Kalefa Sanneh

On the one hand, to eating the placenta, right?

Which is a tradition that some people are reviving.

Or even to something like a wake, where if you've never been to an open casket wake, it's a little bit strange.

But yes, this seems like an incredibly respectful way of honoring a body, right?

It's not treating a body as meat.

Yeah, I mean, you know, at the base of the cannibalism taboo is this idea that as human beings, we don't look at each other as food.

And this, in a way, honors that, right?

This isn't like, oh, this person died, they're going to be delicious, right?

This is like, yeah, we don't look at each other as food, and we're going to do this ritualistic thing to honor the life, maybe.

Yeah.

You know, there is this idea that a lot of food taboos traditionally, you think of kosher and halal systems, had to do partly with health and had to do partly with safety and ways of consuming meat that wouldn't put you at risk.

And so it's not surprising to learn that there might be some element of that in the taboo against human cannibalism.

I think I would eat lab-grown human meat.

I mean, it doesn't seem like we're necessarily too far away from a time when you can grow all different kinds of flesh in a lab.

Yeah.

And so in that sense, what it would mean for it to be quote unquote human, I guess would have something to do with the DNA.

And I don't know, but it gets a little abstract.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, that's part of what modernization is, right?

It's like various taboos get considered superstitious and they kind of fall away.

And then the question is, can we hold the line against other kinds of behavior we think is bad, even as these taboos get weakened?