Alright. Time for thoughts after having finally watched Hannibal.
One smug and glorious bastard. And admittedly you have to suspend a lot of disbelief to watch Hannibal. It’s a fantasy, not a police procedural, and the science is about as accurate as Freud.
But several thoughts did occur, as I am a veterinarian and part of my education is about the animals we eat, and how we treat them. So while I started out thinking “That’s not smart” by the end it changed to “That makes a certain amount of sense.”
Very early on in the show you see flashbacks of Hannibal murdering a young woman, and he’s pretty explicitly brutal about it. The victim is tortured, displayed like an art project, and on goes the plot.
And I thought: that is a right stupid way to go about getting your dinner.
Here is the thing about meat: before it is dead, it’s muscle. And if you make that muscle exert itself before death, you will change it on a chemical level, and that will change the taste.
Have you ever heard agricultural workers talk about how you don’t want to stress livestock before slaughter because it makes the meat taste bad? That’s legit. Aside from the fact that people don’t want to eat bruised meat, stressing an animal out before death causes it to build up lactic acid in the muscles and makes the body temperature rise, which results in chemical changes to the resulting meat. In particular it’s soft, gooey, pale, oozy and acidic. Pale Soft Exudative pork (PSE) is probably the best studied of these cases, though similar patterns happen in other species too, and there is no reason to assume that human muscle from a panicking individual fighting for their life wouldn’t do basically the same thing.
There is another potential change in meat caused by long term stress and glycogen depletion, Dry Firm Dark (DFD), which also makes meat look and taste weird (soapy, apparently) but it’s probably not quite as relevant to the Hannibal situation.
Ideally you want the creature you are going to eat to be completely unstressed and unaware before it is killed instantly. Not the gore and torture fest that Hannibal implies. It’s simply going to ruin the flavour of the meat, and as Hannibal is portrayed as having a very refined palate and sense of smell, that just doesn’t make sense.
Until… you realise he’s not actually eating a whole lot of meat. He’s eating a lot of offal and obscure cuts. While I can’t find something to confirm this 100%, I don’t recall organs being affected by PSE or DFD, and wouldn’t expect them to, as they’re not big stores of short term glycogen. Even things like hearts and tongues are probably not as affected, because they’re not extra-active in those final moments fighting for ones life.
So it’s not actually implausible that Hannibal is preferentially eating organs instead of muscle meat because of issues with PSE/DFD.
And then I thought about a case when Hannibal was actually eating a lot of muscle meat.
Abel Gideon had his limbs eaten, over a long period of time. Notably, his neck was broken. So which his meat may have been bruised (which affects appearance more than taste), he could no longer exert himself. So given a little time to recover, the muscles stay permanently relaxed, and Hannibal can harvest him like a fruit tree.
So yeah, that backstrap Will presents him with in season 2? Where he says “This meat tastes frightened?” That’s plausible, not just being a yuppie about it.
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