The Other, Other (Other) White Meat

In the ancient Greek story of Tantalus, the ancient Greek Tantalus invited all the ancient Greek gods to what, we must assume, was a dinner comprised of dishes eaten exclusively by ancient Greeks. Because he was full of piss and vinegar (or, to be more literary perhaps, what Poe would signify as the "Imp of the Perverse"), the merry jokester killed, cooked and served his little son Pelops to his guests. (By comparison, the hairy Hebraic patriarch Abraham, in the Old Testament, was instructed by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. He was finally stopped by a visiting angel and invited to sacrifice a goat instead... Actually, that is probably not a relevant comparison.)

The gods themselves would taste none of what they knew, intuitively, was a hideous cannibal repast. All save for Demeter, whose daughter Persephone was being held captive in Hades by Hades. (Or maybe they actually called the realm Tartarus, perchance. I'm not certain.)

Demeter was so preoccupied in her vast grief that she nibbled a little bit of the ill-starred Pelops' arm. Zeus, so enraged at this effrontery, decided he must punish Tantalus in a rather maddeningly surreal fashion.

Confined to an eternity in Hell, Tantalus was suspended above a body of water that would, forever, recede just out of reach before he could slake his thirst.

Above him, succulent fruit would grow from a tree, always just out of his reach, so that he might stare at it, smell it, and hunger after it, forever and ever--and yet never be able to grab it and assuage his grumbling, cannibalistic tummy.

But, the fellow did cook and serve his own son for dinner, you will say. What sort of punishment would be fitting for such an abominable, atrocious crime?

"Served him right!"

Katherine Knight of Sydney, Australia, was jailed in October 2001. Why? you might ask. Well, Kathy, who worked as a laborer at a slaughterhouse, was a wee bit upset with her boyfriend, a drug addict that wanted out of the relationship—out of a sense of apparent domestic terror stemming from his violent mama-san.

After calmly explaining herself via a home video recording, Katherine departed to her boyfriend's bungalow and, finding him passed out due to overdosing, perhaps conveniently, on junk, chopped off his head and various other needed appendages. She then flayed the luckless sonofabitch and hung his skin in the hall.

She then prepared three bowls of hot and spicy daddy soup for his three unsuspecting children...

It is said that the investigating officers, some of them, were in "mandatory therapy."

Not the first occurrence of this sort of thing, of course. A schizophrenic killer named Rakowski cooked and served pieces of a girlfriend to homeless vagrants in Central Park, NYC. He commented, '"It tastes pretty good!"

He served her RIGHT, one supposes.

In closing, I will admit that the ONLY time a fictional motion picture scene actually nearly made me vomit was way back in 2001, sitting in a theater watching Hannibal starring Anthony Hopkins. When Hannibal opens up the top of the scalp of Ray Liotta, hacks off a lobe of Liotta's badly-damaged brain, and then, sauteeing it for a short time in a wok, feeds it to him, I literally felt myself become physically sick, as if I were going to puke. Thankfully, I didn't.

Liotta, seeming as if he is on some vast, zombifying drug (he is really just lobotomized, one supposes), eats his own brain dutifully, assuring Hopkins that, "It's good!" (There's no accounting for taste, one supposes.)

Now, we're off for a bit of a nosh.

(Source: True Vampires by Sondra London.)