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Armin Meiwes was jailed in 2006 for eating a volunteer he found on the internet. Now a new restaurant in Berlin appears to want to formalise cannibalism. AP Photo/Michael Probst
Cannibalism

Got any spare organs we can cook for you?

A Berlin restaurant seeks human donors to give body parts for consumption. Is this a joke?

A RESTAURANT IN BERLIN has kicked off a massively high-profile advertising campaign asking potential diners to donate parts of their bodies, apparently to be converted into a luxury Brazilian cuisine to be fed back to them.

The ‘Flimé‘ restaurant, which has refused to disclose its physical location or the identities of its backers ahead of its opening on September 8th, is seeking ‘members’ who are willing “to donate any part of their body,” with the restaurant shouldering any hospital costs.

The restaurant says its menu is derived from the original tradition of the Wari tribes of modern-day Peru, who (it says) lived by the proverb that “to eat is more than to satisfy hunger”.

“Our innovation lies in the combination of finest ingredients of the Wari culture with classical Brazilian recipes. Let us thrill you with incomparably aromatic and sapid dishes,” claims the website.

Main course dishes include a “jowels stew with rice, green beans and coriander” and “liver with butter beans”. Interested parties can download a medical questionnaire from the website which, when returned, makes them a member – thus agreeing “to donate an arbitrary part of their body to the FLIMÉ.

“The exact bodypart is chosen by the member.”

Naturally, the proposed scheme – if it’s true – is not to everyone’s moral tastes any more than their gastronomic ones.

“I’m working on the assumption that this is some sort of a warped joke,” Michael Braun, the vice-chairman of Berlin’s Christian Democrat party, told Germany’s biggest-selling newspaper Bild.

Many see the website as a gruesome reminder of the case of Armin Meiwes, who was jailed for life in 2006 after being convicted of eating Bernd Jürgen Brandes who had replied to an ad posted online seeking a human volunteer to be eaten.