Kalefa Sanneh

Ever since the last time you interviewed me for your podcast, I've been sitting here at this table, in this chair, watching you, listening, waiting patiently for you to turn my microphone back on.

My feeling about people eating people?

I mean...

Look, this is a taboo that everyone recognizes is a taboo.

But when you tell me about people eating people, I immediately want to break it apart into different pieces, right?

There's people eating people on top of a mountain after a plane crash.

And some people have died and the other people need the sustenance, right?

That's one kind.

Yeah.

There's a kind of ritualized people eating people where that's part of the culture and you do it on special occasions or for a special reason.

There's lots of different kinds of people eating people.

But in general, yes, I certainly share the idea that it's something that we generally don't do.

And I can't claim I've ever had an overriding desire to do it.

The origin of cannibalism as taboo.

Now we know how the taboo starts, and we can work on ending it.

So this is a familiar story.

He's going to some faraway place, meeting a bunch of people, and basically trying to categorize them.

Why did the eating thing loom so large in his mind?

I feel like if I was meeting some people, possibly hostile, whether or not they would kill me would loom a lot larger in my mind than whether or not they would eat me.

But maybe it's a way of measuring distance.