Depending on how you interpret the dietary needs of ghouls, it likely wouldn't work. The whole point of their need for flesh is Essence, and a shedim-occupied corpse has been dead far too long to still have trace Essence (which IIRC lasts 24-48 hours).

And I've contested this as making no sense, regardless of what the canon rules say. You might recall we had quite the debate on this subject recently here.

My understanding mirrors binarywraith's. Ghouls can eat other (raw) things, but they need metahuman flesh to live. It's not the flesh itself that's important but the trace Essence that remains. Even if the shedim are regenerating the meat, I wouldn't allow them to regenerate the Essence.

I think one of the earlier editions suggested that the Infected need 5% of their body weight in ____ (bones, blood, whatever the specific species needs) every week. Not too bad for the smaller Infected, but tougher for your dzoo-noo-quas and fomóraigs.

And as we've said before, if you're going to houserule it, why bother with the question? Just decide how you want to do it in your game and do that.

It doesn't really and any value to a question of rules-as-written theory to state you houserule it differently because reasons.

Fine until the Master Shedim gets out and then your players are going to be hunted until the end of time.

Maybe throw a twist in there that the body parts harvested from the Master are also 'tainted' slightly and the more they eat the more a ghoul may fall under the Master's remote control.

Starts off with the ghoul hearing eerie whispers/seeing shadows out of the corner of the eye slowing building to a presence in the back of their head, encouraging certain behaviours.

Could also lead to a scenario where some ghoul thralls work to break the Master free for some retribution.

That's actually a rather good mini-campaign idea. The ghouls who eat the meat start to hear...whispers...in their thoughts, and, of course, it's calling its minions to come free it from captivity.

Depending on how you interpret the dietary needs of ghouls, it likely wouldn't work. The whole point of their need for flesh is Essence, and a shedim-occupied corpse has been dead far too long to still have trace Essence (which IIRC lasts 24-48 hours).

A few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.

According SR4A, p. 73, 98% of the global sapient population is metahuman, while "the remaining 2 percent of the global population includes dracoforms, ghouls and other vampiric entities, spirits, artificial intelligences, shapeshifters, and other sentient non-metahuman species." So even without accurate numbers of total population, we still know that there are no more than 2 Infected for every 100 people, and realistically closer to only 1 per 100.

Ghouls require 5% of their body weight per week in human flesh. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume perfect consumption efficiency and state that for every 100 ghouls, you need 5 human corpses per week, or 260 corpses per year. Thus the minimum overal number of corpses consumed by ghouls per year can be measured as 260% of their population.

Crude Death Rate is measured in the total number of deaths per year per 1000 people. As of July 2009, the global CDR was 8.37 deaths per 1000 per year, or 0.837 deaths per hundred per year. If the percentage of the global population which is ghouls is greater than 0.3219%, this death rate is insufficient to feed them all. If the percentage is somewhere around 1%, say 1.287% of the global population (still well below the 2% cited above), you can at best feed a quarter of the ghoul population, assuming perfect "harvest" efficiency, meaning every year the ghouls would be forced to kill and eat a number of people equal to 195% of the ghoul population, effectively increasing the CDR from 8.37 per 1000 to 33.466 per 1000, roughly quadrupling the CDR.

Even if the CDR is already much higher in 2075, ghouls are theoretically unfeedable by passive means alone.

And none of this even accounts for detailed information.

For example, Humans make up 60% of the population, so at least for that portion these numbers are "roughly" accurate. Orks and Trolls provide more meat and have higher death rates, but while Orks are a relatively large group, they're still a minority, and Trolls are actually pretty rare. Additionally, you can also have Ork and Troll ghouls, which increases the amount of meat you need per individual ghoul. Moreover, given the relative disenfranchizement of Orks and Trolls, they may have disproportionately higher rates of Infection, resulting in the global Ghoul population not cleanly mirroring un-infected metatype ratios. Elves and Dwarves likewise complicate matters, as they not only live longer and provide less meat, they're probably also less frequently Infected thanks to better standards of living, and therefor make up a smaller portion of the ghoul population, counteracting their reduced intake of human flesh.

For example, not every scrap of every corpse is useable. What actually counts as "Metahuman Flesh" in terms of magical theory? Could you dig up old bones and eat those, or does it actually mean muscle and meat? Moreover, even if the ferals could survive off mere bones and sinew, the still sane ones might not be so undiscerning. I get that you don't have much of a choice, but with groups like Tamanous willing and able to fill a blackmarket demand for choice flesh, the "natural harvest" needs to be able to compete in terms of quality of cuts of meat. There there's the matter of damage to the body, which accounts for a significant number of deaths and which would destroy useable parts. Then there's "harvesting", preservation, transportation, pricing, regional supply discrepancies (a lot easier to get fed in places where more people are dying), and so forth.

This doesn't even begin to touch on legal and religious concerns. Do you have any idea how messy the laws on the possession and storage of human remains already are in our own day and age? How do you handle Organ Donations? Does Joe Human get his kidney transplant, or does Johnny Ghoul get his kidney pie?

Actually, I got quite a bit out of that discussion. I consider it a very educational thread, on multiple topics/ideas.