Aren’t cheese puffs great? They’re not just delicious, but their packaging can also help preserve and store a severed thumb! At least, that’s what The Man From Toronto wants us to believe, as Kevin Hart’s Teddy offers up his spicy, Cheetos-like bag to Woody Harrelson’s titular Man From Toronto as he looks for a place to put the thumb he (allegedly) chopped off a tech worker. He’s intending to take the freshly detached digit to a client, who’ll try to use it to open a briefcase needed to pull off a terrorist attack.
It’s all pretty ridiculous — in the very best way, of course — which is why we needed to get to the bottom of just how ridiculous it actually is. Would a cheese puff bag effectively preserve a human thumb in real life? How quickly would that thumb begin to turn, let’s say, less than viable? Or would the preservatives in this beloved snack help keep the thumb fresh longer than normal, as Teddy suggests? Finally, would the cheese dust impact the quality of the print? We have so many questions...
That’s why we went to an expert, Sarah Chavez, the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. Founded by noted mortician Caitlin Doughty, The Order of the Good Death is a death-acceptance organization that advocates for natural burial, humane and thoughtful post-life processes, and, as they put it, “challenging the ways we think about death.” Chavez is also a co-host of the Death in the Afternoon Podcast, a co-founder of the Collective for Radical Death Studies and co-founder of the feminist death site Death & the Maiden. In short, she knows her dead people, and she was the perfect person to answer our goofy query.
Would a cheese puff bag preserve a severed thumb? On our podcast, Death in the Afternoon, the topic of using a dead man’s thumb to unlock a cell phone was covered. You can find the episode here. They go into detail about actual instances where this has been done, and a forensic pathologist weighs in on the science behind it.
A severed thumb will likely begin to dehydrate, and the skin will begin to retract, which is why some people think fingernails grow after death. They don’t, it’s just the skin retracting. Sometimes when morticians are preparing a body, they’ll apply lotion to the fingers to counteract this. Cheetos, great as they are, wouldn’t prevent this.
What about the fingerprint? Would that still work? There's a man in Mexico who invented a “secret solution” for rehydrating corpses for identification purposes, and pathologists who conduct autopsies have injected fingers with a solution to try and get fingerprints.
Do you think the cheesy dust would impact the clarity of the print? And how long would the thumb stay viable? I can’t answer this one with a lot of confidence — a pathologist or someone working with a coroner facilitating autopsies will likely have the most experience with severed limbs. I can say that if it’s kept in a pocket, close to the body, it’s going to be a warmer and more moist environment, which would accelerate decomposition.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
