Folk Tales--Evolutions

When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was swapping ghost stories with friends.  The goal was to scare the most people with a single story.  The one that freaked me out the most was the story of the stolen bone, though I've heard it in different ways.  Anyway, a young man is starving and finds a bone with a large amount of meat on it one day in a field.  He goes home, cooks it, and eats the meat.  That night, the corpse that had lost whatever limb the man ate, comes back to reclaim it. And, in true horror story fashion, the man is never seen or heard of again.  

Freaky, right?  This one bothered me because I like steak and I don't necessarily know where my steak comes from, but that is beside the point.  When reading Diop's The Bone, I felt like that ghost story from my childhood could be The Bone II: Curse of Good Meat or something ridiculous.  In both stories, the bone and choice meat are the main character's downfall.  They are driven by a similar motive, hunger, however there is a different lesson from both.  Diop seems to be telling his audience to avoid being selfish, and the story I knew was more of a be careful with strange meat, both of which are good life lessons.  

Now, that was totally off the wall, but it is what The Bone reminded me of.