VeganMoFo, Day 4: Fruity Hufu
October 4th, 2008 10:04 pm by Kelly Garbato
Shane and I spent the day outside, regrading the yard so that the rain water drains away from the house instead of towards it. Novel concept, right?
Anyway, that means I’m phoning it in today with some frivolous veg*n weirdness.
Remember Hufu, that faux human flesh product from 2005?
Hufu was a spoof product, supposedly a soy-based food product designed to resemble human flesh in taste and texture. The Hufu website was in existence from May 2005 to June 2006. The creators claimed that Milla Jovovich coined the term after hearing about the product’s development while on the Eurostar from London to Paris.
Hufu was touted as “the healthy human flesh alternative” for “cannibals who want to quit”, as well as a product for anthropology students studying cannibalism. According to its website, hufu is also “a great convenience food for cannibals. No more Friday night hunting raids! Stay home and enjoy the good healthy taste of hufu.”
Mark Nuckols (founder and CEO of Hufu, LLC)—then a student at Tuck School of Business—claimed that the concept of Hufu occurred to him when he ate a tofurkey sandwich while reading “Good To Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture”, a book on cannibalism by anthropologist Marvin Harris.
Samantha Bee of The Daily Show has interviewed Nuckols. In the interview, he said “I think that a lot of the pleasure of eating the Hufu product, is imagining you’re eating human flesh. For that moment, you can join the fraternity of cannibals… If you really want to come as close as possible to the experience of cannibalism, Hufu is your best option.” Nuckols was also interviewed by a variety of radio and print media, including The Harvard Crimson and The Stanford Daily.
I so totally would have tried Hufu, but alas, ’twas a spoof. I think I accidentally recreated it in my dehydrator last week, though.
Those are partially dried watermelon slices, which resemble raw human flesh. Or, more accurately, what I imagine raw human flesh must look like.
Fully dried, they look like rawhides….
…and taste like candy.
Ew, right?
I think I’ll leave the dried watermelon to Shane. The cognitive dissonance is too much, even for me.
Happy Saturday, peoples!
————————
Tagged: veganmofo vegan veganism vegetarian vegetarianism blog swarm october food carnival fruit watermelon hufu dried fruit dried watermelon dehydrator vegan weirdness flickr photos
October 5th, 2008 at 12:32 am
I hope this doesn’t sound too weird – after all, I am a vegan as well as a medical student, but I have seen quite a bit of human flesh (on anatomy cadavers, in operating theatres and in autopsies) and I think you can safely eat your watermelon knowing that it looks nothing like Hufu. ;) :D
How much water came out of it? I am very curious, as I always think of watermelon as consisting mostly of water!
October 5th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Not gonna lie. I don’t know whether to laugh or dry heave. I think I want to try the dried watermelon though. Ha ha.
October 5th, 2008 at 10:43 am
happyvegan, that is strangely reassuring, actually :)
When I put them in the dehydrator, the slices were maybe 3/8 to 1/2 inches thick; when they were done, they were a little thinner than a rawhide treat. Or, to give you a better idea – that’s a gallon freezer bag in the bottom photo, holding the complete dried contents of an entire watermelon.
So yeah, like 95% water!
November 15th, 2010 at 11:40 am
[...] and even watermelon (looks like HuFu, yo!): [...]