Friday, November 20, 2009

Chew the fat

My favourite scene from the movie Fight Club is when Brad Pitt takes Edward Norton scavenging through the rubbish bins of liposuction labs in search of human fat. Then, they make soap out of it and sell it to an upmarket cosmetic shop. As Brad Pitt explains - they use fat from rich women's ass to put it on their face.

The set-up was so outrageous that it was priceless. It was funny precisely because we couldn't bring ourselves to believe that anyone would be coarse enough to do that. After all, who would have a disgust-threshold high enough to survive that?

Apparently, these Peruvians do, who according to BBC were operating "an international network trafficking human fat". Only, they didn't bother with voluntary donations of fat. Since this is Peru, they simply abducted people of lonely roads, killed them, sucked off all that luscious human fat and sold it to European pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies for £9000 a litre. That is globalisation of human fat for you.

Somehow, the Fight Club anecdote doesn't seem so funny anymore.

2 comments:

jaimit said...

this is by far the most gruesome thing that i have read in a long time. truth is surely stranger than fiction.

Girish Shahane said...

As a Fight Club fan you might enjoy this: http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/movie-talk-fight-club-bluray.html