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Yes, the ManBeef.com website that sprang to life in 2001 was quite slick and nicely laid out for its time, and chock full of background information, sales pitches, recipes for human meat, and even company T-shirts for sale. Yes, one may even have heard a representative from ManBeef discussing (through a voice changer, because of the death threats he claimed he received) their products on a local talk radio program. And yes, it was nothing but a hoax. Cannibalism is undoubtedly the strongest taboo in modern society, and in a country where most people turn up their noses in digust at the thought of eating horsemeat or duck eggs, the sales potential for human meat is negligible. Aside from that pesky marketing problem, however, is the inconvenient fact that it simply isn't legal to sell human flesh for consumption (by other humans or anything else) anywhere in the United States (or to export it out of the USA), no matter how fresh or carefully packaged it may be. (The recent scares over Mad Cow Disease have led people to object to the practice of feeding livestock ground-up parts of other livestock, so the notion of humans eating other humans just isn't going to fly.) The Food Safety and Inspection Service, under the aegis of the United States Department of Agriculture, is the agency tasked with the inspection of meat sold in or exported from the USA: When we queried the USDA about the possibility of purchasing a few people chops from ManBeef.com, they responded: Needless to say, neither the FDA nor the USDA does — or ever has — approved the sale of human meat in the USA or its export to other countries. (That latter part puts the kibosh on the ManBeef hoaxsters' dodge that the company's main market is Asia and the Middle East. In fact, an Arabic newspaper in Sudan was shut down for two days merely for printing an article about ManBeef, a topic considered offending to the public taste.) Of course, pesky facts about the non-legality of selling human meat didn't really cut into ManBeef's sales, since you couldn't actually order anything from the website (other than T-shirts and coffee mugs) because, they claimed: That's certainly a novel way of doing business: We already have more orders than we can handle, so we're going to put up a web site to advertise our product to customers whom we can't service. Since the website didn't include a physical address prospective customers could visit, a mailing address they could write to, or a phone number they could use to order ManBeef's alleged products, one had to wonder just how ManBeef conducted any business at all, let alone business on a personal basis. If you wanted to order from ManBeef.com, you had to apply for a membership on their website, which brought a mail message asking for additional information and informing you that: At least this part was literally, if deceptively, true: They could not legally sell any human meat product to anyone with a criminal history because they could not legally sell any human meat product to anyone. If you declared yourself to be a non-felon (and swore you didn't associate with felons), you got a message back telling you that a background check was being run on you. ManBeef got a bit backed up running those background checks though, so it wasn't advisable to hold one's breath: Our background check date came and went, but we received nothing further from ManBeef — no contract, no information packet, no ManBeef And You video. What a surprise. Note that the phone number listed for the Technical and the Administrative contact in the domain registration of this international company's website didn't correspond to the New York address given and traced back to a 16-year-old in Apex, NC, and that said 16-year-old's own domain was established with the very same registrar as ManBeef.com's. Also note that the Binghamton, New York, address listed in the registration was phony: ManBeef had no offices there, and county officials verified that they had no business license on file for a ManBeef International Meats. Eventually, the map showing Binghamton as the home of ManBeef's regional headquarters disappeared from the ManBeef.com website. What a surprise. In June 2001, ManBeef's sole employee (and putative President) finally confessed: Soon we will be publishing some pages on our website stating that manbeef is in fact a joke. Alas, that promise also turned out to be hoax. Update: As of 2005, ManBeef.com became a porn site and the hoax site moved to a different URL, though it didn't last long there either. Courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, you can still browse the original ManBeef site as it existed in 2001. Bon appetit!
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