Hufu- The Pleasures of Cannibalism without the Moral Dubiousness

I'm a big fan of random happenstance, and last week saw a choice example.

A colleague of mine was conferencing with her English for Academic Purposes students on essays they were preparing. One of them had volunteered to do his essay on "The Pyramid of Hufu". Coming into the staffroom during the break, she expressed loudly her perplexedness at this mysterious essay topic. I volunteered that perhaps the student had made a spelling error and had actually meant the Pyramid of Khufu (which turned out in fact to be the case and which monument, coincidentally, I shall be visiting next week) but not before my colleague had done a search for 'Hufu' on one of the computers, whereupon it was discovered that this word has a meaning of its own.

As it turns out, there is such a thing as hufu, or rather there isn't. It is, apparently, a parody version of tofu for recovering cannibals who wish to ease off their dependence on human flesh for sustenance but are not ready to take up the exclusive consumption of non-human based food products. Unfortunately (or fortunately) its website has been off the air since 2006 but one can read about it here. Moreover, the folks at Damn Interesting (a site which is well worth your time anyway) did an article on it a while back as well. Certainly, the concept of a pyramid of hufu does create a curious and rather risible image in the mind.