I'm under the impression that that was an actual statement made by a man from New Guinea to a missionary (who was presumably trying to make the case against.) But it might just be a joke anthropologists tell each other or something like that.
IIRC they didn’t quite eat people but rather ate the brain parts of ancestors steamed in bamboo if something. Anyhow it want always well prepared and 40 years thence they developed some disease, so foreigners tried to get them to stop the custom.
Not to nitpick, just to illustrate, but the disease is called Kuru[0] - essentially, prions transferred by the consumption of cooked dead bodies during a rite -, and it is absolutely terrifying:
>In the third and final (terminal) stage, the infected individual's existing symptoms, like ataxia, progress to the point where they are no longer capable of sitting without support. New symptoms also emerge: the individual develops dysphagia, which can lead to severe malnutrition. They may also become incontinent, lose the ability or will to speak and become unresponsive to their surroundings, despite maintaining consciousness.[14] Towards the end of the terminal stage, patients often develop chronic ulcerated wounds that can be easily infected. An infected person usually dies within three months to two years after the first terminal stage symptoms, often because of pneumonia or other secondary infections.[15]
