The Hungriest Man to Ever Exist

Here's your random dose of knowledge for the day.

When you hear people saying that they love food, you assume that they have a big appetite and that they generally just like to eat. You don’t stand and wonder if they could fit a quarter of a cow into their stomach in one sitting. Well, that’s what our man Tarrare did when he was a teenager. His hunger was so voracious that he was able to eat an entire quarter of a cow carcass in a single day. So, buckle up you bipedal bastards, because you’re in for a story about a biologically impossible specimen of a human being which boy oh boy is a rollercoaster to read.  

Tarrare was born in France in 1772 to a poor farming family. When you think of his eating habits you might imagine him to be extremely obese but no. At the age of 18, he only weighed 45 kilograms, talk about a fast metabolism. But he didn’t look like any other normal human being, he had a huge stretched out mouth enough to fill his mouth with a dozen of eggs like a squirrel filling its mouth with a bunch of nuts and had horribly stained teeth, reckon he didn’t care about his dental health when all he wanted to do was eat all the time. After he would finish devouring a meal, he had huge flaps of skin that would make it look like he had a baby bump and on days when he hadn’t eaten, the flap just hangs there… doing its own thing. He also smelled horrendous and couldn’t be spoken to anywhere in the radius of 20 steps from him, even for French peasant standards that’s quite an accomplishment, a negative one but an accomplishment for sure. Naturally, after all this, his parents realized that he was being a burden and asked him to leave the house because he was eating all the food and so he did.

Image Credits: Wikipedia.org 

Fun fact: Tarrare wasn't his real name, he was called so to mimic the sound of an explosion because of his extremely loud farts.

After he left home, he was forced to beg and steal in order to fulfil his monstrous appetite. After a while, people began noticing the things that Tarrare could do and he became a street performer. People from Paris would give him entire barrels of apples, eggs and even wine corks and watch in delight as he would gulp them all down without hesitation. Except for one time when he had an intestinal blockage, luckily for him, he was taken to the hospital soon after and they gave him the strongest laxatives you could find in the 18th century. 

Let's forward time a little now and cut to the year 1792. It was during the time of “The war of the first coalition” ever heard of it? Me neither. Who was in it? Pretty much everyone… Anyway, Tarrare decided to enlist in the war, after all maybe that profound emptiness he was feeling was just a lack of purpose in life. Turns out no, he really was just psychotically hungry. Even after being granted multiple rations by the government, he would be seen going through trash digging for food. After suffering exhaustion, he was sent to a Military hospital and the staff was dumbfounded by his abilities. They ran a bunch of experiments on him the first of which involved putting him in a room with a meal prepared for 15 people. Naturally, he ate the entire thing and immediately went to sleep after eating. The second of which was when they presented him with a raw eel, in response, Tarrare crushed the eel’s skull between his teeth before slurping down the entire creature in one go. This is extremely horrifying for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, he put a whole eel in his stomach without a second thought, secondly, there had to be some point during digestion where the meat was all gone but the bone still remained. For reference, this is what an eel’s skeleton looks like.  

Image Credits: Wikipedia.org 

This meant that Tarrare had all of those needle-sized ribs stabbing into the walls of a stomach at once and he was completely fine. He also ripped a live cat apart with his bare hands drank its blood and ate everything but its bones and then later gagged up the fur and skin like an owl but you know that's neither here nor there. After reviewing the data about him I've come to the scientific conclusion that uh yeah, we got a goddamn demon on our hands.  

As we know with great devour comes great responsibility and since he was still in the military, they decided to use his abilities for the greater good. They tried using his abilities to their advantage, with emphasis on “tried”.  

The conversation with him and the General probably went something like this - 

“Hey, Tarrare. It's me the General. Listen, could you eat this box with a note in it for me?” 

*Inaudible suspicious stalling* 

“If you do it, we’ll give you a wheelbarrow full of bull organs.” 

*Hungry Tarrare noises* 

And thus, Tarrare swallowed an entire wooden box. 

Lo and behold two days later he passed the container in mint condition and was given his reward as promised. After this small test, the Military decided that he was ready to become a spy and they sent him to Prussia with a document in his stomach which was to be delivered to an imprisoned French Colonel. Even though he had a place to hide the documents he didn’t really have the basic necessities when you're a spy in another nation. For one, he didn’t know German and secondly it was pretty hard keeping a low profile when you're running around like a madman gulping down garbage and mutilating small animals. He was caught by the enemies and they waited for the document to pass through and then gave him a mock execution, beat him up and sent him on his way.  

He then returned to the hospital in desperate need to cure his illness. After trying multiple different methods, the doctors couldn’t find a cure for his disease at all, meanwhile, Tarrare would be getting into all sorts of trouble. He'd often sneak out of the hospital to eat the scraps behind the local butcher and fight stray dogs in the alley for their precious garbage. He'd also seek out patients undergoing bloodletting in order to take all their life juice for himself. On several occasions, he was even caught attempting to eat bodies in the mortuary. At this point, you might be thinking that this dude can't get worse than he already is until one day the nurses from the hospital found out that a 14-month-old infant was missing from the hospital, as you can imagine all hands were pointed at Tarrare and he was promptly kicked for eating an entire baby. 

After that, he spent the next four years of his life doing about all the crazy weird shit he was always doing, and one day when he was back, doctors found out that he suffered from advanced Tuberculosis and he died shortly after. During his autopsy, the surgeons found that when they looked into his mouth, they could see all the way down his throat and into his stomach cavity and his whole abdominal region was profoundly deformed. So, the moral of the story here is that now you know what, not even I can find anything resembling a moral here. Not all stories have a point to them sometimes they're just sad and disgusting from beginning to end and now. 

- Afridh Ali P A