Consuming human flesh is taboo, and often illegal, pretty much anywhere you go. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it's impossible to speculate how good a people sandwich would taste. Recently, the team at The BBC’s Brit Lab did just that, and the results are far less off-putting than you might have imagined.

To begin the experiment, host Greg Foot had a small piece of his leg muscle medically removed. However, rather than cook up and taste the tiny pink fragments of flesh, Foot had other plans. Instead, Foot had the aromas of his cooked leg muscle analyzed in a lab to get a round-about idea of what he might taste like without actually having to chow down on his own flesh.

According to Live Science, the sensation of flavor is actually a combination of both taste and smell. When we chew, we force air carrying the scent of our food through the nasal passages. This is why individuals who have partially or completely lost their sense of smell often remark that food no longer tastes as good.

Although the first sniff of his own cooked leg meat caused Foot to gag, once he got past the initial gore-factor the presenter admitted that his leg meat “smelled quite nice.” This isn’t too hard to believe considering a chemical analysis revealed that human flesh actually contained many of the same components as pork, chicken, lamb, and beef.

Of course, Foot isn’t the first person to wonder what human flesh tastes like, and many before him have actually gone all the way and eaten human steaks. In fact, according to Armin Meiwes, a German cannibal who’s serving a life sentence for killing and eating a man, we taste like pork only “a little bit more bitter, stronger,” The Huffington Post reported.