Chapter Four (Part One)


Having stayed up quite late reading and with no particular plans for the next day, Jennifer slept late the next morning. She put her dressing gown and slippers on over her pyjamas and went downstairs to get some breakfast.

“Good morning, sleepy head!” her mum smiled as she emerged at the bottom of the stairs. She seemed very relaxed and contented and Jennifer couldn’t help remembering what she had heard about the aphrodisiac quality girl meat had on a lot of people, generally put down to how aroused most meat-girls tend to be as they cook, resulting in meat that is absolutely flooded with hormones. From the way her mum was smiling and humming to herself, Jennifer was confident that her parents had enjoyed a very good night indeed! She went into the kitchen and poured herself some orange juice then began to pour her favourite chocolate-flavoured cereal into a bowl. “Remember we’re out with Daddy’s work friends tonight!” Her mum called through from the living room. “I’ll leave you money for a pizza and I promise we won’t be too late!”

The pre-teen always liked when her parents trusted her to look after herself like that. It made her feel responsible and grown-up. She sat on the sofa and watched cartoons while she ate her breakfast but her mind was really on the joke book that had supposedly inspired Sidney’s whole campaign. It seemed very old-fashioned and, while she had found a lot of the jokes funny, some didn’t seem to make sense and she couldn’t really work out what the joke was supposed to be. Some of them, she worked out, relied on cultural references from the time that she simply couldn’t relate to, which she decided was not too big a surprise since the book was originally published around a hundred years ago and was meant as cheap, smutty humour, the sort of thing to be given as a Christmas present to a man you couldn’t think of anything else for, and not exactly high literature. The illustrations, on the whole, also seemed more like an excuse to draw pictures of nude women with big boobs. There were a couple of pictures of children and one of a man with a comically large willy but in general all the meat depicted was busty young women. What exactly was it about these jokes and pictures, she wondered, that has made Sidney decide she wanted to be eaten? There had to have been more to it. Still, she really was just at the beginning of her investigation and was sure she had a lot still to find out!

After putting her bowl and glass in the sink, she went back upstairs and took a quick shower, leaving her pyjamas in the laundry hamper and coming back to her room wrapped in a towel with her dressing gown over her arm. As she sat on the edge of her bed, blow-drying her hair and wondering what she should wear that day, her eyes fell upon the white Sidney hat and boot set she had bought from the gift shop. Grinning to herself, she set down her hair-dryer and brush, retrieved and pulled on the boots, set the hat on her head and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the front of her wardrobe. They were a good fit just as she had hoped and certainly looked the part. Feeling rather daring, she dropped the towel and regarded her reflection in nothing but the hat and boots, a full Sidney outfit! She had thought that she would wear the accessories to give her presentation, and for any “to camera” segments she filmed in advance but had always intended to wear a bikini with them or even lycra shorts and a crop top but now she was beginning to wonder if she dared to go “full Sidney” to add to the authenticity and impact of her presentation.

There was no denying that she had a cute body, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, but could she really stand stark naked in front of all her class-mates? Up until yesterday evening she would have said absolutely not but seeing Sarah and the others dancing naked on stage and the mermaids in their costumes which left nothing to the imagination lounging on the artificial rocks, not to mention the girls who were actually being cooked, made her think it might not be such a big deal after all! There had been a quote in Martha’s book where she talked about how Sidney never considered herself to be naked when wearing her trademark outfit. It was simply her uniform, her own “Sidney costume”. Away from the cameras, Sidney was a tom-boy who liked to wear baggy jeans and hockey jerseys with her naturally straight hair in a simply ponytail. The Sidney Roebuck the world had known was a character created for her campaign and in many ways no more real than Ronald McDonald. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, Jennifer started to see herself the same way. She was not naked, she was dressed as Sidney! The revelation of the feeling gave her just a glimmer of insight into Sidney’s thought process and she hoped that it was the start of a deeper understanding.

It would be a simple enough matter, she knew, to put together a presentation based on the readily available facts of Sidney’s short life, essentially padding out her Wikipedia article with some some photos and video clips, but there were already a number of books and even movies that did this. She wanted her presentation to be something deeper, more interesting, perhaps worthy of uploading to Youtube as a documentary in itself. She wanted to get inside Sidney’s head, to find out what made her tick. The information she was gathering about the girl-meat industry which had grown up since her successful campaign was certainly interesting and would provide colour to the presentation, it was only really of secondary importance. Any girl eaten today, she knew, had been born into a world where cannibalism had been normalised, at least to some degree, for three generations, a very different world to the one Sidney had been born into. If she was really going to understand Sidney, she was going to need to learn more about her time as well. A girl of her own time would know from very early childhood that there was at least a one in ten chance of ending up as food but in Sidney’s time such acts were illegal, taboo and considered “gross”, the stuff of horror movies!

Looking again at her near-naked reflection, Jennifer saw the avatar of Sidney that she had become smiling back at her and knew that she was on the right track. She wondered again about the outfit. There would be plenty of naked girls featured in the video segments of her presentation, simply by virtue of the subject matter, but would the school allow her to make the presentation wearing so little, even if she plucked up the courage to do so? This, Jennifer decided, was a decision for later. One that did not need to be made that day. Feeling very contented and with a new renewed sense of purpose, she took off the accessories and got dressed into normal clothes, feeling much more like herself once more and realising with amusement how much more embarrassed she would have been if someone had walked in on her getting dressed than if she had been caught admiring her Sidney costume in the mirror!

Opening on her laptop, she started to search for information about how cannibalism had been viewed “Pre-Sidney”. At first all she found were articles about the practice in ancient cultures and mythology as well as stories about the Donnar Party and the remains of a teenage girl found in Jamestown and other times when people had turned to cannibalism out of desperation but eventually she found something close to what she was looking for – a blog entitled “From Schlock to Sidney”. It did not look as if it had been updated for several years but that didn’t matter. It contained a number of essays exploring exactly what she had been hoping to find out more about – the cultural attitudes towards cannibalism in the twenties and early twenty-first century.

The first post was a summary of Sidney’s life and campaign, not offering any particular insight and mostly, from the looks of it, copied from an earlier version of her Wikipedia article but illustrated with a few pictures, mostly official campaign images but a couple of more personal ones like her school photo and a picture of her with her brothers on holiday is Disneyland. Both of these Jennifer recognised from Martha’s biography and assumed that was where the writer had found them too.

Another covered most of what she had found already in terms of evidence for cannibalism among Neanderthals and in the religious practices and mythology of ancient cultures, even touching on the often overlooked passages in the Bible where it is either hinted at or, in some cases, clearly described. Jennifer expected it to mention the Jamestown girl but understood why it had not when she clicked on the next essay and found it full of examples of times people had turned to eating each other out of desperation, including the examples she had already read about and the story of a plane crash where the survivors were forced to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash in order to survive while they awaited rescue.

The next essay was about serial killers and other criminals who had practised cannibalism. She read about Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish among others. In some ways, she found this chapter harder to understand than the earlier ones. In the world she had always known, human meat was harvested from willing volunteers and readily available to anyone who wanted it. Somehow the idea of a world where recreational cannibalism, as opposed to the ritual or survival versions described in earlier chapters, simply didn’t exist was easier to get her head around than a world in which it existed and there were people who craved it but could only do so by breaking the law. After all, she knew that there had been a time before cars, a time before televisions and a time before computers but in those times, people had simply not had those things. Learning that there was a time when people wanted to eat human meat simply because they enjoyed it but could only do so through deception, kidnapping and murder was like learning that televisions had existed in Victorian times with all the typical soap operas, comedy shows and documentaries, but could only be watched in seedy opium dens.

The final case this essay explored blew her mind even more. It described a German man who had set up a small abattoir in his house and invited others to come over and pretend to be the meat being slaughtered, making photos and videos of them for their mutual enjoyment, until he had finally come across someone who wanted to be eaten for real. Jennifer screwed up her face a little upon learning that the “victim” as he had been deemed at the time was a man in his forties. She could not imagine his meat would have been especially good at all! At least Albert Fish had seemed to have good taste, even if he had acquired his meat through violence and murder. Reflecting on that story, she couldn’t help wondering if little Grace or other girls he knew might have been amenable to the idea of being his dinner if he has simply asked them nicely? What seemed to insane to her about the whole situation, other than the choice of meat, was how aggressively the man was prosecuted. It was true that he had technically broken the law but the videos proved that the man he butchered was more than willing and there was plenty of evidence that many others had visited his home-made slaughterhouse and left perfectly intact. Surely, Jennifer thought, his crime should only have earned him a slap on the wrist rather than a lengthy prison sentence.

Noticing the date when the so-called crime had taken place, she realised that he would very likely have still been alive and probably still serving her sentence when Sidney launched her campaign. A quite search of his name confirmed this and she saw that he lived to see Sidney gain her victory, the launch of the Sidney’s restaurant chain and the gradual normalisation of his particular interest. In fact, he had only died about ten years before she was born! She wondered how he had felt seeing the world gradually come to accept the very act he had been so vilified for? Had it pleased or frustrated him? Perhaps a mixture of both? From her searches, it did not seem that he had given any interviews following his conviction, even once he was released from prison, so she could find no real insight into this. She wondered if he had appealed his sentence once some forms of consensual cannibalism were legalised or whether he just thought it best to quietly serve out the rest of his sentence, reluctant to draw new attention to himself. Still, she hoped he had taken the opportunity to eat at a Sidney’s restaurant at least once in his later years.

This article ended by hinting at a broader topic to be explored more fulling in a future instalment – the online cannibal fetish communities in which the German man had met his “victim” and other playmates. This, Jennifer thought, sounded like the kind of thing she was looking for and could perhaps help her understand Sidney’s motivations and inspirations beyond the “canonical” story of the joke book. She almost skipped the next chapter in her eagerness to find answers but thought that the blog’s author had made choices about the order in which they presented their material and so, feeling honour-bound to respect those choices, she clicked on the next article which was about cannibalism in fiction and popular culture in general.

The idea of cannibalism being the domain of horror movies was something else that Jennifer found hard to get her head around but she read with interest the discussion of movies such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Silence of the Lambs” as well as their various sequels, remakes and spin-offs. Wondering if they were something Sidney had enjoyed and reflecting on the fact that she had grown up with two significantly older brothers and so had probably had access to all sorts of movies and other media that weren’t technically considered appropriate for her age, she resolved to try watching at least one to see what they were like. Finally she reached the entry she thought would be most relevant to her research.