The Mystery of ‘Human Meat’ for Sale on Temu |
I should get this out of the way: I have no good reason to believe that Temu, the popular discount shopping app, is selling human meat disguised as cans of corned beef hash, and plenty of reasons to believe it’s not. It would obviously be a pretty risky move, brand-wise, and might make people give a second thought to that “shop like a billionaire” tagline.
In terms of e-commerce strategy and best practices, it would also be sub-optimal: Intentional cannibals might not think to look on Temu, so conversions would be low, while customers looking for deals on Hormel products would end up eating some disappointing breakfasts, leave negative reviews, and wonder if they should consider alternative shopping apps. No good. As a regulatory matter, offering a can of man could draw unwanted scrutiny to a company that has been subjected to a great deal already and ultimately targeted by aggressive new tariff policies. No, in fact, any suggestion at all that Temu is selling canned human meat would be utterly ridiculous, which is why I was a little bit surprised, the other day, when an ad shown to me on a search for “Temu food” did exactly that:
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment here, but Temu did, explaining that the ad “shouldn’t have run” and resulted from “a glitch in our automated ad system” that was quickly fixed. (One plausible explanation is that a seller supplied information to Temu intended to differentiate its products from pet food in web searches and some maybe-AI SEO-type tools got a little carried away, resulting this extraordinarily visible ad; a link to the same listing from within Temu’s website contained the phrase “human meat,” too, but the listing itself never did.)
Anyway, this is a roundabout way to get to the main point and the reason I saw this search page in the first place: Temu, which is by some measures the most popular e-commerce app in the world, grew by offering incredibly cheap products shipped directly from China, and is conceptually, as a cross-border retailer, an incredibly unlikely grocer, has gotten into selling food. For humans.
What? Why? These are questions also shared by thousands of commenters on videos like these:
@lifewithrekina #ad Temu really did their big one with these 6oz ribeyes🥩✨ Seasoned to perfection, seared on my griddle until my kind of done, then........