Not a week goes by where we don’t see someone professing a weird food obsession. From the countless people with eerily flawless skin confessing to their chicken nuggets/Supernoodles/Ketchup diets to the collective mania over kale chips to the Victoria Beckham-inspired surge of the sales of popcorn as snacks outside of the cinema and the place you go for lunch suddenly serving up a simple boiled egg with some spinach in a tiny plastic container.
But this one really takes the metaphorical biscuit, because a Norwegian artist is so obsessed with the word hipster than he ate his actual hip. Yeah, look away now if stories of cannibalism make you feel peaky.
Alexander Selvik Wenshoel, who is just 25, had his hip replaced after having ongoing problems with it because of a deformity he’s had since birth. Up until he was 21, he had to spend most of his life on crutches or on a wheelchair, but then he had a life-changing operation which meant he could walk. And once he had the hip replacement, he took it home with him after the operation. On a ‘whim,, he boiled it to loosen the meat and then ate it. He’s not a savage, though, as he served it up to himself with potato gratin and a glass of wine.
‘When I got home I sat in my living room and suddenly I had a whim that I should cook the meat,’ he revealed to The Independent. ‘I resolved to have this really nice moment, with me and my hip bone. 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 described the meat’s flavor with very detailed accuracy, saying: ‘It has this flavour of wild sheep, if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eat mushrooms.’ Ugh. Not exactly our idea of a decent meal, but then again, maybe he felt a bit of empowerment in eating the meat of a bone that had caused him so much grief over the years?
That’s what he says, at least. ‘It had been such a problem for me for over 20 year sand it was just a way of making it better again.’ ‘It had been so hard to have it in my body, and when I took it out, it turned into something else, something romantic. It as a natural process I felt I had to do to move on.’
And if you’re really into this hip way of showing that your body can’t get the better of you Alexander’s hip and video footage of his operation are on show at an art gallery at the Tromso Academy Of Contemporary Art, which is so far north it’s in the actual Artic Circle. Which makes the exhibition literally bone-chilling.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.