He is recruited by the FDA as an agent with the special crimes division, and finds out he’s not the only Cibopath in the team. When a stakeout of an underground chicken restaurant turns into a much more dramatic discovery, Chu’s talent is discovered by higher powers: the Food and Drug Agency. And if anything will make me personally feel empathy for a character, it’s the knowledge they can only eat beetroot. The only food that Chu doesn’t react to is beets. Eating a steak is accompanied by the unpleasant knowledge of how said steak got on the plate. Eating an apple will tell Cibopaths where the orchard was that it grew from and what pesticides were used. Cibopaths can get impressions from what they eat on the history of where their food came from.

Well, you won’t find it in there, so put it down and get back to reading this. What is that? you ask, scrambling for your medical dictionary. But Chu isn’t just your everyday cop (who is in the world of comics?) but is, in fact, Cibopathic. Detective Tony Chu is on the case, staking out such organisations with his partner. Chicken is, predictably, banned, but there is a flourishing black market for it. But what would have happened in a world where avian flu was actually an international disaster? The comic Chew is here to tell you.Ģ3 million Americans have died of bird flu. And a pandemic-well, everyone gets into a frenzy about those, like last year’s swine flu, which threatened to take on Spanish flu proportions but essentially had a lesser fatality rate (though any fatality rate is terrible) than the normal flu. See the Icelandic volcano, spurting out ash and stranding travellers all over Europe.

Chew, Vol. 3 by John Layman