(Image Source: Daily Mail)

BY LAUREN ZIMA

There’s a whole meaning to the term ‘you’ve got a friend in me.’ Two Dutch TV broadcaster pals ate each other’s flesh on TV Wednesday.

The show, called Guinea Pigs, features Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno as they take on weird challenges. The latest is a Silence of the Lambs-style task; each presenter had a piece of his flesh surgically removed -- Storm from his backside, Zeno from his abdomen. Here’s a promotional spot:

... and in front of a studio audience, a cook fried up the two pieces of human -- and each man ate a piece of the other. The Periscope Post calls the stunt “disgusting.”

“Just when you thought reality television producers couldn’t sink much lower in the taste stakes in search of a ratings spike … “

But as shallow or gross as the meal might have been -- was it legal? The Daily Mail adds more meat to the story.

“They insist that their stunt was entirely legal as both entered into the cannibalistic pact voluntarily. A lawyer advised the programme's producers that while cannibalism is not itself against the law, the presenters or the surgeon who operated on them could run in to legal difficulties.”

And, since this is believed to have been a television first, the lingering question for the two is.... how does human flesh taste? Storm spoke with ABC News about the taste test, and says the possible pallete pleaser was worth the pain.

“Nothing is really that special when you’re talking about the taste of the meat … But it is weird to look into the eyes of a friend when you are chewing on his belly. …It was just a few centimeters of meat … And now I have a good story about that scar.”

If only they’d had some fava beans and a nice chianti. Still, DutchNews points out that there might be a reason to question the cannibalism.

“In the Netherlands, opinion is divided about whether the presenters actually do eat human flesh or whether the trailer is a hoax. In 2007, BNN staged a tv reality show which centred on people competing for a dying woman’s kidneys. That show turned out to be a hoax aimed at raising awareness for kidney patients.

Producers of the show maintain that it was all real.