Watch Out, Fatties!

My humble prediction: Within one year–at the outside–the following will be a ripped-from-the-headlines Law and Order episode:

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.

Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn’t the only one doing such killings.

Mejia said two of the suspects were arrested carrying bottles of liquid human fat and told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter). The fat was sold to intermediaries in Peru’s capital, Lima, and police suspect it was then sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, Mejia said Thursday, but he could not confirm any sales.

I’m actually sort of baffled that this hasn’t yet become a pop-culture phenomenon. All sorts of make-up has animal product in it, and now the prices here seem to imply that Peruvian beauticians have discovered the ultimate in age-defying fat: Man’s. Of course, while I don’t want to cast doubt on the professionalism of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police, I did have some questions. For one thing, the suspects that were busted with the bottles of liquid human fat. My own blubber, at least, is in solid form at room temperature. So was this suspect carrying extremely hot bottles? Or had the contents been adulterated in such a way as to give them a lower melting point?

Also, isn’t there an easier way to acquire human fat–say, from the back end of a liposuction procedure? Or is it that the fat of a dead body is somehow better when it comes to crows-feet erasure? The AP story quotes physicians expressing “doubt about an international black market for human fat, though it does have cosmetic applications.” But wouldn’t it be better to find someone from the cosmetics business to talk about whether such a market exists? The piece offers us a Yale dermatology professor who calls it “pure baloney” to think that human fat has some sort of superior cosmetic application. But don’t large chunks of the beauty industry demonstrate that people are willing to shell out for all sorts of things deemed “pure baloney” by (presumably wrinkly-faced) scientists?

Anyway, I’m waiting for the L&O version. I figure at the last minute, McCoy decides to not just prosecute the Peruvian trigger-man but to also throw the book at the super-rich, Upper East Side beauty-obsessed end-users.