Edible Animals

[ysabetwordsmith]

My inner teenage boy was deeply amused by this billboard showing a spectrum of pets to food animals.

Me, I'm a pragmatist.  Anything I can get into my mouth and digest safely is potential food.  In practice, I strongly prefer not to eat other sapient beings unless I am starving to death, so things like cetacean, elephant, and primate are off my list of edibles outside of that context.  There are a few things I choose not to eat because I disapprove of their production methods; farmed veal exceeds my personal tolerance for animal abuse.  However, historic veal is in the same class as buckling for me -- used to be, all the milk animals would drop about 50% male offspring that you didn't need, so you dressed them out right then and had the tenderest meat ever.  That I would gleefully eat if I had the chance.  There are plenty of things I'd like to try, haven't encountered yet, and probably wouldn't want to eat routinely; dog and horse are both in that category.  So are insects, a key indicator that I am not culturally an American despite living here.  My everyday category is wider too: rabbit, goat, and lamb are all things I actively look for and order when I find them.  I also enjoy some animal parts that most Americans do not, including tongue, brains, heart, gizzard, and testicles.  I loved haggis the one time I got it.  However, I have tried kidney and wasn't fond of it; I really dislike liver and would have to be ravenous to eat it willingly.

These are all things that vary widely by culture and time period.  What are some of your settings?

Comments

For haggis

[dialecticdreamer]

See if you can find uncured pork cheek for your test haggis. It needs slow, moist cooking like heart or tongue, but it freaking MELTS. It's also a little bit greasier than I expected, but in a meatloaf type dish, the fat is a huge flavor boost.

[scrubjayspeaks]

I think I hit all the "too sapient for food" notes that others hit. I ultimately gave up octopus and squid readily but with sorrow, as those are flippin' delicious.

My regarded-as-eccentric rule is I won't knowingly eat any type of animal--beyond just specific individuals--that I've kept as a pet. Which rules out...most rodents including squirrels, possum, quail, duck, goose, frog, snail, lizard, cat, dog, horse, and rabbit. I think that covers it. My brain just seems to require "pet" and "food" to be circles with zero overlap.

My best friend has Chinese parents who liked trying to gross out the white kid when we were growing up. It never really worked, so long as they didn't tell me what it was in advance. (With my friend serving as a spotter for my known restrictions.) And I've had chips made from insects, but I haven't had a chance yet to try them whole. The texture might be a problem for me, but I'd be keen.

I did stop eating beef, because raw and rare beef reminded me too much of horse meat in the form of "dumbass foal found the only sharp object around and decided to skin himself alive, quick, somebody put him back together!" A distinctly unappetizing association. Raising animals has put a few kinks in my dietary habits. XD

On the subject of animal husbandry and food vs pet, anyone interested might like to check out Comrade Shepherd (@NeolithicSheep) on Twitter. She talks about raising heritage breeds, the ethics of food, and why snotty vegans need to get bent.

Re: Foods and preferences

[mdlbear]

I've had steak-and-kidney pie -- delicious. Same for sweatbreads (pancreas).

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> She talks about raising heritage breeds, the ethics of food, and why snotty vegans need to get bent.<<

1) Because each individual makes decisions for themselves, and has no right to force theirs on anyone else.

2) Because any action that makes animals less accessible, appealing, and useful to humans is a vote that those animals should cease to exist. That's what happens to animals that humans don't care about. The people who drove elephants out of circuses probably doomed them to extinction. Look at all the heritage breeds we've lost. Gaited horses used to be valuable and numerous; we're down to a few rare breeds.

3) This conversation usually ends when the vegan's fluffy herbivorous totem realizes there is a wolf in the room. :D

Re: Well ...

[gingicat]

Well, if we’re getting into taste, I prefer my meat thoroughly deboned. That lets out frog, whole fish, squab, etc.

(And, sadly, I have a massive aversion to scaled-and-finned fish, even in very-fresh-and-raw form. This did not use to be the case. It’s a pregnancy-related aversion that never went away.)

[gingicat]

Goat is delicious when tender.

Re: Foods and preferences

[gingicat]

If you like liver and kidneys, I thoroughly recommend chicken hearts. Our local Asian market sells them in the kind of trays that are often used for ground beef.

Re: Foods and preferences

[dialecticdreamer]

Our local Asian market sells all KINDS of odd animal parts, with chicken feet being the MOST familiar.

Chicken hearts are definitely NOM!

[arlie]

I figure my food preferences are culturally British - not modern British, but British before curry was standard fare. Plus a lot of additions from living in Canada and then California.

I absolutely love beef kidneys. I prefer chicken liver to beef liver - much easier to mess up cooking beef liver, and produce something about as appetizing as the sole of a boot :-( But I used to stop at the same town every time I took a particular 6 hour road trip, just to eat beef liver and onions at a particular restaurant that did it right. Beef tongue is great. Hearts are OK. The idea of eating testicles squicks me, so I've never tried them.

While I enjoy a good steak, I'd rather have a slow-cooked piece of tough meat than an also-ran steak.

As a child in Canada, I used to eat raw beef hamburger; that ended with mad cow disease and a move to the US.

I'm happy to eat raw fish, and it doesn't have to be in cute little sushi rolls. Cooked fish too. But please don't serve something like trout whole, looking like a critter. I can't think of a fish I don't like, though there are some I avoid because of overfishing/endangerment. I love scallops. I'm more or less meh on other shellfish. (I eat them, but don't seek them out.) Lobster's fine, but taking a nut cracker to one is no fun. And a bit of squick for boiling them alive. I have a nice jar of pickled herring in the fridge right now.

I've eaten buffalo, and prefer beef. I've eaten rabbit, and it was OK. I eat all the standard North American meats - beef, pork, chicken, turkey, lamb. I like goose. Ostrich is tasty, but I've only had it a couple of times. I wouldn't seek out horse, or pick it from a menu, but I'd eat it if served to me. I've had goat a couple of times, and it was awful; I now actively avoid it on Indian buffets. But I'm not sure the problem was goat, it might just have been the way it was cooked. I love lamb, cooked according to recipes from approx. Greece thru India, but *not* the way British or traditional white Americans cook it.

Given a choice, I pick the more humanely raised meat, but don't put much effort into it.

I've never knowingly eaten insects, but I'd be willing to try.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you like lamb, you should like properly prepared goat. But they're both meats that are easy to wreck. One problem is if you get the wrong age of meat for your recipe, and another is that -- aside from very young kid -- goat meat will toughen and taste rank if overcooked or dried out. Look for a wet-cooked version like an African stew if you want to try it again.

Re: Foods and preferences

[ysabetwordsmith]

Chicken feet are good for making stock!

Another of the odd things I've tried is duck's blood soup, a Polish recipe. Too sour for me to eat much of, but very interesting to try.

Re: Foods and preferences

[dialecticdreamer]

The boys STILL laugh about the Asian staff's reactions to the boys opting for "chocolate meat" or blood soup in restaurants.

Re: Foods and preferences

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yep. The most consistent occasion we have significant trouble with racism is in ethnic restaurants. They look at our skin and make wildly inaccurate predictions about our diet. Doug has a hard time getting his food picante enough for his tastes. People stare at both of us when we order the goat. If I order tongue taco in Spanish they ask if I know what it is. And let's not forget the Chinese place that didn't want to give us chopsticks because they were afraid we'd hurt ourselves. 0_o

But some places we go are awesome. At Yanni's he was talking to the Greek-American family next to us, and we just sort of got rolled into the conversation.

[pronker]

Thanks for the new word, "buckling."

Haggis sounds interesting; I'm fond of heart, gizzard, and tongue; kidney is a pain, has great waste to its preparation with the fat and tubes inside the structure, and tastes nasty unless it's in a steak-and-kidney pie, which is a 3 hour project, so no thanks after the two or three meals I've prepared of it. Liver is great with onions and just barely cooked so that it looks like it might recover and get well, otherwise it's leather. All the rest of the list, well, I'm not adventurous anymore. It's okay.

Tee hee at the billboard. :)

EAD: lamb and goat, oh my yes! Rabbit is so so; I've not discovered a way to make it as tender as I like. Otherwise it's okay, all white meat.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Among the more reliable ways to make rabbit tender: crock it until the meat falls off the bones, remove bones, shred meat, then add vegetables to make stew.

Another option is to section the rabbit, bury the pieces in a casserole or something else, then bake for a long time.

Good to know, thanks!

[pronker]

make stew Would that be wabbit stew?? ;P

Yes, this sounds reasonable because it's such a lean meat it needs glop added to it to moisten. I raised rabbits commercially for about 20 years, but only as pets. The technical part about slaughtering and skinning was part of the knowledge, yet I had no heart to kill the beasties. They are fascinating critters and vets use cat meds for many of their ailments,.luckily.

Re: Good to know, thanks!

[ysabetwordsmith]

You can also wrap lean meat in fatty meat for a nice combination. My deer-in-a-thicket consists of a handful of blackberries wrapped in venison meatloaf wrapped in hot pork sausage.

For rabbit, I would probably add schmaltz (chicken fat), duck or goose.

Re: Good to know, thanks!

[pronker]

Deer in a thicket sounds phenomenal.

Re: Good to know, thanks!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It is incredibly delicious. :D I nicked the recipe from some of my characters. We have made it for ritual feasts several times.

Re: Foods and preferences

[ng_moonmoth]

>> Yep. The most consistent occasion we have significant trouble with racism is in ethnic restaurants. They look at our skin and make wildly inaccurate predictions about our diet. <<

We get that a lot, too. One way we've found that seems to reduce the issue (fortunately, fairly easy to do around here) is to filter by how many of the patrons look like the place the cuisine is from: if you're a round-eye, and walk into a place like that, there seems to be a general presumption that you know what you're doing once you can convince them you haven't wandered into the place by mistake. Which we usually confirm by getting at least one instance of Stuff White Folks Don't Eat.

Speaking of culinary racism, spouse got a stiff dose of that once at a supposedly renowned dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong, where they got shunted off into a side room and served mostly mundane stuff. Having seen more interesting stuff in the main room, they went back, the staff attempted to put them back in the side room again, and they got across that they wanted to be in the main room -- where the dishes were much more varied and quite enjoyable.

More locally, they were taking a break to have lunch with a colleague, and went to a halal Chinese place we frequent once. One of the lunch specials was tripe, which the colleague loves and ordered. The server asked whether colleague knew what they were ordering, got "yes, bring it", and filled the order. When the order came out, a number of the wait staff and a few folks from the kitchen positioned themselves discreetly to check out what the round-eye was going to do with the order. According to spouse, there was visible relaxation once the colleague's enjoyment of the dish was observed.

Re: Foods and preferences

[ysabetwordsmith]

LOL yes, we get watched like that.

And just about every time I'm in a crowded ethnic Chinese restaurant, the staff will do a double-take, because I'm ambidextrous enough to use chopsticks with both hands. That means I can switch to whichever side isn't bumping into someone else at the moment. Apparently almost nobody can do that, so it attracts attention. But after that, they take me quite seriously.

[zeeth_kyrah]

If you're counting all those as people, I think horses should be on that list. Despite being delicious. Elk, on the other hand, is not really much more intelligent than any other deer. I might eat caribou (reindeer by any other name, eh?) but I think I'd treat them more like horses most of the time.

Killing wild animals for food... well, if that's the situation you're in, that's what food looks like. Might as well.

[siliconshaman]

Heh, shows my UK bias.. of course horses count as people.. but even if they didn't I wouldn't eat them. Never even considered it, hence failure to mention.

Re: Thoughts

[zeeth_kyrah]

Heh.. I seem to manifest cats a lot more, including snow leopard and treecat/margay (same species, different biology of origin, think treecats from the Honor Harrington series). But there is horse, bird (a couple of types) and snowshoe hare in here. Plus a dog or two.

I think I'm sensible about it, but the dragon in me keeps eyeing the animals as food supplies; she's been through a few hard winters before.

[johnpalmer]

Haggis is really just a form of sausage-and; it's interesting that people have a strong reaction to it.

One thing about testicles: they contain testosterone, which is active when administered orally (but it can damage the liver long term, which is why it's administered medically yin gels, creams, patches, and injections). But I believe testosterone replacement therapy started life as Rocky Mountain Oysters.