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[Grath]

Cannibalism isn't eating sentient creatures, it's eating your OWN SPECIES.
Unless the elves have started eating their own young for kicks, they're not cannibals. They're just opportunistic and carnivorous.

[SirPenguin]

In the real world, yes, cannibalism, in terms of humans, is humans eating other humans. But we obviously don't have Elves/Dwarves/Goblins/Kobolds in our world. So it's kind of hard to determine how different an elf is from a human, in terms of Species.

Alternate answer: Hannibal Kelf the Cannible Elf rhymes better than Hannibal Kelf the Eater of Sentient Beings. 

[Grath]

Cannibalism in terms of HUMANS is eating other HUMANS.
Cannibalism in terms of zoology is extended to refer to any species consuming members of it's own kind.

[SirPenguin]

Which is what I just said. Now tell me, is an elf a different species? I think you'd be hard pressed to find a book telling you one way or another.

[Cthulhu]

Stop feeding the real world to Dwarf Fortress, it's allergic.

[Lalandrathon]

Cannibalism can be defined as eating other people. Since humans are the only ones we know of so far that count as people in the real world there's no difference between defining it that way and defining it as eating another member of the same species.

[Christes]

Would eating a modern human eating an older hominid (such as a neanderthal) constitute cannibalism?  I would say yes in spirit, even though they are technically different species.  It sort of crosses a line beyond which the two individuals are close enough.

Dwarves and elves are both extremely similar to humans in physiology and, more importantly, in sapience.

And note that the raws do not call it cannibalism - they refer to it as eating sapient creatures.

[McDoomhammer]

In much fantasy you see half-elves, which allows a convincing case for describing the act as cannibalism (rather than just, you know, wilful corpse-desecration).

However, half-elves have never been in DF, and don't look to be any time soon.

[Toady One]

Of course, if an elf kills a snatched elf in a war, you don't even have to worry about the distinctions.

[Jetman123]

I think people are just calling the elves cannibals for lack of a better term, but I prefer "predator" elves.

Honestly I think elves are cool but unbalanced now. They have their own flavor, but I do NOT see elves as being warlike, swarming towns of 20 with 1472105 elves all of which are ageless and can only die to tragedy or war. They reproduce too fast and don't die of old age - I don't agree with either, unfortunately.

After the initial shock, though, I realized that elves eating the corpses of their foes makes sense. They don't want to eat anything more than neccessary, unlike the humans who eat to keep themselves bloated (in their eyes), or the goblins who kill for pleasure... So eating the corpses of their foes means that they don't have to go out and kill an animal later. Dual purpose - they eat what they kill.

And you could also make a convincing arguement for how they don't want the corpses to decompose, because the corpses of goblins and the like are "impure" and shouldn't be allowed to feed the saplings for fear that they would be poisoned.