Artist Eats Own Hip With Side Of Potatoes

A Norwegian artist figured out a way to turn fine-dining into art by taking some inspiration from Hannibal Lecter and eating his own hip with some potato gratin and a nice glass of wine as part of his graduation show from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art.

According to The Local, the story of Alexander Selvik Wengshoel is not quite as dark as it initially seems. While he did cook and eat his own flesh and display the cleansed hip bone at his art show, it all started out relatively innocently. A few years ago, Wengshoel was having hip replacement surgery to correct a congenital hip problem that had forced him to use crutches or a wheelchair for years. Since he was an art student at the time, he figured having his own hip bone around to work with couldn't hurt, so he convinced the doctors to give it to him. The operation to remove the hip was filmed for the art show.

Wengshoel did not initially plan on eating the hip, but the chunk of bone he was given still had bits of flesh stuck to it, so he had to boil it to clean it. As he was scraping the meat off the bone, he thought, "Why not?"

"It's not every day I will have a piece of human flesh which is mine and which it is possible to eat, so I had a little taste, and then I thought, 'that's really nice,'" he said.

So Wengshoel went with the whim and decided to make an event of it, serving his meat with a side of potato gratin and a nice glass of wine.

"I made myself dinner while my girlfriend was at work, and I just resolved to have this really nice moment, with me and my hipbone," he said.

Wengshoel said it was cathartic to eat the hip that had caused him so much pain and trouble for 20 years, and he actually found it delicious.

"It had this flavour of wild sheep," he said, "if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eats mushrooms. It was goaty."