was devoured by the very soldiers he mass-produced.
The Lost Number Aptom, of the anime and manga series Guyver, has a unique approach to this. He literally ''fuses'' with his victims and assimilates their bio-mass. This allows him to supercharge his regeneration to Nigh Invulnerability levels, although as the series progresses developments taken by Chronos means that Good Thing You Can Heal starts getting more a look in. Despite this repulsive method of "feeding", and the fact his goals are explictly selfish (vengeance against Chronos and proving himself the most powerful life form in the world), he's actually treated as some sort of hero.
- Mainly because if he succeeds, it still works to the heroes' benefit to some degree.
Gluttony in Fullmetal Alchemist is an Extreme Omnivore whose only concern in life is eating people, all kinds of objects, and even chunks of ancient ruins. Fellow homunculus Pride ends up devouring him.
- The Cyclops Army fits the Zombie Mooks variant of the trope.
  - In the first anime, all of the homunculi would fit this at some point, as they become whole and get their powers from eating the "red stones" which are made of human sacrifices. Envy remarks on enjoying the taste.
  - Speaking of Eny, in the movie he gets to eat Hohenheim. Granted, he was morphed into a serpent like dragon when he did so, but still...
In RG Veda, Taishakuten ate King Ashura to absorb his powers.
One chapter of Franken Fran had the victim's body being sliced up and served as dinner. Fran, being a Mad Scientist, was immediately able to identify it as human meat. Of course Fran, being a Mad Scientist, didn't say anything at first since she thought that this was what the guests intended to eat in the first place.
Super Megatron in Transformers Return Of Convoy decides to show how evil he is by eating a bunch of humans.
Many of the apostles in Berserk. Bonus points for the fact that all of them were once human themselves.
Perhaps because of a dept to Fullmetal Alchemist, the hommunculi of Busou Renkin like to eat humans as well.

Close Anime and Manga

In Tales From The Crypt, a Shrimp Grill owner and his wife resort to murder to protect their failing business from foreclosure. The body? They cook it as steaks and quickly become the city's most popular Steak House.
In a famous Venom miniseries from Marvel Comics, the symbiont develops a sort of vitamin deficiency, and starts compelling Eddie Brock to help it eat human brains. When Eddie is too repulsed to continue, the symbiont leaves him temporarily.
- Conveniently, whatever chemical it is the symbiote gets from brains can also be received from chocolate, a way of turning what was supposed to be something dark and edgy into a Running Gag...
- The new Venom (formerly the Scorpion) has even less scruples, and thus doesn't have a problem with the whole "eating people" thing.
In the Ultimate universe, The Hulk has been known to eat whole people. Apparently he tries to break the habit, as this editor recalls an issue where he's trying to get breakfast at a restaurant instead ("HULK WANT PANCAKES!"). The manager tells Hulk to leave because Hulk doesn't have any pants on. Too Dumb To Live, maybe, but denying Hulk his pancakes must take balls of adamantium.
- The Hulk's taste for human is explained by Banner being a vegetarian, the Hulk is just naturally breaking the restraints Banner set for himself. So in other words, Banner is the vegetarian, Hulk is the Humanitarian. It works out perfect.
Transmetropolitan has a popular restaurant chain called Long Pig, which serves vat-grown human meat.
The DCU's Vandal Savage. "Recent archaeological evidence suggests that he may actually have invented cannibalism."
- Semi-kinda-not-really justified in that he'll eventually die if he doesn't eat parts of his descendants. In one case Savage lost his immortality and restored it by eating a clone of himself.
- In one issue of Secret Six, he feeds human meat to Dr. Psycho and Chesire. She throws up. He asks for more.
Among Herr Starr's many humiliations is losing a leg to a family of cannibals.
- There's also the scene where a man's hand is being chewed straight off his arm by a crazed war vet, but he doesn't notice for the length of a full conversation because it's under local anesthesia and the person he's having it with tells him not to turn his head.
Marvel Comics' Skrull Kill Krew have the ability to detect the shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls no matter what form they take. They gained this ability by... eating Skrull meat. And offer Skrull-burgers to those who want to join them.
The Ultimate Marvel Blob turns out to be a cannibal in Ultimatum. How is this shown? He eats the Wasp.
- He was implied to be a cannibal during the first couple of arcs penned by Mark Millar.
- "Tastes like chicken."
- And then Hank Pym bites the Blob's head off.
In Universe X, Jamie Madrox is turned into a Wendigo after eating one of his own duplicates to survive in a frozen wasteland. (Disturbingly, in the previous issue Madrox is shown complaining about the lack of meat, despite the fact that all the animals in the area have been transformed into sentient beings.)
At one point, while possessed by an Eldritch Abomination, Giganta seduces the Atom, then when she gets the chance, swallows him whole in a rather Fetish Fuelled panel.
In Avengers: The Initiative, the Hood kills and apparently eats a lackey who has displeased him. He tells his horrified followers, "I know a lot of you have... appetites. So do I. But you will learn to control them. To be smart about how you indulge them. Or your appetites will feed my appetites."
Kevin and Cardinal Roark in Sin City.
Willy Pete from Empowered. He doesn't /need/ to eat, he just likes doing it.
Batman foe Corelius Stirk who operates under the delusion that he requires the nutrients and hormones from peoples' hearts in order to stay alive, and these are best prepared with norepinephrine by inducing fear in the victim prior to death.
Rosa Sleen, the Cannibal Queen, from The Spider story "Burning Lead for the Walking Dead" in Titanic Tales. She leads a cannibal cult that operates out of an exclusive dining club in New York where they feed human flesh to an unsuspecting upper crust. The meals include a drug that instills its victims with an insatiable lust for human flesh.

Close Comic Books

Little Red Riding Hood used to have more gruesome elements to it. In certain once-common tellings, the Big Bad Wolf didn't just eat Red Riding Hood's grandmother — he fed her the leftovers.
- The Newgrounds flash animation Red Riding Hood features this. And a bad ending, too.
In some versions of Snow White, the evil queen wants Snow White's heart returned to her by the woodsman to eat (and also possibly regain youth and beauty, like historical pseudo-vampire Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in young girls' blood for this reason, following local folklore).
In Sun, Moon, and Talia which is the origin story for Sleeping Beauty, the King (not Prince) already has a wife who, in jealousy, has Talia's (Sleeping Beauty's) children sent to the palace chef to be killed. The chef takes pity on them and kills a couple of goat kids instead and passes them off as the children to the evil Queen, who then feeds them to the King. When the King finds out he kills his wife and marries Talia. Incidentally, the children are his... through rape/necrophilia.
In The Juniper Tree, a stepmother kills her stepson by chopping off his head with a chest lid. She then hids the body by cutting it up and using it to make a stew. And her husband spends the meal saying how tasty the meat is!
A variation of Cinderella has the girl's biological mother turned into a sheep by a witch. The witch then takes the mother's form and convinces the girl's father to kill the sheep and have it for dinner. The mother-turned-sheep instructs her daughter not to eat the meat but instead bury the bones under a tree, so she can later help the girl.
Two words: Baba Yaga.

Close Fairy Tales

Hannibal Lecter of Silence Of The Lambs fame. Probably the closest we'll ever get to a heroic, cannibalistic serial killer.
- Um, "heroic"?
- Someone is Completely Missing The Point.
In Soylent Green, when the world's food supply has run out and people are no longer satisfied with Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, corporations create the eponymous food product Soylent Green, which is recycled humans. Ew. Everybody knows that Soylent Green is people, even those who don't even know that it's a movie.
In Dog Soldiers a group of British soldiers on a training exercise find an abandoned cabin, inside one of the soldiers finds a stew cooking on the stove. After eating a bowl he comments that he doesn't know what it is but it "Tastes like pork." Later they discover that the missing residents are anthropophagous werewolves. Whether the werewolves themselves are cannibals is debatable (half-cannibal?).
- The same director's next movie The Descent also had technical cannibalism - a couple of characters were eaten by monsters who were evolved cavemen themselves.
- And in the third, Doomsday, the guy who played one of the flesh-eating monsters in The Descent now gets to go the full hog - he prances about onstage singing a song by the Fine Young Cannibals, then tosses little plastic plates to his followers, cooks a guy, and starts handing out pieces of charred corpse. So Yeah.
  - In addition to the Crawlers and the cannibalistic savage, that actor was also one of the previously mentioned werewolves. Neil Marshall obviously loves both this trope and this actor.
In Eat The Rich, a disgruntled waiter violently takes over the restaurant that fired him with the help of his pseudo-anarchist accomplices, and start serving minced human flesh (with a side of chips).
In the Michael Palin-scripted TV movie Secrets, a brand of chocolate that accidentally becomes contaminated with the mashed-up bodies of a pair of unfortunate humans becomes wildly popular with the public, necessitating drastic action on the part of the factory managers to keep stocks up...
The island natives that show up near the beginning of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest kill and eat their chiefs, who they perceive as a god bound in human form.
- Also, prior to that, Will encounters a Jamaican on his search for Jack, who mentions "delicious long pork".
In the black comedy Eating Raoul, conservative couple Paul and Mary Bland systematically lure and murder "swingers" — at first to sell their corpses to a pet food company, but at the end...
The French black comedy Delicatessen deals with cannibalism in a post-apocalyptic 1950's France.
And let's not forget Tim Burton's adaptation of the classic Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - which was itself an adaptation of the old magazine serial A String of Pearls, which was written by either J.M. Rymer or Thomas Prest - with Johnny Depp as the eponymous barber. Todd and Mrs. Lovett aren't cannibals themselves, as far as we know, but Mrs. Lovett does sell meat pies made from Sweeney's victims to her customers.
In the second Lord of the Rings movie, one of the orcs is killed by an Uruk-hai leader for trying to eat Merry and Pippin against orders. The leader looks down and announces "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!"
- This is in direct contrast to the book, where an accusation of Orc cannibalism is seen as a horrible slur. (Though this may not apply to Uruk-hai eating Morgul orcs.)
  - Not to mention the fact that humans are standard Orc fare.
Dying Breed involves a bunch of young people stumbling upon a remote community in Tasmania where humans are on the menu, to emulate the behaviour of the convict who founded the place. The kicker is that the Tasmanian state government is trying to use the film to attract tourists.
Played straight and then subverted in Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, Master Of Disguise Sam Smith infiltrates a group of the eponymous tomatoes and is enjoying a meal with them... until he realizes just what the tomatoes are eating. In a later scene, he's back to being casual about the matter (he is a master infiltrator, after all), until he forgets and asks someone to pass the ketchup.
Alive is entirely based around a rugby team being forced to eat their dead teammates and family members after their plane crashes high in the Andes and they learn no rescue will ever come.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show has Frank'N'Furter serving Eddie to their guests who are unaware of this.
- There's a nice little Stealth Pun about the characters eating Meat Loaf, the actor playing Eddie.
Every Zombie movie in existence is about dead people eating living people.
American Psycho: "I ate some of their brains... and I tried to cook a little."
In Slither anyone infected with the alien parasite becomes obsessed with eating meat. Any meat. We are treated to a close shot of the Mayor becoming overcome with hunger, and knowing full well what he is doing and disgusted and terrified by it, taking a huge bite out of the arm of a (hopefully) dead human...
Bizarrely, the film version of My Favourite Martian had one of the good guys cheerfully eat someone. The sweet natured love interest (played by Daryl Hannah) temporarily get turned into an alien monster and swallow a luckless human mook whole, before turning back in a beautiful blonde. She doesn't seem all that fazed by the experience.
In the second Cube movie, the heroine fights the villain and shuts him into an adjacent cube. The cube itself holds multiple timelines, tesseracts and other traps that will essentially mind rape you. You can essentially run into a copy of someone you saw shredded into ribbons in the next room you escape to that has just started exploring the cube. The heroine encounters the villain less than half hour later looking grey and bedraggled covered in name tags and watches from two of the other trapped victims. Looking at how much older he looks, coupled with the amount of watches and name tags he has, it's very inferred he had quite a healthy appetite over the years.
Cannibal The Musical, a musical about legendary Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer.
In Dune, human flesh is not eaten, but water is so precious, the dead are cremated and the water collected and distributed for drinking.

Close Film

Milliway's, in (and the) Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe, serves talking cows bred to be absolutely delighted about their fate. Most characters accept a self-serving food source as ethically sound, but the less-travelled human protagonist can't partake. Without regards to the ethics of breeding or eating food that wants to be eaten, that the food can communicate and is thus intelligent could easily be considered cannibalism, especially in a story full of people who aren't human.
- This is the Trope Namer for Lets Meet The Meat.
Played straight by The Culture in Iain M Banks' State of the Art. Removing a few muscle cells doesn't hurt anyone, therefore why should eating the resulting vat-grown meat be bad? Stretched pretty far in that they chose to eat Ghandi.
Edgar Rice Burroughs:
- In the John Carter Of Mars books, the White Martians subsist solely on the flesh of Red and Green Martians, considering themselves to be above dining on mere animals. The Black Martians, in turn, eat only White Martians.
- In Thuvia, Maid of Mars, Komal eats men.
In one science fiction story by Arthur C Clarke, people stopped killing animals for meat and instead grew tissue in vats. Then one company hit upon the idea of cloning and growing meat perfectly compatible with human needs, and...
The Roald Dahl short story Pig in the collection Kiss Kiss.
- Also used in The Witches, in which it is mentioned that witches in America turned children into food like hot dogs so that they were eaten by their own parents.
A Geral Durrell story involves a French restaurant disposing of a critic's body by serving it to the customers. This leads to great reviews and a mention in influential travel guides (the very reason why the critic was invited in the first place)
Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen has the Pannion Domin, a ghastly empire of cannibals. Their peasant horde, the Tenescowri, are part of the army and double as a food supply for the officers. In fact, humans are the only source of food the Pannions eat, so the Domin is completely dead in its core lands and only alive on the border, where there are other peoples to conquer and eat.
The Greek historian Herodotus writes about cannibalism a number of times. Perhaps most notably is the story a disgraced Persian officer being fed his son at a feast as punishment. Herodotus didn't think too well of Persian people, apparently.
Jonathan Swift's satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal proposed solving the problem of the mass poverty and starvation in Ireland by selling the Irish children as a delicacy. He was really criticizing how little was currently being done for the Irish, but many readers thought he was seriously suggesting cannibalism.
The children's book Baa! is the Soylent Green story WITH SHEEP!. No, seriously. Finding out that your lamb chop is made of sheep isn't quite so much of a big reveal, though.
The 'popular restaurant with a secret' version pre-dates TV: attend for instance the tale of The String of Pearls, about a barber who murdered his customers and sold the bodies to the pie shop next door, a classic pennydreadful of Victorian days. And yes, his name was Sweeney Todd.
- A recent front-page article in the Sunday Sport, possibly inspired by the Sweeney Todd story, involved a man killing a tramp and making his body into döner kebabs to sell at his takeaway.
In Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman expands upon this variant of Snow White (see Fairy Tales) in a short story.
In the short story Babycakes, Neil Gaiman (who eats meat and wears leather jackets - but assures us that he is "rather nice towards babies"), one day all the animals on earth disappeared mysteriously. From the title of the work, guess how humanity coped with this. Neil wrote this for PETA, but it's best not to think of it as a parable — it's far more enjoyable just as an exercise in creepiness.
- Similarly, a rather bad postapocalyptic novel lets us slowly realise that the 'cattle' are humans (apparently bred to be stupid and cow like). This is particularly gratuitous as the novel states that this only happened as the real farm animals almost died out and became too rare. Yet over the generations required to breed the human stock, farm animals with shorter generations and multiple births must have recovered their numbers.
- Subverted in Neil's book American Gods, Mr Ibis, a mortician and autopsist, eats small parts of the bodies he's working on, but "[s]omehow it seemed [...] a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene." This is because Ibis was the god Thoth, one of the Egyptian deities responsible for judgment after death.
The protagonist of Robert A Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is a veteran of a squad that ate their commanding officer during the war (He was already dead, and they were dying of starvation). This dark bit of his history jump-starts the plot, then is removed by Time Travel (someone went back in time and hid emergency rations under the body).
- Heinlein also used cannibalism in Farnham's Freehold as a way of showing just how screwed up the dystopian future his characters found themselves in After The End was.
- In Stranger in a Strange Land, we see one of the relatively rare subversions of the trope, with Valentine Michael Smith encouraging a literal interpretation of the biblical phrase "This is my body..." This is because Michael was raised by Martians, who routinely practice funereal cannibalism to "grok" the essence of the departed.
In The Bad Place by Dean Koontz the bad guy drinks the blood of his victims. His sisters dug up their dead mother and ate some of it and shared the rest with their mob of cats - so their mother 'would always be with them'.
In CS Lewis's The Silver Chair, the adventurers are visiting the Giants and happily eating venison when Puddleglum tells them to stop eating. The Giants' conversation has revealed that this was a talking deer, hence eating it is equivalent to cannibalism.
HP Lovecraft's The Picture In The House. It's really creepy, though the ending in which the main character escapes the cannibal because lightning explodes the house and he wakes up somewhere else has a bit of Narm to it.
- Unless you assume that by his ambiguous wording about that means that he was killed by the lightning bolt...
- The Rats in the Walls dealt with this trope as well, in a truly horrifying way. Let's just say that subterranean stables full of degenerate humans bred for their meat are involved.
- August Derleth added the Tcho-Tcho to the Cthulhu Mythos, a Burmese tribe of pygmies that worships ancient and malevolent gods. By their D20 Call Of Cthulhu entry, the Tcho-Tcho have integrated in American society, and tend to operate popular restaurants serving dishes with delicious ~~human ganglia paste~~ "White Pork Sauce."
Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry. The narrator turns out to have been eating her way across the country. (So to speak.)
In the Tim Powers novel The Anubis Gates, the head of a secret society of beggars turns down a dinner invitation at a rival society, saying that he doesn't care for the variety of pork they serve.
In Terry Pratchett's Nation, First Mate Cox becomes chief of a tribe of cannibals, though he insists he had the fish.
Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle described the manufacture of "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard;" workers who fell into the vat were processed along with the rest of the meat. This was the only one of Sinclair's claims about the meat packing industry that wasn't verified later by the FDA. Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't happening - the factories knew they were going to be inspected.
As mentioned in the trope description, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Not only a cannibal, but a gourmet cannibal.
- In Hannibal Rising, Thomas Harris expands on Hannibal's history, including his childhood and orphaning in Lithuania. Nazi deserters take up residence in his home and force him to watch them kill and cannibalize his sister Mischa, sparking his obsession.
- Hannibal also drugged and Hannibal Lectured nemesis and main villain Mason Verger into cutting off his own face and feeding it to his dogs, during which he eats his own nose. It is implied Mason had previously allowed industrial accidents to go overlooked in his meatpacking plant, exposing the market to trace amounts of his workers' flesh. Mason also took bites from his sister's buttocks while sexually abusing her throughout their childhood.
In the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and film, an elderly woman kills a man in self defense. He had it coming. Knowing it would be impossible for her to get a fair trial, the protagonists get rid of the body by secretly cooking it and serving it as pork in the cafe. Doesn't sound that bad until you realize they served human flesh to their unknowing family and friends.
- On the other hand Curtis Smoote, one of the officers who investigates the disappearance, had a daughter whose life was pretty much ruined by Frank. He unwittingly gets his revenge by eating several sandwiches while in Whistle Stop.
- When working in Georgia, this troper discovered that the set of the movie has since been turned into an actual resturant called the Whistle Stop. She found it particularly disturbing that none of the other patrons seemed to be bothered by the connection to the pork sandwiches they were hungrily devouring. DIDN'T ANY OF YOU WATCH THE MOVIE????
Subverted in the book Bodyguard of Lighting by Stan Nicholls, The medic in a group of Orcs (ironically the protagonists) who are incredibly short of supplies, serves a hearty meat stew to a warrior who has just had his leg amputated. The rest of the orcs complain until they realise where the meat came from...
In Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei is travelling and must stop to rest at the house of a man in the forest. The man, having no meat to serve to him, panics - he kills his wife and serves her to Liu Bei. The next morning, Liu Bei discovers the remains of her body, and figures out what he'd eaten the night before. However, instead of being squicked, he weeps for the man's loss, telling him that he'd have been happy with a simple plate of rice. He later relates the story to Cao Cao, who also weeps, and orders that the man be compensated for his loss! A bit of Values Dissonance going on.
In Outlaws of the Marsh, Sun the Witch and Zhang the Vegetable Gardener own an inn wherein they capture unwary travellers and cook them into dumplings.
In Richard Coeur de Lion, a Middle English verse romance based loosely on the life of King Richard I, Richard falls ill while on crusade and claims he won't get better unless he tastes pork. As he is in the Muslim-held Holy Land at the time, there is no pork to be found...so Richard's men kill one of their prisoners and feed his flesh to the king. Richard goes on to serve roasted "Saracen" heads to a party of terrified Muslim messengers, who watch in horror as the king first happily tucks in, then announces that the Christians will not leave the Holy Land until they have eaten all the Muslims. The poet, by the way, is completely on Richard's side here.
In H.G. Wells' TheTimeMachine, the Time Traveller goes 800,000 years into the future, where he discovers two main humanoid species: the Eloi, a group of attractive, youthful people living in an Eden-like paradise without a care in the world, and the Morlocks, a subterranean race of animalistic, fur-covered monsters that do all the work to keep the Eloi contented. It's revealed to the reader and the Time Traveller that not only are the Morlocks actually raising the Eloi for food, but both evolved from our own species. So it turns out that it's a satire on the class system.
Alice Hong from S.M. Stirling's Nantucket trilogy waxes lyrical about the delicious flavor of long pig (human flesh), which she claims is only rivaled by long veal steak
- In the related Emberverse series by the same author, after the Change, large groups of cannibals, called "Eaters", pop up in response to lack of food. They take the first book's place as the zombie horde in some parts.
In AhabsWife, Una is shipwrecked and fed the flesh of her captain by her shipmates.
Two Bottles Of Relish. Yum-Yummo is not very good on salads.
John Anthony West's short story "Gladys's Gregory."
The Specialty of the House by Stanley Ellin, another restaurant story, which was made into an episiode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Averted in The Lord Of The Rings. Amusingly enough, the one thing orcs won't stoop to is eating other orcs (humans, though, are fair game). They changed this in the movie ("Looks like meat is back on the menu, boys!").
- Saruman suggests that Gríma may have eaten Lotho Sackville-Baggins ("Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately.").
In the Vampire Chronicles, Maharet and Mekare's people routinely roast and eat their dead as a properly respectful funeral. It's eventually used as an excuse to destroy the tribe and kidnap the twins.
The protagonist of Succulent Prey by Wrath James White struggles with and eventually gives in to overwhelming cannibalistic urges which are the result of a contagious infection he suspects he caught from the blood-drinking child rapist/murderer who kidnapped him as a child.
In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, almost all life has been destroyed in an unseen apocolapse. So you can guess what the bad guys eat—and what they eventually store, and raise, and hoard—for food. It will redefine your view of Dead Baby Comedy, that's for sure.
Charles Dickens wrote a little-known short story called Captain Murderer which was about a pirate who would not only have his wives cooked into meat pies, but actually force them to roll out the crusts themselves before chopping off their heads and cutting them to bits. Eventually one of his sisters-in-law finds out. She convinces him to marry her, and before he decapitates her and has her baked into pie, she secretly consumes a deadly poison. He dies immediately after devouring her remains.

Close Literature

In The X Files episode "Our Town", Mulder and Scully investigate a cannibal cult that has developed the disease kuru from eating human brains. Other cannibals included the mutant Eugene Victor Tooms from "Squeeze" and "Tooms"; the diet-obsessed crazy in "Hungry" and the eponymous "Jersey Devil" (although the last three may not count, as they're not quite human).
- Apparently Kuru is only a problem if the human brains are uncooked.
  - Not exactly. As it's a prion disease, that means it's caused by a malformed protein. Proteins don't break down sufficiently at ordinary cooking temperatures. This means to prevent it, you'd have to cook it hot enough to break down the malformed protein - I.E. hot enough to reduce the whole organ to ash.
- Interestingly, this episode was written and aired before Mad Cow was part of the public consciousness.
The Torchwood episode "Countrycide" is The Hills Have Eyes WITH FAT WELSHMEN!.
- Made even creepier near the end when the team, and the viewer, realize that, unlike normal Torchwood episodes, there is nothing science-fictiony going on at all. They're just perfectly normal humans. ...for a given value of "perfectly normal", in any case.
Sylar, from Heroes, gains the superpowers of others by doing something with their brains. It's never shown how he does this, leading to lots of jokes by fans about him eating the brains. Word Of God says that this was the original plan, but they realized how ludicrous it would sound, so they just said that he had an ability to "see how things work" and left the actual procedure unspecified.
- This was given a Shout Out in a first-season episode where he refers to finding the list of Differently Powered Individuals names and locations as "...something I can sink my teeth into!"
- And was Lampshaded early on in season three. "Eat your brain? Claire, that's disgusting!"
The Reavers of Firefly have a thing for eating their victims. The lucky ones get raped to death first and then eaten before their skins are sewn into their clothing. In that order.
Subverted in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Doublemeat Palace". Because of the high staff turnover and repeated mentions of a "secret ingredient", Buffy thinks the fast food restaurant she's working at is using human meat in its products. It turns out that the disappearances are because of a demon that likes the taste of people who've eaten lots of Doublemeat foods, and the "meat" is actually a vegetable product, with a secret ingredient of... beef flavoring. Comes complete with a Shout Out to Soylent Green, where Buffy runs through the restaurant screaming "It's people!"
- Another episode uses cannibalism as a joke: Oz, while in werewolf form, eats a zombie and wonders why he feels so full the next day.
In the third season of Bones. A recurring story arc is the hunt for a cannibalistic serial killer called the Gormogon, who in addition to eating his victims, will make a skeleton out of their bones using a ironic bone from each victim (knees of a bishop, jaw of a lobbyist, finger of a musician, etc.). Oh yeah, one of the members of the team is his apprentice.
In the first episode of Red Dwarf VII ("Tikka To Ride"), Lister and The Cat eat "barbecued person", assuming it to be chicken after Kryten's guilt chip is removed.
An episode of Smallville had a Kryptonite-mutated "fat vampire" who had to devour the adipose tissues of living beings to survive (in a farming town full of livestock, she chose to go after her classmates. Hmm.)
- You think that's strange, she was played by a pre-fame Amy Adams, and it's hard not to think about Enchanted while watching the episode.
In I Claudius, Caligula impregnates his sister Drusilla, cuts her open, and eats the fetus. Don't you just love Masterpiece Theatre?
The unsub in the Criminal Minds episode "Lucky" turns out to be a psychotic Satanist cannibal. Like many of the serial killers on the show, he injected himself into the investigation. Unlike the others, he brought snacks.
Father Marks: "God is in all of us."
Floyd Feylinn Ferell: "... So is Tracy Lambert."
- The earlier episode "Blood Hungry" had another cannibal villain, one who took and ate body parts with special significance in different religions.
The Futurekind in the Doctor Who episode "Utopia" have (d)evolved into cannibalism.
A literal Cannibal Clan abduct Virgil and Gabrielle in an episode of Xena Warrior Princess.
In an episode of CSI, Sara Sidle and Greg Sanders are trying to remove a corpse that has rotted to the point of liquification from the trunk of a car.'
Greg: "Oh my God, I think I got some in my mouth!"
Sara: "You know, Greg... technically that makes you a cannibal."
- And there was another one with a dietitian with a rare blood disorder who kept herself young and beautiful by drinking protein shakes made of ground up human livers. She offered one to Grissom at the end of the episode...
  - PORPHYRIA DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!
An odd variant in the CSI New York episode "Point of No Return". Marty, a former employee of the ME's office, hits upon the idea of removing organs from the corpses of drug addicts and processing out the unmetabolized drugs. When he gets fired (not for that), he resorts to obtaining his own supply of dead druggies.
Giggerota the Wicked from Lexx, whose dress is made of the skin of her victims.
In one second-season episode of The IT Crowd, Moss reads a classified ad stating, quite simply, "I want to cook with you." Thinking it's for a cooking course, he goes to visit the man who placed the ad. Unfortunately, it turns out that the man was a German immigrant with a less-than-perfect grasp of English, and wanted to cook with the reader...as an ingredient.
The Ben Stiller Show had a sketch called The Legend of T.J O'Pootertoot, about a theme restaurant based on a member of the Donner party.
In one episode of True Blood, Mary Ann, the evil goddess in disguise, cuts up a human heart, makes it into souffle, which she then gives to Tara and Eggs. They proclaim it to be unbelievably delicious.

Close Live Action TV

Of course, just about ANY version of the song 'King of the Cannibal Islands' addresses this trope.
C.W. McCall, otherwise best known for trucking songs like 'Convoy', did a song about the legendary cannibal killer Al Packer, titled 'Comin' Back For More (Al's Cafe)'.
The German punk band Die Ärzte has a slow power ballad titled 'Baby', which starts out as a plea to stop killing animals for food and directly proceeds to suggest eating people as an alternative for several verses. Quite likely a spoof of PETA-like activism.
Voltaire's song Cannibal Buffet consists of a Hurricane Of Puns on the subject:
I'm in the middle of the Cannibal Buffet
I'm feeling well — they like me that way!
So if you really wanna know what's eatin' me
It's the man-eaters on the coast of Barbary
"Cannibal's Hymn" by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.
"Mein Teil" by Rammstein, about that famous German Cannibal a few years back. "You are what you eat."
"To Serve Man" by Creature Feature.
"The Chainsaw Buffet" by Lordi. Some of their other titles also at least dip into the concept as part of their 'monster' stage act.
The 1970s hit "Timothy" by the Buoys, in which three men are trapped in a mine. And then there were two.
Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go?
Timothy, Timothy, God why don't I know?
Flanders and Swann did a song called 'The Reluctant Cannibal'. Being from 1956, it has a political edge to it, satirizing the Cold War.
Going around saying “don't eat people”, that's the way to make people hate you!
We always have eaten people, always will eat people — You Can't Change Human Nature.
The Celtic song Jesuitmont. While the lord of the castle is out hunting with his knights, his wife and the cook kill his daughter and bake her into a pie for no adequately explained reason. They probably should have thought the whole thing through more, as the first thing the lord asks when he gets home is where his daughter is, inevitably uncovering the horrible truth—and ensuring a slow and painful death for the murderers.
Propagandhi's Human(e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor Katz) is a satirical vegan response to some of the writings of the culinary author Sandor Katz. It's about eating him.
There's a very well-known, very cheerful French nursery rhyme about a little boat. Most children only know the first verse and the chorus of it, and then discover years later that the song actually goes on to say the crew got short on food and
They had to draw lots, they had to draw lots
To choose who, who, who would get eaten
To choose who, who, who would get eaten
Oheeey oheeey ! Ohey, ohey, ohey little sailor
Little sailor, sail on the waves
Fate designated the youngest, fate designated the youngest
Though he wasn't, wasn't, wasn't very thick
Though he wasn't, wasn't, wasn't very thick
- All that very cheerfully. To be fair, in some versions of the song the boy is saved by something like thousands of fish magically dropping on the deck from the sky.

Close Music

Chronos himself ate his kids for a while, to try to not fulfil a prophecy. You Cant Fight Fate, of course, but there's a rather famous painting◊ of it.
Tantalus tricked the goddess Demeter (who, to be fair, should have been on anti-depressants following the kidnapping of her daughter, Persephone) into eating the shoulder of his dead, roasted son. While dear little Pelops was brought back to life, his shoulder replaced by an ivory one by Demeter, he then went on to spawn the cursed House of Atreides. Tantalus, on the other hand, was punished in such a way as to give us the word "tantalizing." So this trope is Older Than Dirt.
Tantalus wasn't the only one. Pelops had twin sons: Atreus and Thyestes. Thyestes was having an affair with Atreus's wife, so as revenge Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes's toddlers and fed them to their own father before stealing the throne of Mycenae (back) and kicking Thyestes out. For more Squick, Thyestes has one more son, Aegisthus, with Thyestes's own daughter, Pelopia. So then Aegisthus kills Atreus and rules Mycenae with his dad until Atreus's sons come back for their own revenge. These sons are Agamemnon (later killed by Aegisthus and Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra) and Menelaus.
There's also Philomela, who was raped and had her tongue cut off by her brother-in-law, King Thereus. In revenge, Philomela's sister Queen Procne killed her baby son Ithys and roasted the body, serving it to her rapist asshole of a husband. The three were, according to the myths, turned into birds; Procne became a nightingale (forever calling "Ithys, Ithys"), Thereus became a hawk or owl (calling "Where? Where?"), and Philomela was made into a songless swallow.
And Lycan, who fed his son to the god Zeus and was turned into a wolf as punishment. This is the origin of the word lycanthropy.

Close Mythology

Played for laughs in Warhammer 40000's typically darkly humorous way. A common source of food rations for the Imperial Guard and many Imperial citizens on some drearier worlds is "Soylens Viridians," which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Also present in the universe is the infamous Corpse Starch, and the even more heavily processed Block (also used as a clandestine delivery method for a variety of suppressive narcotics). It's unclear exactly how close to cannibalism these rations actually are, though; among the fandom, theories range from "Soylens Viridians is people," to "Soylens Viridians is recycled human protein," to "Soylens Viridians is a soy product cultivated on recycled human protein."
- Of course, this is parodied in Ciaphas Cain by relating Soylens Viridians to promethium (gasoline).
- Odds are like everything else in the Imperuim it depends on what world you're from, (with most worlds modern day Earth like) Hives' version will of course be just like the movie.
- The Kroot, a species of avian humanoids that typically work as mercenaries, cannibalize both members of other species and their own fallen. As Kroot can absorb genetic material from their food, this allows different kindreds to quickly evolve various adaptations. While their Tau allies find it barbaric, the pragmatic Kroot see it as just another form of progress, as well as a safegaurd from the loss of sentience that may result from eating solely prey animals. Funnily enough, this means that the Kroot are the least xenophobic and hate-filled race in the game.
  - The Tau that work with Kroot long enough seem to understand why the Kroot do this and don't really care, as shown in the first Cain book the Tau on the planet learn of the Genestealer Cult, thanks to the Kroot being able to tell the dead has been infected and use them to find nest in the undercity
- One of the many unpleasant jobs Gretchin are regulated to in the service of the Orks is "Emergency Food Source".
- In the mildly less GRIMDARK treatments of the material, Imperial Guard quartermasters in a warzone are ...sanctioned... for serving people steaks without any more treatment than straight butchering.
Goblins don't have it much better in Warhammer Fantasy, either. In fact, they will often readily kill and eat each other. The Orcs will often occasionally eat Gobbos and other humanoids. One of their more infamous battles is the Blood River Massacre and Barbecue. Orcs and Goblins alike keep the miniscule Snotlings on hand as combination cheap labor/cute widdle pets/light snacks.
- The Skaven readily eat the bodies of the dead after a battle, friend and foe alike, and consider graveyards a waste of good food.
  - The Skaven even call their own dead 'burrow pork'.
  - One of the Konrad books features a truly bizarre spin on this: it turns out that in the case of a Skaven grey seer, if you eat his organs, he possesses your body.
- The culture of the Ogres revolves around cannibalism. They worship a deity called the Great Maw who encourages them to devour everything in sight, from slaves to rocks. After a battle, the Ogres gorge themselves on corpses, captives, and fallen allies alike. The most common way for an Ogre to become Tyrant of his tribe is to kill and eat his predecessor. Ogre "Butchers" (warrior-priests) channel the magic of their god by devouring certain ritual objects (examples given in the army book consist of severed limbs, bedrock, troll entrails, bones, bull Rhinox hearts and brains)—they call it "Gut Magic". The only reason they keep Gnoblars (Hill Goblins) as slaves instead of snacks is because they're too bony to make a good meal.
  - They still eat them alright, if they need to, just eating a Gnoblar another Ogre has taken a liking to is a major no-no.
Cannibal fast food is a running gag in Mayfair's Underground game.
An obvious element of the Cannibal Sectors in SLA Industries.
In The World Of Darkness, it is possible for vampires to commit diablerie, which involves eating another vampire's soul. It is referred to in the same terms as cannibalism and automatically reduces the Karma Meter. Interestingly, although cannibalism is at the top of the hierarchy of sins for all races, werewolves rank eating humans (and wolves) one step below eating other werewolves.
- Back in the Old World of Darkness, demons who were banished from their physical bodies were at risk of being eaten by other demons, who would absorb their powers. Oddly enough, this wasn't ranked as a sin.
- And in the new world there´s the Noctuku, a Nosferatu bloodline whose members regulary need to consume the flesh of other vampires, lest they risk going into a hunger frenzy. They don´t gain any nourishment from it and have to regurgitate it soon after, but possesss a unique bloodline power called "Phagia" which allows them (among other things) to absorb blood through their skin, magically conserve the flesh of a vampire they killed for later consumption, or make leather out of a victim's skin which they can wear (or sleep under) for protection.
  - Similarly, there's the Macellarius, a Ventrue bloodline of rotund gourmands that regains the ability to eat food. Among, um, other things...
In Deadlands, engaging in the act of "humanitarianism" is universally regarded as a sin against, at the very least, one's own humanity. It's one of the quickest ways to have one's Player Character turned into an NPC, regardless of setting or circumstances. That's right: the "Forces of Good" would rather have their champions die than eat their fallen comrades out of necessity. Don't tempt Fate on this one, brainer.
Among the many colorful faces you will meet in the Feng Shui supplement Blowing Up Hong Kong is Ng Pui, an insane sorcerer and Serial Killer who runs a pushcart that sells steamed dumplings and pork buns. The pork buns in question are made from the people that he kills once a week with his meat cleaver.
The Denver Zonemind in GURPS Reign Of Steel sometimes renders its dead human slaves into a "high protein soup" to feed the others. (In the slaves' defense, though, the robots don't tell them where it comes from!)
Dungeons And Dragons has too many "really omnivore" sentient creatures to list, but even there are some oustanding examples.
- Sahuagin ("sea devils") have peculiar worldview of their own, key point of which is phrased as "Meat is meat": whatever it was, once it ceased to move, it's food, that's all. Their name for themselves is "we who eat." Normally they won't kill their own to eat, but will eagerly kill for lots of other reasons (like challenge), then eat and share with their kin.
- Flind is subspecies of gnoll (hyaena-like humanoids) which is just as mean, but smarter, haughty, better organized and use sort of nunchaku to disarm opponents. "Flind" is said to mean "cannibal" ("gnoll-eater") in Gnollish. ^*
  ^{"The Sociology of the Flind", Dragon Magazine #173}
- Co-narrator of some Planescape accesories Xanxost the slaad intersperses his planar chant with offhanded mentions of eating sentient beings: mephits (he digresses to mention this favourite food at any opportunity), humans, fiends... and turns it into comedy gold.
  Xanxaost: They are hateful. Vicious. Bad-tasting.
- The halflings of the Dark Sun setting will eat any sentient race with the exception of their own kind, leading to them being called "cannibals."
- Dragonlance features a race of giant goblins called cave lords. They actually heal themselves by eating the flesh of other creatures—and eating other goblins heals them up to three times as many hit points than other creatures.
Metahumans in Shadowrun infected with the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus turn into Vampires, Ghouls, and other things all of which require either blood, raw meat or internal organs of other humans/metahumans to survive.

Close Tabletop RPG

Even Shakespeare uses this one. In Titus Andronicus, Titus' daughter Lavinia is raped by Chiram and Demetrius, with their mother's help. To get revenge, Titus kills the two brothers, bakes them into a pie, and feeds them to their unwitting mother. This is based on the Thyestes and Philomela myths mentioned above.
- In the 1999 film adaptation, Titus was played by Anthony Hopkins, which makes it even better.
- When they visit Titus, Lavinia introduces herself as "Revenge" and her two sons as "Rape" and "Murder." Literary critic John Sutherland observed that therefore, when Lavinia eats the pie, Revenge has consumed Rape and Murder.

Close Theater

We're still debating on how Kirby fits into this.
- There aren't many examples of Kirby eating his own kind in his original series, but in Smash Bros you can eat Meta Knight and shit him out as pure energy if you wish.
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. Your characters, who have been granted the power to transform into demons, get stronger by "devouring" other people with the same power. (Which is everyone.) If someone with this power refuses to eat others, they eventually go insane and start attacking their friends and allies, presumably on the basis that their friends would be much tastier than their enemies. It can be disturbing (especially the factory in the second game), and many of the characters are themselves greatly disturbed by this.
- Though, amusingly, some of the characters who aren't bothered by it are among the protagonists, and only one recurring character doesn't get used to it fairly quickly.
First Encounter Assault Recon's Dragon, Paxton Fettel, eats the flesh of his victims. It is indicated All There In The Manual that he gains memories and information directly from their corpses.
Something that may or may not count as an example: In the game Lord Of The Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth, some trolls have the ability to pick up and eat a nearby orc (from their own side) to heal their own wounds.
In the background lore of The Elder Scrolls series, the Wood Elves are cannibals, eating both their own dead and the bodies of those they've killed in battle. They try to avoid war unless they've had a suitable fasting period beforehand.
In World Of Warcraft, the Forsaken (Undead) race can eat the corpses of humanoids to restore their health.
- Even more disturbingly, there are several recipes that include ingredients culled from murlocs. Murlocs are sapient beings, who use tools, make weapons, build shelters, and wield magic. Ever since realizing this, this troper has refused to have his characters learn the relevant recipes, or collect the relevant murloc bits.
  - They're still walking fishes though. Also, they're oh-so-annoying, many players probably think they deserve it.
- Nay, the most disturbing thing is that many players actually enjoy feeding on their enemies. I once had a conversation with a particularly friendly Forsaken Warlock over general chat.
- Except for the playable Darkspear trolls, all other trolls in the setting practice cannibalism.
- In the Bug Family encounter in Ahn'Qiraj, the remaining bugs eat their fallen family members as the battle progresses, gaining their powers.
The most recent update of Dwarf Fortress has the Elves consuming the bodies of their fallen comrades and / or foes. While this is justified in the lore by their unique view of nature, the other races are naturally horrified by this, which generally results in a Vicious Cycle of wars (particularly with the humans).
In Roadwar 2000, cannibal gangs are a surprisingly common threat in most urban / road areas. Adhering to the taboo of this trope, even the instruction manual goes out of its way to describe them as the near-mindless scum of the earth. (Of course, your own gang can still score Food from defeating the cannibals, which makes the situation all the more ghastly.)
In Twisted Metal: Black, Mr. Grimm's backstory is that he is a Vietnam war veteran who was forced by a sadistic enemy commander to eat his dying friend to survive. This causes him to develop a craving for human flesh. If he wins the contest, Calypso delivers the commander to him and Mr. Grimm has "dinner for one."
The chocolate bars in Deus Ex 'Chocolent! It's chocolate! It's people! It's both!' ... a Shout Out (naturally) to Soylent Green.
The cannibals from Monkey Island would like to fit this trope. Unfortunately, they have to watch their diet.
Nero in Tsukihime, unlike the other vampires, eats his victims whole. Depending on the path, the Big Bad may also eat people (but not whole). Older vampires in general seem to have to resort to this as blood ceases to be enough to sustain them.
Kusaregedo from the Samurai Shodown games is a huge, deformed, demonic creature who got to be that way by eating people, and his goal in entering the tournament is to track down and eat one of the other fighters. In his ending, he eats his daughter instead.
Fallout 3 as both a Perk, so you too could be a cannibal, and an area in the game, namely Andale, "We'd love to have you for dinner," indeed.
- Also the 'Strange Meat' which hunters sell.
  - Also, the children-only city Little Lamplight seems to feed solely upon the "strange meat" of adults they kill. They still persist in considering them "good", so attacking them is always an immoral act.
  - Actually they dump the strange meat into the water which the fungus feeds off of, which is perfectly natural as fungii exist to break down dead tissue (and some living tissue) into it's basic elements so that plants can consume the nutrients. They also noticed that the water they dump the bodies into used to be where they dumped dead bodies.
- Don't forget the 'Human Flesh' that you occasionally find on Feral Ghouls.
- In the quest "Blood Ties", you can refer to Vance, the leader of "The Family" (a group of cannibals who have disciplined themselves to only drink blood and not eat human flesh), as "a real humanitarian". He doesn't find it funny.
Armed And Dangerous has the Heroes eat two villagers to survive after crashing in a desert. This causes some awkwardness when they realise there was a town just over the hill.
In the Rogue Like game ADOM, player characters may eat many different kinds of corpses. Several races will refuse to eat certain kinds of corpses. This may go for other roguelikes.
In Clock Tower: The First Fear, you can find yourself trapped in a cage with another person inside. If you have the right item, ham, he will tell you his name and offer a cryptic hint. If you don't have the item, he attacks Jennifer, and the screen goes black. We then here some rather disturbing crunching noises, followed by the Dead End screen.
Quite possibly, Debilitas from Haunting Ground. The game kicks off with a scene of him butchering some unidentifiable meat in a dungeon filled with apparent corpses — while the heroine waits in a cage. Later, if he successfully kills the heroine during gameplay, the camera cuts away while some... suggestive wet, fleshy noises play.
Saya no Uta
The original worst ending for Disgaea 2 invariably pops up under the term of High Octane Nightmare Fuel, due to the fact that you get to hear, with horrifically realistic sound effects, Adell killing his siblings and then eating them. The sound effects are removed in the English dubbed version, which some argue makes it worse.
Prototype has Alex Mercer, who uses the same sort of feeding mechanism as Aptom, from the Guyver exampled mentioned above. Alex is also the protagonist, which kind of gives a new meaning to Designated Hero.
In Fate Stay Night, beings that drain 'life force' from humans are a dime-a-dozen; all the Servants can do it to increase their own magical energy, but only Rider, Caster and Gilgamesh actually do. Actual human meat-eaters do exist, however: Zouken Matou must do it every time he reincarnates, and the Shadow that appears in Heaven's Feel eventually starts devouring humans whole as well.
Touhou Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Remilia Scarlet (and her Enfant Terrible little sister) both must consume blood, as vampires. They do this in unusual methods, however, as their Ninja Maid, Sakuya, prepares the "food" in the form of blood tea, strawberry shortcakes with more than strawberries in the sauce, and, in some accounts, even entrail hamburgers. Even better: little sister Flandre Scarlet is often presumed not to know she's eating people, or that people are even food for her, or what being a vampire really means. She just likes it when they serve cake. As part of an agreement to keep the peace in Gensokyo, the humans are delivered to her by Yukari, who abducts suicidal people from "the real world" for this purpose, because, to the residents of Gensokyo, apparently eating people is just fine, so long as it isn't anyone they knew. Depending on the Fan Fic in question, this is either the Hand Wave for being Friendly Neighborhood Vampires, or purposeful Moral Dissonance played up with cheer and gusto to creep the reader out.
The Visual Novel and H Game Atlach Nacha is full of this, seeing as how the Villain Protagonist is a Jorōgumo (a shapechanging Giant Spider Yokai) who only just escaped with her life after a battle with her arch-enemy, and who can rebuild her power by devouring or having sex with humans. There's a strong element of Psycho Lesbian, as by default Hirasaka Hatsune (the jurougumo) prefers to have sex with girls and eat boys, but she is presumably capable of feeding upon or having sex with either gender.
The moral consequences of this are completely ignored in Aion, where the sapient (but evil) Balaur are considered a delicacy, with all the top-level, most useful cooking recipes specializing in cooking Balaur meat.
During the attempt to escape Shevat in Xenogears, Fei and crew come upon the Soylent System, which makes both a certain type of mook that you have to fight in specific dungeons AND a very tasty foodstuff.

Close Video Games

Sluggy Freelance actually had a Cannibals Anonymous support group (though their definition of "cannibal" was a little loose). Freaky-Fred, one of the more crazed characters, was later shown to have a Dimension of Lame counterpart who makes rice cakes shaped like people then bites off the heads.
Schlock Mercenary had some fun with nameless mooks: Food that talks is not food. ...but the goon never said anything, so it's okay, right?
The Cat Girl cosplayers in Something Positive , among other things, decide to take the idea of communion a little too literally with a Pepito dressed up as 8-Bit Jesus.as
Scarygoround has some.
Sally, Jar-Jar Binks' player in Darths And Droids whose active imagination was responsible for a lot of stuff in the campaign, turned the Gungans of Star Wars into these and had tried to offer the other PCs as food for her people.
Jar-Jar: But wesa can can use the humans for food!
Qui-Gon: That's a good... hey, wait, what!?
The "Revenge of the Weasel Queen" sidestory for Girl Genius has the eponymous character, Ferretina, a Spark-created fusion of human and weasel. In this comic, one of the locals from the village she's been attacking claims that she demands young, good-looking men to be delivered to her, which are then eaten (apparently grilled with cheese). This comic, meanwhile, opens with a fake out; the first panel implies that she has done this to Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!, who grievously insulted her in an earlier strip, though the very next panel reveals he was simply thrown into a "Pit of Doom", which failed to kill him.
Dumm Comics had a Skadi story arc where she encountered the cannibalistic "Hill People". Read here Not work safe!
The trolls of Errant Story, though they don't usually eat humans, just other trolls. To them it's something of a compliment, they believe it grants a sort of immortality as the spirit of the eaten is passed on to the eater. They did it once to some particularly skilled humans they killed as a show of respect and got a bad rap for it. Actually one of the punishments in their culture is "no one save the dirt and the worms shall eat of your meat."
WTF Comics has one comic where Straha Ironscale (a lizardman) was eating some food. Annashi, a young wood elven girl traveling with him, wants to try some. He warns her not to eat one sandwich. She ignores him, takes a bite and comments how good it is. Then she asks him what is in it. His answer, "Smoked wood elf".
Amazing Super Powers [1]: The paper bag isn't holding Ted's lunch. It's Ted.
Richard, from Looking For Group... is there a nice way to say "he eats babies"?
In Drowtales, Drow will eat almost anything, including humans, orcs, and their own dead. Food is relatively scarce in the underdark and even some nobles suffer from malnutrition, and humans are rarely actually killed for food, but to bury a dead slave is considered a waste of resources the impovershed, war - torn society cannot afford.

Close Webcomics

Comes up a couple of times in Survival Of The Fittest.
- Warning, not only spoilers here but excessive Nightmare Fuel.
- Viktor Kurchatov cannibalises a corpse - and its genitals at that. Later the pregnant Mary McKay does the exact same thing to Guy Rapide, although the former is played as Viktor's Fetish Fuel and the latter as symbolic. (It was Guy who got Mary pregnant.)
What, it never comes up in the Whateley Universe?
- Sorta does, if you really want to know. Carmilla (Sara Waite) eats live things to survive. Her first meals when she awoke in a morgue? A security guard, then a child-beating pusher. She's sworn off. Or so she says.
- There's also Jimmy Trauger, a shapeshifter with a reputation for this and an Ultraviolent rating — actually a pretty nice guy, and that reputation seems to stem mainly from one isolated incident in which he 'only nibbled' on a fellow student. On the other hand, there are a couple of scenes (Bloodwolf & company's attack on Jade early in the timeline and a fairly disturbing 'contest' involving captured enemy troopers in the aftermath of the Halloween attack) that suggest that other Ultraviolents aren't necessarily above indulging if they think they can get away with it or just plain lose their temper.
Being a ferret, Molly Rath of Protectors Of The Plot Continuum is technically not a cannibal, though she's eaten at least part of one human onscreen.
SCP Foundation has Fernand the Cannibal, Baba Yaga, and a dining set, among those that are close enough to humans eating humans.
Kirby in There Will Be Brawl is part Hannibal Lecter Expy and part Deconstruction of the normally-adorable hero.

Close Web Original

On Stroker And Hoop, the two buddy detectives wake up in a bathtub full of ice and assume they've had their kidneys stolen by two beautiful women; but, no, they're members of an enlightened cannibal cult who eat vestigial organs safely harvested from their victims. They took the boys' appendices and tail bones. Later in the ep, the cult goes even crazier, and tries the old "giant kettle" routine on Stroker (though they claim it's because they don't like him). They had to wait a while, as 100 gallons of water takes a long time to boil.
In a particularly creepy South Park, Eric Cartman devises a complex plan to get his enemy to eat his own parents, and succeeds. It's okay though, later he apologizes by giving the boy a fruit basket.
- In another, a group of people are snowed in and trapped in a hospital. Even though they've only been without food for a few hours, they decide they must draw straws and eat each other to survive.
- More specifically, they decide to eat Eric Roberts (because nobody gives a shit about him) and the other people who've come to town to shoot a crime special.
Parodied in Futurama. When Fry half-jokingly suggests that the secret ingredient in Slurm soda is people, he's told that no, they already have a soda like that: Soylent Cola. The taste "varies from person to person".
In an episode of Mutant League, Razor Kid is threatened by the other starving players after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the mountains. With the help of his agent, he negotiates it down to his tail, which will grow back.
An episode of Eek! the Cat had Anabelle made the queen of some bizarre-looking savages on an island out in the middle of nowhere. Problem was that, "In order for the queen to become a goddess, she must be cooked and then eaten by the king."
The king, tongue hanging out: "I like... girls.
The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror episodes use this a few times. The earliest involved the school staff killing and cooking problem students (and eventually, all of them). Another was a parody of The Blob where Homer became a voracious slime monster. Yet another is a parody of The Most Dangerous Game... although it wasn't too necessary that time.
Carl: Homer, Mr. Burns has only been chasing us for three hours and you've already resorted to cannibalism.
Lenny: And there's bananas in that tree right over there.
Homer: Eh, they look a little green...
- There was also a reference (in a non-Treehouse of Horror ep) to Abe Simpson biting his old mountain climbing buddy.
The Sealab 2021 episode "Frozen Dinner" finds the crew answering a distress call from two men trapped on an ice station, one of whom has decided to resort to cannibalism and proves remarkably dedicated to following that course of action no matter what happens. He even asks the crew for vegetables... so he can make a proper stew out of his companion.
Reversal: In one episode, Count Duckula is sent into future, where he is captured by intelligent vegetables. He tries to defend himself by (truthfully) saying: "I am a vegetarian, a vegetable lover"; the vegetables aren't too amused.
While in the literal sense this trope doesn't apply in Beast Wars (though Tarantulas probably would have eaten any hominid he managed to catch), the technical sense gets more than its look in. Tarantulas relishes eating living creatures, and is quite willing to add Cybertronians to the menu- a fact made terrifyingly clear in the third episode. In fact, in the first season, it was this literal appetite for carnage and bloody gluttony that was his defining trait, to the extent that his official season 1 profile talks mainly about his appetite and defines him as a "twisted gourmand", as opposed to the Mad Scientist and Machievallian plotter of seasons 2 and 3. Rampage, we are reminded regularly, (mainly by the Psycho For Hire himself), tortured, butchered and ate the entire population of no less then two Maximal colonies before ending up in the Beast Wars. In one of the first season episodes, Dinobot eats a psuedo-clone of himself (a biologically grown raptor with a cybernetic brain).

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A real-life example which is also an inversion of the stereotype of "natives" as cannibals, is that in one of the areas he visited (perhaps Burma?), the explorer and pirate William Dampier saw what he thought was a barbecue in the town square and took some meat off of the spit. He didn't understand the furious reaction of those around him until he realized that the barbecue was a funeral pyre.
The Aztecs, often misrepresented as a Religion Of Evil, genuinely did eat bits of your arms and legs after a sacrifice. And they actually did it to honor the victim, since these sacrificed to their Gods (especially Huitzlipotchli, God of the Sun) were usually the warriors captured in wars.
- I'm sure that at least some of their reputation was spread by the spanish to justify stealing all their gold.
- The Iroquois considered it a great compliment to be eaten after death, since it meant you were valuable enough to be 'absorbed'. Their warcry was "We will eat you."
- Some Papua New Guinea tribes would eat relatives after they were dead as a kind of burial ritual. (and often voiced their thoughts about how strange it is to simply bury the dead rather than eat them) Many other kinds of isolated island cultures resorted to cannibalism after cataclysmic hurricanes or human-caused deforestation wrecked the usual food supply. One of the worst insults you can hurl at some islanders is "Your mother's flesh sticks between my teeth."
- That is from Easter Island and is part of the evidence that cannibalism happened at all, suggesting that the collapse from a rich statue building society was very unpleasant.
- Jared Diamond used to visit many Papua New Guineau tribes. A given tribe would courteously make him welcome in their tribe, but warn him against going on to their neighbours as they were evil cannibals who would kill you as soon as look at you. When he got to the next tribe they would courteously welcome him, but commend him on his lucky escape from their evil cannibalistic neighbours. They were all cannibals.
  - Or none of them were cannibals and they just didn't like their neighbors.
Chipotle (a fast-food restaurant) prides themselves on their "vegetarian-fed" meat. Hmm...
- (Of course, what they really mean is that the animals were fed as vegetarians. Animal meat unfit for human consumption winds up in animal feed, which is both squicky and a vector for prion diseases such as mad cow and scrapie.)
  - Most people over the age of five know that and don't need to be lectured. And Chipotle may mean that, but that is most certainly not what "vegetarian-fed" means. Basically they fail English forever.
The Duke of the West was held hostage by the last Yin emperor, so one of his handsome sons went to the palace to negotiate for his release. The emperor's favored concubine took a shining to this son and tried to seduce him, and when her advances were rebuffed, flew into a rage and had the son chopped up into stew, which was then served to the father. The Duke of the West later rebelled and one of his surviving sons then went on to found the Zhou dynasty.
Albert Fish, Serial Killer.
Germany seems to have a disturbing number of serial killers who are also cannibals: Joachim Kroll, Fritz Haarmann, George Karl Grossman, Karl Denke. That's not even counting the recent case where a German man advertised online for a victim to eat and kill -- AND GOT ONE!
- Notice that the victim was indeed eaten, then killed. Apparently the two men ate the chopped off body part together. The story was immortalised in the Rammstein song 'Mein Teil', a portrayal which strays into (non evil) AGlassOfChianti territory.
  - There was an episode of TheITCrowd that used this plot. In "Moss and the German", Moss answers an add for what he thinks is a private cooking class, not realizing that the eccentric german man who placed the ad was trying to find someone whom he could eat.
- Not cannibalism, but on a related note, Heinrich Himmler had furniture made from human flesh in his attic.
Around 1931, journalist William Buehler Seabrook ate human meat just to know, how it tastes. He got a chunk of meat from a young human, killed by accident, from a hospital intern. He stated that it was like veal.
There has been accusations of Japanese solders practicing cannibalism on POW's during World War 2
Not to long ago, there was a German politican (with Turkish roots) who candidated for an election. Two of his goals: Make Doenner Kebap (fast food) less expensive and.... allow cannibalism. To quote him: "The animal eat animal; the human eat human!" It soon became kind of a meme to call him "the guy, who wants human-kebab for 1€". Naturally, he lost the election.
- Cannabalisim isn't technicaly illegal in Germany, but the act may violate other laws.
There are rumors that the Asmat tribe in southern New Guinea has not completely given up the practice of cannibalism. So much so, that there is a healthy amount of speculation that Michael Rockefeller didn't simply disappear, but was eaten by members of the tribe.
Historically, slave traders in Africa routinely claimed that their 'merchandise' had come from bloodthirsty cannibal tribes, to quash any revulsion buyers might feel for how their captives were abused.
Whether or not the legendary Sweeney Todd actually existed is subject to much debate, but one possible story of his life as an 18th-century cutler's apprentice and prison barber turned serial killer bears telling. A String of Pearls, the penny-dreadful story that introduced Todd, had him killing people by means of a trick barber's chair that dumped people into the basement below, with Sweeney taking his razor to anyone who survived the fall. Mrs. Lovett's pie shop was across the street from Sweeney's barber shop, and the bodies of Sweeney's victims were delivered to her bakeroom via a secret tunnel below Fleet Street. The story ended somewhat differently from the musical, with Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett both being arrested by the Bow Street Runners and Mrs. Lovett almost getting lynched by her customers upon finding out what was actually in those pies she made. Mrs. Lovett would poison herself before the trial, and Sweeney himself would be tried, convicted, and hanged.
During the Whitechapel murders (Jack The Ripper), a package was sent to a neighborhood leader with part of a human kidney. The writer of the letter, apparently Jack, claimed he cooked and ate the rest of it.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, also known as the Andes flight disaster, was a chartered flight carrying 45 rugby team members and associates that crashed in the Andes on 13 October, 1972. Their story is told in the book and movie, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. Facing starvation, they ate the dead bodies of the passengers killed in the crash.
Idi Amin.
Jeffrey Dahlmer.
Issei Sagawa.
Leonarda Cianciulli, who killed three women, turned their body fat into soap (in one case giving it to her neighbours) and used their blood as an ingredient for cakes, which were eaten by her friends, her son and herself.
Sawney Bean and his horrible family.
Um... The Donner Party
Not humans cannibalism, but feeding cows unused cow parts (brains) is what leads to mad cow disease.
This may well be Flame Bait, but one interpretation of mass/communion is that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ... SoYeah.
According to some U.S. soldiers, during World War II the Fijian islanders absolutely loved the canned Spam from the army canteens—because the taste was the closest thing they'd found to human flesh.

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