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

Re: Foods and preferences

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Finding /real mutton/, not LAMB, would make my decade! <<

I have on occasion, but not often.

Similarly, what is sold as goat is more often chevre (kid meat) and the two are not identical. Recipes designed for mature goat or mutton will overwhelm kid or lamb.

>>cabesa (cow brains), but stopped that during the last mad cow disease scare. <<

Sadly, I came to the same conclusion.

>>My kids don't balk at things like head cheese or braunschweiger. <<

<3 head cheese.

>>Frankly, I may or may not be willing to try it voluntarily, since I do love buffalo, but I resent to the ends of the Earth the fact that I wasn't given a choice in the matter. <<

That's an example of how America's food system is not based on safety or consent, but on money and power. >_<

>>So, yeah, there's bias in there, all tangled up with observed versus unexplored assumptions. I love conversations that make me THINK about those assumptions. <<

Yeah, and that's exactly why I need like-minded friends. Most people find my favorite conversations boring, scary, or offensive. I feel the same about theirs, especially when they won't shut up about the sex lives of people neither of us even know.

Re: Foods and preferences

[dialecticdreamer]

So many people spend so much time speculating on the sex lives of others that I genuinely wonder how many world-changing discoveries have been left in dark corners, lost in the shuffle.

Re: Foods and preferences

[ysabetwordsmith]

Vast treasure warrens full of them, I should think.

I mean, look at some of the stuff I've turned up. Everyone else found worlds full of superpowers and all they wrote was crime drama. For decades. I'm like, don't you want any of the other genres? Because hey, if you're not gonna eat that...