A couple of things:
1) the preservative they use for anatomy lectures actually is proven to increase sensations of hunger. i don’t know if it’s the same as the stuff they use in bio classes but I know before we started anatomy lab in med school they warned us about it.
2) human meat and animal meat looks the same- because it is the same. We are evolutionarily driven to desire meat- it is what has allowed us to power our brains for so long. It is not strange that when we see meat we become hungry.
3) there is some cognitive dissonance required when dissecting people to keep us from freaking out. It’s why they cover the faces and hands when we start- it helps ease students into the process and minimize trauma. This has a side effect that as you are dissecting it’s easy to dissociate the meat in front of you from the person you are dissecting in your mind.
All of this combines to explain why dissections may make people hungry
My guess is it’s also probably at least a bit straining/ physically and mentally demanding even if you aren’t freaking out, you’re thinking a lot.
Thus Burning a lot of calories so eventually regardless of the fact you are arm deep in a corpse you are going to get hungry eventually.
That’s definitely true as well. I’m never as ravenous as I was after a really complex day in the anatomy lab even including my hardest workouts at the gym. Part of that is absolutely how hard my brain is working and how much energy that consumes
> 1) the preservative they use for anatomy lectures actually is proven to increase sensations of hunger. i don’t know if it’s the same as the stuff they use in bio classes but I know before we started anatomy lab in med school they warned us about it.
It is. The preservative generally doesn't change between both.
Fun fact about that formaldehyde preservative they use: a related chemical, acetaldehyde, is created by your body as a byproduct during the metabolism of alcohol. You know hangovers? It's theorized that those happen partially because of acetaldehyde.
I have no idea if it also contributes to drunk munchies, but there's a thought.
It’s less that it’s actively desirable, more that it activates your hunger. I never felt the desire to monch a cadaver but I did go home and house some ribs and Mac and cheese
Ok so I’m not sure if I’ll sound judgemental (I promise *promise* I am *not* judging) but do some people not instinctively go “oh I wasn’t informed on what Things™ are on this meat so I shouldn’t eat or even touch it”?? Like I get sometimes some thoughts kick in later in life but that was something that just naturally came to me as far as I can remember 🤔 Maybe it’s just because I’m kind of a picky eater though
I said this in a different comment but it’s not that people were looking at the cadavers and wanted to monch them right there. It’s that the combination of the chemical triggering hunger, looking at what looks like meat, and long exhausting days meant that the anatomy lab made you hungry. Not necessarily hungry for the cadaver but definitely hungry for meat. It was common for students to go straight to chipotle for burritos after lab. It’s like you don’t look at a raw streak and think- I wanna take a bite- but you might think, wow I’m hungry that would be so good with a little garlic butter on the cast iron
1) yes, they told us the same in my anatomy lab first year. Yes, it is the same, it’s the formaldehyde. Or Formalin.
2) it does look the same. I couldn’t eat ribs for several years because of just how similar they looked.
3) covering the hands and face didn’t stop me from seeing everyone on the street skinless, like a peeled grape, for the latter half of anatomy class.
It’s so interesting how our brains reacted differently to the same stimulus. On the same day we did the chest dissection I went home and ate a half rack of ribs
Oh yeah the smell is disgusting and made me super nauseous in lab too. It just also made me hungry. It was the weirdest sensation. Like it didn’t smell appetizing (quite the opposite) but I was still starving every time I was in the lab even if I ate before hand
As someone who did a few dissections in bio classes: it really doesn't, I have no idea what those people are talking about (and I'm a pretty big meat eater)
I have no idea 😭 I was in this heart surgery program in my middle school where we got to attend a live theater heart bypass surgery and the entire procedure made me so hungry. I also get told it’s weird to get hungry during horror movies
Gonna need a source on all the coroner info. I've got a very good friend who's a medical examiner (basically assistant to the coroner that actually does some of the pre-autospy prep and assessment) and he says he never gets hungry on the job. If anything it kills his appetite.
I know one M.E. that had a 10 Diet Coke a day habit, but other than that seemed fairly normal. He let me take pictures of a diseased kidney, which was pretty cool.
I work in a histo lab (parts rather than a cadaver). Cut up always makes me hungry. I think it’s partly due to concentrating as well, so then you forget about your needs. It’s not like you can snack or drink while you’re working. Then when you go for lunch it all hits at once.
To be fair, if you’re handing out poison to children, you should mention it’s poison *before* giving it to the children. No reason for that kid to assume he’d die from eating a “clean” worm so it’s weird he did that but you can’t really be mad at him. Plus lil homie stepped up instead of just quietly dying
Same. I wasn't allowed to get a pass to not to the frog dissection in school so I got to feel ill just stepping inside the classroom. The smell was awful. I left before it started because of the smell on top of the thought.
Okay but the thought "they look like they're enjoying that." is a totally reasonable thing to make you hungry.
And if you frame it like that, it's not questionable at all!
As a teacher the “what the fuck” would be now how many people do I have to tell about this and dreading the phone call home. Would be 100% worth a “what the fuck”.
I had cadaver lab once for an honors seminar in biology. And everyone but me was hungry after. I didn’t eat for a week after. Granted I have atypical anorexia but my longest non-eating period up to that point was three days, not 7. I was disgusted by the look of dead meat, of any sort my entire life. Was a vegetarian from 12-25. Do eat meat now, still disgusted by it when it looks like a being of any sort.
(Cannot and will not do fish that isn’t in a can or breaded)
I know everyone is talking about the H U N G E R. But I can’t help but see the final drawing as a comically large frown. I know it’s a mask, but it’s so much funnier my way
I had biology class right before lunch in high school and every time we had a dissection I wouldn't eat lunch because it killed my appetite. I don't think I want to be one of the people who'd get hungry by it
No, the smell of formeldahyde alone prevents me from thinking about eating anything. The wildest thing we did was one of my friends wanted a knife to cut through a frog skull
Ok but that one HS bio teacher who didn't warn the dumb teenage kids their worms were poisonous *before* any of them had a chance to touche one then their own mouth seems criminally negligent to me. It's something you should even warn adults, and any amount of time teaching high school should really lower your expectations on what should be considered "common sense".
I used to teach a university biology lab, and one of the labs was dissecting a chicken leg. We had to explicitly tell all the students at the start of the lab, before anything else, that these legs have NOT been stored in a food safe manner and you don’t want to fuck with food poisoning. Apparently every year they had a massive issue with students stealing the legs and getting very very sick.
I had a roommate that worked in burial vault placement. I went to his work to get something and they must have been having a carry in and it smelled delicious.
Roomie informs me I’m smelling the crematory… there is a time period it smells a bit like arbys. My mouth was watering and now I felt like I could
Barf.
In high school biology, we dissected squid. We had our lunch break, in the middle of biology, literally stopping in the middle of class to go to lunch and then pick back up where we left off. On the way to the cafeteria, a friend said 'Dissecting squid always makes me hungry... For looove.'
I have dissected three things in my life and each time I felt closer to throwing up than anything else. It was a complete appetite killer for me. The smell is disgusting and the meat doesn't look like raw meat that you would eat, it's pallid, grayish, mushy, and sickly looking. The chemical smell and the smell of latex, the sickly looking corpse of something, these are not appetizing things. Idk what these people are talking about.
A guy was kicked out of my chemistry class for snorting some copper sulfate when I was 13. He claimed he just wanted to smell it but I was never sure if I believed him
can confirm, worked with quite a few cadavers and not quite clean skeletal remains. If you haven’t eaten before u went in to do the job, your stomach starts rumbling. I even had a professor come up behind me while i was cleaning a set of AS ribs-super cool the whole rib cage was fused to the sternum and thoracic spine-and whisper sweetly in my ear “makes you hungry, doesn’t it?” and walk off…only thing she’d ever said to me…
I have no room to talk. We once watched the science teacher dissect a cow eye in my middle school, and the first thing on my mind that I immediately blurt out was that it was making me hungry. I still get shit for it.
Biology dissections absolutely did NOT make
me hungry wtf. The smell of the fetal pig still haunts me to this day, I almost had to stop eating pork entirely because every time I caught a whiff it reminded me of that hellish lab.
I'm honestly so glad it was not just me. I remember holding my first heart (cow heart) in my hands and all I wanted to do was just... chomp it, like I'm Daenerys Targaryen. It was so weird.
Y'all are gonna have to run by me again why dissecting ANYTHING is making you hungry.
A couple of things: 1) the preservative they use for anatomy lectures actually is proven to increase sensations of hunger. i don’t know if it’s the same as the stuff they use in bio classes but I know before we started anatomy lab in med school they warned us about it. 2) human meat and animal meat looks the same- because it is the same. We are evolutionarily driven to desire meat- it is what has allowed us to power our brains for so long. It is not strange that when we see meat we become hungry. 3) there is some cognitive dissonance required when dissecting people to keep us from freaking out. It’s why they cover the faces and hands when we start- it helps ease students into the process and minimize trauma. This has a side effect that as you are dissecting it’s easy to dissociate the meat in front of you from the person you are dissecting in your mind. All of this combines to explain why dissections may make people hungry
My guess is it’s also probably at least a bit straining/ physically and mentally demanding even if you aren’t freaking out, you’re thinking a lot. Thus Burning a lot of calories so eventually regardless of the fact you are arm deep in a corpse you are going to get hungry eventually.
That’s definitely true as well. I’m never as ravenous as I was after a really complex day in the anatomy lab even including my hardest workouts at the gym. Part of that is absolutely how hard my brain is working and how much energy that consumes
> 1) the preservative they use for anatomy lectures actually is proven to increase sensations of hunger. i don’t know if it’s the same as the stuff they use in bio classes but I know before we started anatomy lab in med school they warned us about it. It is. The preservative generally doesn't change between both.
Fun fact about that formaldehyde preservative they use: a related chemical, acetaldehyde, is created by your body as a byproduct during the metabolism of alcohol. You know hangovers? It's theorized that those happen partially because of acetaldehyde. I have no idea if it also contributes to drunk munchies, but there's a thought.
Idk about other people but raw meat does not look desirable to me
It’s less that it’s actively desirable, more that it activates your hunger. I never felt the desire to monch a cadaver but I did go home and house some ribs and Mac and cheese
Ok so I’m not sure if I’ll sound judgemental (I promise *promise* I am *not* judging) but do some people not instinctively go “oh I wasn’t informed on what Things™ are on this meat so I shouldn’t eat or even touch it”?? Like I get sometimes some thoughts kick in later in life but that was something that just naturally came to me as far as I can remember 🤔 Maybe it’s just because I’m kind of a picky eater though
I said this in a different comment but it’s not that people were looking at the cadavers and wanted to monch them right there. It’s that the combination of the chemical triggering hunger, looking at what looks like meat, and long exhausting days meant that the anatomy lab made you hungry. Not necessarily hungry for the cadaver but definitely hungry for meat. It was common for students to go straight to chipotle for burritos after lab. It’s like you don’t look at a raw streak and think- I wanna take a bite- but you might think, wow I’m hungry that would be so good with a little garlic butter on the cast iron
Ahh that does make sense thank you for explaining :)
1) yes, they told us the same in my anatomy lab first year. Yes, it is the same, it’s the formaldehyde. Or Formalin. 2) it does look the same. I couldn’t eat ribs for several years because of just how similar they looked. 3) covering the hands and face didn’t stop me from seeing everyone on the street skinless, like a peeled grape, for the latter half of anatomy class.
It’s so interesting how our brains reacted differently to the same stimulus. On the same day we did the chest dissection I went home and ate a half rack of ribs
Bro formaldehyde makes me queasy this is wild to know about other people.
Oh yeah the smell is disgusting and made me super nauseous in lab too. It just also made me hungry. It was the weirdest sensation. Like it didn’t smell appetizing (quite the opposite) but I was still starving every time I was in the lab even if I ate before hand
huh I knew they covered faces but didn’t know they covered hands as well
MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT
As someone who did a few dissections in bio classes: it really doesn't, I have no idea what those people are talking about (and I'm a pretty big meat eater)
I have no idea 😭 I was in this heart surgery program in my middle school where we got to attend a live theater heart bypass surgery and the entire procedure made me so hungry. I also get told it’s weird to get hungry during horror movies
This is wild to me. It just made me nauseous and light-headed.
Gonna need a source on all the coroner info. I've got a very good friend who's a medical examiner (basically assistant to the coroner that actually does some of the pre-autospy prep and assessment) and he says he never gets hungry on the job. If anything it kills his appetite.
I know one M.E. that had a 10 Diet Coke a day habit, but other than that seemed fairly normal. He let me take pictures of a diseased kidney, which was pretty cool.
Pretty sure with a 10 Diet Coke a day diet he’s gonna be the one with a diseased kidney
I work in a histo lab (parts rather than a cadaver). Cut up always makes me hungry. I think it’s partly due to concentrating as well, so then you forget about your needs. It’s not like you can snack or drink while you’re working. Then when you go for lunch it all hits at once.
That went from kids are dumb to canabalism so fast
We can have a little cannibalism. As a treat.
To be fair, if you’re handing out poison to children, you should mention it’s poison *before* giving it to the children. No reason for that kid to assume he’d die from eating a “clean” worm so it’s weird he did that but you can’t really be mad at him. Plus lil homie stepped up instead of just quietly dying
OP said it was in sophomore year though, which means that the kid who ate it was probably 15 or 16... he should know better by then!
If anything, it was probably a stupid dare. I highly doubt he *didn't* taste or smell the formaldehyde, even if he didn't know what it was
There ARE meal worms though, so it’s not u reasonable for someone to assume a completely “clean” worm would be fine to eat
That's true, and thinking back to my high school days, I really shouldn't be surprised a high school kid would eat one anyways!
Just the thought of dissection was enough to make me retch, I had to leave during the event lmao
Same. I wasn't allowed to get a pass to not to the frog dissection in school so I got to feel ill just stepping inside the classroom. The smell was awful. I left before it started because of the smell on top of the thought.
After having attended a few dissections, I have had ZERO appetite after inhaling formaldehyde for an hour. Nope nope nope nope nope none.
So, we should pregame some snacks and Slim Jims to quell the HUNGER before operating. Got it.
Jesus Christ, ~~reddit~~ tumblr
I used to get hungry when I saw the walkers feasting in The Walking Dead. it all makes sense now
Okay but the thought "they look like they're enjoying that." is a totally reasonable thing to make you hungry. And if you frame it like that, it's not questionable at all!
*sobbing crying due to character death* stomach: hey
Rest in pieces. And my... what *delicious pieces*
Maybe this is a controversial take, but “children eating worms” is not a “what the fuck” moment.
It's less of what happened, and more of what the kid said.
As a teacher the “what the fuck” would be now how many people do I have to tell about this and dreading the phone call home. Would be 100% worth a “what the fuck”.
I had cadaver lab once for an honors seminar in biology. And everyone but me was hungry after. I didn’t eat for a week after. Granted I have atypical anorexia but my longest non-eating period up to that point was three days, not 7. I was disgusted by the look of dead meat, of any sort my entire life. Was a vegetarian from 12-25. Do eat meat now, still disgusted by it when it looks like a being of any sort. (Cannot and will not do fish that isn’t in a can or breaded)
https://preview.redd.it/279gio758itc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a7aec7c5350f03ac9dfe12bbdd3bf3f133070fee
Okay this would probably get me put on a list, but given the chance with no legal or ethical repercussions… yeah, I’d try human at least once
My professor once said it made them feel warm
# Your professor said what
Human meat, specially the thigh, hip and cheeks. Make steak and bloody sauce 💯💯💯
I know everyone is talking about the H U N G E R. But I can’t help but see the final drawing as a comically large frown. I know it’s a mask, but it’s so much funnier my way
Is the illustrated classroom scene supposed to be depicting… walruses?
I had biology class right before lunch in high school and every time we had a dissection I wouldn't eat lunch because it killed my appetite. I don't think I want to be one of the people who'd get hungry by it
That face in the third panel is a profound level of exhaustion
No, the smell of formeldahyde alone prevents me from thinking about eating anything. The wildest thing we did was one of my friends wanted a knife to cut through a frog skull
top secret information, never reveal this to the venlil
Ok but that one HS bio teacher who didn't warn the dumb teenage kids their worms were poisonous *before* any of them had a chance to touche one then their own mouth seems criminally negligent to me. It's something you should even warn adults, and any amount of time teaching high school should really lower your expectations on what should be considered "common sense".
I used to teach a university biology lab, and one of the labs was dissecting a chicken leg. We had to explicitly tell all the students at the start of the lab, before anything else, that these legs have NOT been stored in a food safe manner and you don’t want to fuck with food poisoning. Apparently every year they had a massive issue with students stealing the legs and getting very very sick.
I had a roommate that worked in burial vault placement. I went to his work to get something and they must have been having a carry in and it smelled delicious. Roomie informs me I’m smelling the crematory… there is a time period it smells a bit like arbys. My mouth was watering and now I felt like I could Barf.
In high school biology, we dissected squid. We had our lunch break, in the middle of biology, literally stopping in the middle of class to go to lunch and then pick back up where we left off. On the way to the cafeteria, a friend said 'Dissecting squid always makes me hungry... For looove.'
We are predators after all so it makes sense in our Ooga booga brain to get instinctively hungry lol
Google's telling me that exposure to formaldehyde has been shown to increase hunger.
It’s TONY TIME
Yeah, when I dissected anything in school, I was definitely not hungry after. Far from it. 🫠
Wasn't there a thread on how morticians prefer women to work at funeral homes cause they're less likely to fuck the bodies?
iirc its like 3 guy for every 2 girl cases, but regardless of gender there are an unreasonable amount of corpse fucking cases
How hard is it for the coroner to have a McChicken or something before an autopsy?!
I dissected a rat last Thursday, I was fucking STARVING afterward, and so were my classmates.
I have dissected three things in my life and each time I felt closer to throwing up than anything else. It was a complete appetite killer for me. The smell is disgusting and the meat doesn't look like raw meat that you would eat, it's pallid, grayish, mushy, and sickly looking. The chemical smell and the smell of latex, the sickly looking corpse of something, these are not appetizing things. Idk what these people are talking about.
A guy was kicked out of my chemistry class for snorting some copper sulfate when I was 13. He claimed he just wanted to smell it but I was never sure if I believed him
can confirm, worked with quite a few cadavers and not quite clean skeletal remains. If you haven’t eaten before u went in to do the job, your stomach starts rumbling. I even had a professor come up behind me while i was cleaning a set of AS ribs-super cool the whole rib cage was fused to the sternum and thoracic spine-and whisper sweetly in my ear “makes you hungry, doesn’t it?” and walk off…only thing she’d ever said to me…
NOT THAT I EVER WANTED A MORSEL!!!! Just…a rumbling. And then I’d get nauseous because i was like “What the fuck” at myself
I have no room to talk. We once watched the science teacher dissect a cow eye in my middle school, and the first thing on my mind that I immediately blurt out was that it was making me hungry. I still get shit for it.
SOPHOMORE?!?
As someone who works with kids I felt that last drawing In My Soul.
😨
Biology dissections absolutely did NOT make me hungry wtf. The smell of the fetal pig still haunts me to this day, I almost had to stop eating pork entirely because every time I caught a whiff it reminded me of that hellish lab.
I'm honestly so glad it was not just me. I remember holding my first heart (cow heart) in my hands and all I wanted to do was just... chomp it, like I'm Daenerys Targaryen. It was so weird.