It’s not like pork. That misunderstanding about the taste of human flesh is attributable to one of those linguistic mix-ups between explorers and locals: Apparently Pacific Islanders called human meat “long pig” because wild pig was the only other large animal whose meat they ate. According to Carole Travis-Henikoff’s “Dinner With a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo” (Santa Monica Press, 333 pages, $24.95), humans taste more like beef, only better. At least for some folks, she writes, the meat of people is the best they’ve ever had.

An independent scholar who specializes in paleoanthropology (she is also a rancher and businesswoman), Ms. Travis-Henikoff circles around cannibalism by surveying the extremely wide world of eating. She includes tales of diverse culinary exotica (when served live monkey brains, you can hear the scratching of the caged monkeys nearby even after the top of their skulls has been removed), gross trivia from the animal kingdom (sand shark babies eat their siblings before they are born), and weird beliefs about our bodies (some tribes feel that eating others is fine, but eating yourself is terribly wrong). “Dinner With a Cannibal” contains dozens of these peculiar, stimulating facts (“all tongue, regardless of species, tastes like tongue”) and many curious sentences that have surely never been printed before, such as “my favorite story concerning the blood of menses … .”

Throughout the book, Ms. Travis-Henikoff makes the case for cultural determinism: If everyone around you during your childhood drinks tea made from insect feces, or believes in the therapeutic powers of guinea pigs, she argues, then you, too, will see these activities as positive, or at least acceptable. Cannibalism, she says, should be viewed in this forgiving light. For the most part, it’s a sensible approach: Even though we are all familiar with creepy modern cases of serial killers consuming their victims, these pathological incidents are clearly distinct from ritualized group cannibalism, which demands a different analytic approach. Ms. Travis-Henikoff supplies ample evidence that many different groups have practiced cannibalism over long periods of time, so much so that the practice should probably be viewed, at least historically, as a long-standing human activity and an important feature of our social evolution. Indeed, it’s not too hard to appreciate the metaphorical — if not the actual — value of eating one’s enemies so as to declare complete victory over them, as well as terrorize their remaining relatives.

Other kinds of widespread cannibalism Ms. Travis-Henikoff highlights are medicinal cannibalism, religious cannibalism, and funerary cannibalism, in which a dead relative is consumed for reasons of respect, love, and grief. Many of these practices were still being carried out in isolated communities in the early to mid-20th century, and there are rare reported cases of cannibalism still occurring. A 1992 report detailed religious cannibalism in Guyana, South America, where victims were murdered then cannibalized to appease and heal the planet. Ms. Travis-Henikoff also describes “benign cannibalism,” a hopelessly inadequate term for those times when diners don’t actually realize they are eating their fellow humans. Idi Amin once seated a group of foreign guests to a meal and only told them the next day they’d eaten people.

Survival cannibalism is the type we are most familiar with, through urban legend and Donner Party myth. In recounting the tale of the Uruguayan air force Fairchild F-227 that crashed in the Andes in 1972, Ms. Travis-Henikoff rightly stresses the adaptability of human beings. The survivors stayed alive for 71 days following the crash only because they ate their dead traveling companions.

As Ms. Travis-Henikoff suggests, judging the unfortunate passengers of the F-227 as good or bad or right or wrong is pointless, even inappropriate. But the cultural relativity framework only stretches so far. Ms. Travis-Henikoff describes but doesn’t really integrate cases where cannibalism is not merely a cultural variant, but represents a public health problem — for the cannibal, not just the dish. Witness the Fore of Okapa in Papua New Guinea, who ate infected human brains and suffered epidemic levels of a fatal spongiform encephalopathy (like mad cow disease). If you want to put it in biological terms, this kind of cannibalism is nonadaptive. If you want to give it a more judgmental kick, you might say it’s just a very bad idea.

But Ms. Travis-Henikoff does not restrict herself to that kind of narrow approach; she goes wide, and explores what happens to beliefs and practices when invaders try to understand and control the culture of indigenous groups they encounter. She recounts a Maori story about colonists chopping down all the native statues of erect penises but leaving the islands full of wooden vagina carvings, mistaking them for flowers. Such non-cannibal stories are interesting enough, but there are too many of them in this book, as well as too many long preambles and loosely linked reminiscences about unusual food. In place of these diversions, there are many tantalizing items that could have been more fully detailed. Ms. Travis-Henikoff says that brains are the most calorific food on the planet, even richer than butter, but she doesn’t say what their calorie count is. Similarly, she describes how purchasing small packets of Egyptian mummy and eating it “became the rage in Europe” in the 17th century, but it’s not clear how people ate it.

Ramblings aside, there are priceless pieces of information herein. For example, a cannibal taunt from New Guinea goes like this: “I ate your brother yesterday, tomorrow I will crap him out.”

Ms. Kenneally is a journalist and the author of “The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language.”