The hosts of a Dutch TV program left a bad taste in some viewers mouths when they cooked and ate human flesh on air last night. Presenters Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno each had small pieces of flesh surgically removed from their buttocks and stomach during taped segments, then a chef fried the pieces in front of an audience and served them as part of a candlelight dinner.

The cannibalism was a pretty brazen ratings stunt, but to be fair the show is called "Guinea Pigs" (Proefkonijnen in Dutch) and resembles a sort of cross between Fear Factor and Mythbusters. The BNN network that broadcasts the show insists that the flesh-eating was authentic, even though some doubted that they really did it. In 2007, the network pretended to give away a kidney via a reality-type game show, but admitted at the end of the show that it was a hoax.

Strangely enough, cannibalism is only illegal in the Netherlands when "it involves maltreatment or when it violates common decency," which means some people in the legal profession have spent a lot of time thinking about this in the past. Zeno described his piece of meat to be like eating a car tire.

If you can stomach it, you can watch the entire episode online. (Via @mpoppel. The show is in Dutch, sans subtitles, but the dinner comes around the 30 minute mark.)

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Dashiell Bennett