The other, other white meat?

The other night while I was carving up the last slab of my spiral-sliced ham I had an… interesting thought. What if people taste as delicious as pigs?!

I know, I know. That’s just not right to even be thinking. But just bear with me a minute while we go through the chain of thought that ended there.
Anyone who’s cut up a spiral-sliced ham before knows that at some point the spiral stops and you have to manually cut off the remaining portions of ham. Seeing as I’d reached that point, I’d pulled out my knife and starting cutting out the leg bone and most of the fat. That’s when I realized that what I’m assuming was the pig’s knee looks remarkably similar to a human knee. (While I should have called Hayley down to verify that conclusion, I was in the middle of a feeding frenzy and was too busy stuffing small hunks of ham in my mouth to slow down.) I even made the joke to myself that I should carefully cut out the cartilage so I could donate it to StudBoy so he’d have a little bit in his thrice-repaired knee.

While wondering if that’d even be possible, I recalled hearing some bit of info that humans and pigs are not all that different. That the organs, tissues, and the like were quite similar in function and design. Here are a few links that back up my memory:

http://www.goshen.edu/bio/PigBook/humanpigcomparison.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotransplantation

But if pigs and humans are so closely related from an anatomy stand-point, so far as even having the same muscle groups with similar functions, wouldn’t it stand to reason that people would taste just as delicious as pigs? And even if we’re just ½ as delicious as pigs, that’s still pretty tasty. Pigs are possibly the most delicious animal out there. Bacon, ham, and pork chops are all meat all-stars.

No, I’m not going to start eating people for dinner. I still have a moral issue with that. But this does possibly change the odds, and the timing, of whether or not I’d eat a friend in a life-or-death situation. If I’m trapped somewhere and haven’t eating anything in a week and I know that the person sitting next to me tastes like pork chops…they’ve got a very real problem on their hands. If I was able to somehow fashion a pan suitable for bacon, they’ve got a huge problem. They’d be wise to either redouble their efforts to find food, or be very careful about sleeping.

But clearly this can’t be the case. If people really did taste like pigs, we’d have been wiped out before we were able to think our way out of the middle of the food pyramid. I’m sure we’ve all heard the rumor that humans only survived because we taste like crap and other animals just didn’t want to eat us. While I don’t really believe that to be the only reason, maybe there really is something to that theory.

I guess there really is only 1 way to settle this. Anyone care to be slow-roasted and smoked in the name of science? I promise to use only the very best in sauces and glazes.