In November, Faber books announced what it called the “Pineapple Amnesty.” Following months of complaints (that conveniently also promote book sales), readers who had purchased the U.K. edition of feminist cannibal novel A Certain Hunger were invited to exchange it, free of charge, for the American one. (And Faber has since released a new UK edition with that same cover.)
The problem was not the blood-splattered meat cleaver on the U.K. edition’s lime green cover. It was the pineapple that the cleaver was lodged into. A fruit, however aggressively murdered, was apparently too twee for a novel whose protagonist kills, cooks, and eats people. The American edition was more forthright. Its cover showed a woman gripping a human heart, poised to bite. U.K. readers, it seemed, had more of a taste for blood than Faber had anticipated, and they aren’t alone. Female cannibals — and a cannibal girl trend — are currently having a moment.
“A new monster comes in to speak to whichever cultural trauma we’re experiencing,” says horror film scholar Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, PhD. Godzilla, born in postwar Japan, flattened cities like a nuclear bomb. The aliens and body snatchers of the Cold War era thrived in a climate where anyone, even a neighbor, might be an enemy in disguise. The 1980s punished teenage autonomy through slasher films, while the post-9/11 zombie boom fed on anxieties about pandemics and porous borders. While the past few years have given us no shortage of cultural traumas, it’s no surprise one of the Age of Ozempic’s favorite monsters is obsessed with appetite.
After a brief exile during the body positive movement of the mid to late 2010s, “skinny culture” has recently slithered back into the mainstream. Health visits for eating disorders more than doubled among under 17s in recent years according to one study, celebrities openly use Ozempic and other GLP-1s, and “ultra-thinness” has returned as a beauty standard. Some cultural critics have pointed out that this return to policing women’s bodies (when it comes to weight and in the biopolitical sense) has arrived hand-in-hand with a broader swing to the right.
“It's very much about the shackles of power around women's bodies,” Ní Fhlainn explains. “How do you hurt them? You make them hurt themselves.”
It’s in this climate that we have seen a surge in fictional women who embrace appetite at its most transgressive extreme. 2025 releases in the female-cannibal canon include The Starving Saints and What Hunger, with film adaptations already announced for Victorian Psycho and The Eyes Are the Best Part. As the list of foods deemed by media and TikTok influencers as inflammatory, hormone-disrupting, or ultra-processed continues to grow, these heroines respond by indulging in the one cheat meal that remains universally forbidden.
Lucy Rose, the author of The Lamb (2025), describes cannibal fiction as a type of pressure valve. “Because cannibalism is such an extreme form of eating, it becomes a strangely healthy way to explore that friction,” she says, referring to the fraught relationship many women have with food. If Raw’s protagonist can eat her sister’s finger, you can eat that store-bought bread.
This tension with food has deep roots. Content creator Ellen Jacobs (@elleliteracy), who documented the rise of the female cannibal on her YouTube channel, says, “It goes all the way back to the Bible, where female consumption is linked to [original] sin.” (It’s Eve’s bite of the apple that triggers the fall of man.) Women have long been imagined as vessels of nourishment, breastfeeding, and cooking and sustaining others while they deny their own hunger. That’s why the cannibal woman hits a nerve. She consumes others to feed herself. It’s the ultimate sabotage of a domestic role now enjoying a cultural revival under conservatism.
As the right becomes culturally ascendant, meat is having a red-blooded renaissance. Veganism is waning while conservatives celebrate raw steaks, liver, bone broth, and beef tallow. It’s no coincidence. Carnivorous habits harken to a mythic past where women popped out babies by the dozen and men bench-pressed oxen. Such appeals to prehistory thrive in online conservative spaces, where steak-eating cavemen are often wheeled out to frame gender roles as biologically hardwired. In this fantasy, meat is might. But the cannibal woman hijacks this imagery. Food, for her, isn’t a domestic obligation. She eats because she is hungry.
Those ideas about meat and gender don’t dissolve when the meat turns human. Male cannibals have often had the range to be untamed beasts or bourgeois gourmands, serving human ballotine with silver cutlery. Female flesh-eaters, by contrast, used to be animalized. In films like Raw (2016) and Trouble Every Day (2001), hunger turned female cannibals feral.
Recent fiction has closed that gap. In novels like Motherthing, A Certain Hunger, and The Lamb, cannibal women crack open the recipe book, seasoning and serving their human meat. Hunger becomes deliberate rather than deranged. The difference between mindless ravening and meal prep is agency.
Horror has historically been a genre about women being acted upon. They are stalked, haunted, kidnapped, and dismembered. The cannibal woman reverses that flow of violence. That agency is not only about food. “It can represent sexual pleasure,” says Jacobs, “but it's all about the individual.” While sex ideally provides shared pleasure, eating only satisfies the eater. The cannibal woman’s pleasure is unapologetically, grotesquely non-reciprocal.
What’s striking about many contemporary cannibal narratives is not just that women eat people, but that they often do so without shame. In real life, Jacobs notes, restriction often erupts into bingeing, followed by disgust and self-reproach. Female cannibals short-circuit that cycle. They indulge and feel nothing resembling regret. The horror is displaced onto the audience.
This unsettling freedom is a stark contrast to the way women’s consumption is policed in capitalist society. They are relentlessly targeted as consumers, then shamed for consuming the wrong things, be it food or fashion. As Ní Fhlainn puts it, “There is a sense of misery within the economic chain… and I think that is tied very much into our sense of, okay, well, I can either consume part of that, or be consumed myself.” It is a small, defiant fantasy of opting out of the system altogether.
Yet the cannibal trope carries its own political baggage. Cannibalism myths have long been deployed as propaganda, a way to paint other groups as savage or subhuman and justify violence against them. Jacobs notes, “Cannibalism became a shorthand for savagery, and because these people were ‘savage,’ they ‘needed to be civilized.’” Because disgust is so visceral, it’s easy to use for political purposes. Just this year, Kristi Noem deployed cannibal accusations to dehumanize migrants and justify their deportation.
This history helps explain another striking feature of the current wave of cannibal protagonists. The bodies most policed in real life – fat women, women of color – are very often excluded from the fantasy. Their hunger is already read as excessive, their consumption already treated as a social problem rather than a subversion. As Jacobs puts it, rebellion is “still only acceptable when it looks like this very narrow ideal.”
That limitation doesn’t negate the power of the cannibal, but it does circumscribe it. The female cannibal is radical, but selectively so. She disrupts gendered expectations around appetite and restraint, while often leaving intact the racial and class hierarchies that decide whose hunger is disgusting and whose is intriguing.
The cannibal girl isn’t here to fix society. She’s here to show us how bad things feel. She takes the low-level cultural dread around consumption and blows it out of proportion until it becomes almost cathartic. She doesn’t fix our broken relationship with food — she reflects it back at us. We can admire her appetite because it is safely unreal, and because it ends when the movie does.
