Reddit reviews Australian Wagyu Beef Rib Eye Steaks, MS5 - 2 pieces, 10 oz ea

It's pretty expensive.

Meat animals have been selectively bred for generations to be as meat-dense as possible. We've doubled the size of the turkey and the cow in under a hundred years. When humans put on weight, it's in the form of fat, unless they exercise in specific ways to bulk up muscles: but this makes the meat tough and stringy.

Here's an assertion that the average human is about 40 per cent muscle tissue, aka meat: that seems very high to me, because cows, which are bred to be meat, are about 40 per cent usable muscle tissue. (Once they've been dressed, they're about 65 per cent meat, but that's because things like bones and skin have been stripped away.) I'm going to go out on a limb and say that because we've doubled the size of meat animals, a human has only half the usable muscle tissue of a cow, so 20 per cent.

The average adult human worldwide weighs about 137 pounds, so 20 per cent of that would be about 27 pounds of meat. (We're not going to count organ meats: when we ask for beef, we don't expect to get beef liver or kidneys.) It's not all equal quality, though — the muscles that get the most use will be toughest (I'm guessing the brachioradialis, in the forearm, won't be good for anything except stewing), while the tenderest will probably be the glutei maximi, aka the buttocks: they're the largest, so even if they're not the very tenderest (they do get kind of a workout keeping the body upright), they will provide the largest roasts and therefore be valuable.

If we're capturing free-range humans and stripping them of their meat for sale, then the cost of the livestock is fairly low but the quality is extremely variable. If we want to control for quality, then we need to raise the humans in pens and feed them specific foods, which will add to the cost, a lot.

I think it's safe to say that, in the absence of breeding programs to make humans more suitable for meat production, the costs incurred in raising them for meat are going to be higher than for other livestock, because there's just not that much meat per animal and humans have specific dietary and physical needs that farmyard animals don't. There's no way to know for sure, of course, but I'll hazard a guess: good-quality human meat is going to be in the vicinity of a really good cut of beef, say filet mignon, which Amazon will sell you right now for about $27 a pound, or wagyu, which Amazon also has available, for about $55 a pound. Since beef where I live is currently going for on average $10 a pound (CAD, ≈ $7.70 USD), I'd say that human is three and a half to seven times as expensive as cow.