Culinary Cannibalism: How ‘Hannibal’ Makes Meat Look Like Human Flesh, And Delicious Enough To Eat!

Hannibal Lecter eats the rude. And judging by the reactions of his unsuspecting guests, the rude have never tasted better. Unlike the show’s characters, we all know where that lung, heart, liver, spleen, or thigh comes from. Hannibal is the hunter and the butcher; a cannibal who also happens to be a gourmet cook.

NBC’s Hannibal (now enjoying a new life on Netflix) pays loving attention to Hannibal’s dinner preparation. It’s like watching a gourmet cooking show on the Food Network. The juxtaposition of gore with shots that belong on a cooking show trigger uneasy feelings. Quite possibly, you’ll experience a range of emotions or sensations watching these scenes. You’ll feel revulsion for the human body parts he’s chopping, slicing, and dicing. But then you might salivate at the final result he serves to his guests. The show deliberately juxtaposes the gore of the food preparation with the delicious result to elicit contrary, uneasy responses. You might find yourself thinking, “Why am I feeling this way?” Not to worry, you’re not uncovering latent desires for cannibalism. Rather, the sight of delicious food automatically triggers your senses regardless of the gore that came before. It’s subconscious.

Of course, those body parts aren’t actually human. Hannibal‘s secret to creating delicious-looking meals made from “human” choice cuts was the responsibility of Janice Poon.

Food styling for television shows is Poon’s specialty. Since the cancellation of Hannibal in 2015, Poon has moved on to styling the food on American Gods. She’s chronicled her entire food styling journey on the two shows in her blog, Feeding Hannibal.

Poon followed a process in the preparation of each meal for each episode. She got a rundown from series creator, Bryan Fuller, and consulted with celebrity chef, José Andres. Then she drew a creative sketch of how she envisaged the dish to look. Then came the hard part; how to find food to double human body parts. She told Business Insider:

“A lot of times, I’ll get a late night email from Bryan saying ‘We need a recipe for a leg, what can we do with this leg?’ I don’t think this is a spoiler of any type, in an upcoming episode Hannibal will be eating somebody, and it will be a leg. They had this idea going around in the writer’s room that they wanted to do a kind of a hallucinogenic evil witch thing, so they wanted to do some sort of candied meat. I don’t know if they just put words in a hat and pull them out and say ‘Ok, candy. Ok, meat’ and then email me, but it sure seems like it.”“I can either rely on my feeble understanding of anatomy or I can ask Dr. Google what the dimensions are, what the skeletal structure is … just the general appearance and then I think, ok, what in the grocery store looks like what I’m looking for. It doesn’t always have to be meat … sometimes an eggplant will look like what you’re looking for, like a wrist or something. Then you have to know the bone structure. It’s got a tibia, but I need a fibula, or maybe it’s the other way around.”

She often needed to convince Fuller of her ideas.

“I remember there was some doubt as to whether this shank that I was preparing would actually look like a cow’s leg, so I put a sock on it and a shoe, put it up against my leg and took a picture and emailed Bryan, and they bought it,” Poon said.

Poon says it helps to have a “very, very cooperative butcher or a guy at the abattoir is key, too.” She prefers shopping at ethnic markets, where she gets “different cuts that you wouldn’t get at your local grocer.”

Due to the high volume of food stuffs needed for a scene, Poon favored readily available ingredients.

Pre-Smoked Lungs

The first episode Hannibal’s debut meal was a pretty gruesome pair of lungs. Poon did a concept drawing of the final meal (seen below).

Poon told Buzzfeed that she made sure edible ingredients were used since actor Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal Lecter) would have to cook and taste it — and the tasting was done when it was just raw ingredients!

“I was thinking something with air sacks,” Poon told Buzzfeed. “If I cut, like, a giant French loaf and soak it in egg to get that pink color…”

However, Mikkelsen was allergic to egg, so she settled on pork lungs from an abattoir five minutes from the studio. “Pork organs are almost exactly the same size and shape as humans,” said Poon. On her blog, Poon referred to it as “my hot lung. (Hot is what they call it when it is fresh off the kill floor).”

Poon added tomato toast, onions, mushrooms, and grilled baby tomatoes with herbs to create the final dish.

If you dare, watch Hannibal prepare his debut meal in the final scene below:

Thigh Meat

For episode 2, Poon had a completely different dish to prepare: thigh. A woman’s thigh to be clear. As usual, a lot of research went into getting the look of the meat right. Poon consulted her niece, a physiotherapist, for the correct dimensions of a human thigh bone, which she double-checked on Google.

Her blog provides the detailed dimensions (including a cross-section of thigh meat and bone).

The final dish was served up to FBI special agent Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne). Over the entire series, Crawford and special agent Will Graham were frequent guests of Hannibal’s until they knew what he was serving up. It was always fascinating to me that they weren’t completed disgusted after they learned what they were consuming. They didn’t seem to bat an eyelid.

 

In season 1, Poon maintained a balance between appetizing and nauseating when creating dishes.

“I want to maintain that underlying threat, I think that’s the key goal, to make it right on that knife edge of really appetizing and really scary. It’s like that excitement of ‘I’d love to eat it, but will it kill me?’ While shooting my favorite thing to hear from the crew is ‘Oh, that looks disgusting, can I try it?’ That’s the reaction I’m going for — something that is so alluring, just like Hannibal himself. We know he’s a monster, we know that he’s just the worst imaginable person, but we love him and it’s inexplicable, so that’s what I’m going for, too.”

So is Hannibal good enough to eat?

Mason Verger certainly thought so. In season 3, he had an elaborate fantasy to capture the cannibal, roast him like a Peking Duck, and eat him; the perfect indignity to the man who fed Verger’s face to Will Graham’s dogs.

Poon, of course, gave us an idea of what a Peking Hannibal would like in Verger’s dream sequence.

“The director asked me if I wanted to work on Mads or if we should get a prosthetic body double. With a heavy heavy heart (sobbing!!!) I said it would be too onerous for Mads to endure being naked, covered in glaze and laid out naked on a table while I drape his nakedness with fruit. So on set, I glaze and garnish the Man-o-Latex instead of the Man-o-Dreams. “