H&F: I’m assuming you would need to compare lots of cuts of meat to make it look human.

Janice Poon: You would, but you also need a certain bag of knowledge in terms of how big an animal is, and what would be the longest muscle.

I remember thinking, “If I could just get some giraffe meat.” I did make a few calls, “There must be a zoo that’s lost a giraffe recently. They can FedEx it to me.”

H&F: Is the task always doable?

Janice Poon: I get some extreme requests from Bryan [Fuller]. At one point, he wanted to show Hannibal cutting up a body the way a butcher would quarter a carcass. Where am I going to get an animal that passes as a human being that’s going to be credible?

H&F: Do you Frankenstein different meats together?

Janice Poon: I’m just like Dr. Frankenstein. I’m always stitching things, exchanging, putting one kind of meat on a different bone, patching stuff together. I sew a lot but don’t use a lot of meat glue - transglutaminase. It’s used a lot in the industry for making big pieces of meat out of scraps.

H&F: You use the term “Hannibalize” to describe your process. What does that entail?

Janice Poon: The key is to let the viewer’s imagination do more of your work. You do what you can, but you also put something else on the plate, a garnish or sauce or whatever, that hints at something else. The secret ingredient is imagination, fear.

H&F: Hannibal has a very ornate, decadent sense of taste.

Janice Poon: Yes, because the food isn’t just part of the script, it’s everything. It either has to propel the plot, inform Hannibal’s motive, his mood, or what’s coming next. It needs to hint at all these things. That’s my real job.