My quirky cookbook concept that I should probably pitch to a publisher.

I’m going to edit a cookbook, getting accomplished chefs (I know a few, and they each know several) to create recipes with the same primary ingredient: people.  There’s plenty of room for variety, as there are many types of people, each with several parts.  Ensuring that it’s still a conventionally useful cookbook, each recipe would also list an alternate, non-cannibal equivalent, like tofu, pork or chicken (humanity all tastes like chicken, right?).

Between recipes, featuring photos of the respective chefs biting into body parts, will be nested stories about cannibalism in popular culture, glossaries of cannibalistic terms,  boxes with nutrition facts about person meat, warnings on the health effects, insets about famous cases of cannibalism, sidebars about cannibalistic cultural practices , and so on.

One of my favorite episdes of The Twilight Zone is “To Serve Man” about an alien race landing on Earth and offering the solutions to war and hunger.  SPOILER ALERT: throughout the episode, government code-breakers try to decipher the book, To Serve Man, left by the aliens, which they eventually discern to be a cookbook. Now that I’ve spoiled the shocking ending, you can watch the entire episode on the left side of the screen

Keywords: soylent, donner, hufu, recession dining, effects of global warming on the food supply, Kuru, Jonathan Swift