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

[gatheringrivers]

Other than cats, if it walks or flies, I'm willing to TRY it once. (I don't *normally* do seafood on account of parental stupidity. The exceptions I *can't* have often because they're very high in mercury - things like Tuna.)

I may ONLY try it once, and a lot depends on how it's prepped (because food sensitivity issues) these days.

I don't like a lot of commercial feedlot practices, and I *really* dislike people/groups who abuse/neglect the animals before killing them, so I buy most of meat from small farms now.

I've HAD kangaroo, camel, and a couple other oddities (one of the grocery stores in the outer "boonies" (a/k/a countryside) actually stocked some exotics, and we picked up "one of each" in ground meat. We still have froglegs that we haven't done anything with yet, I really need to look up how to cook them...

Had tongue, heart, liver and kidney. I prefer fattier cuts of meat. I use gizzards as stock fodder. Have NOT had the opportunity for "critter nuts" or "rocky mountain oysters" :) but willing to try if they're available.

The "hard lines of NOPE NOPE NOPE!" for me are: (1) cats, and (2) food that's still alive when it's on my plate.

I don't want something like octopus trying to crawl BACK out of my throat, and I don't want to chase it around the table.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I prefer farm-raised anything to factory-raised anything, when I can find and afford it. Often I can't. But we get things like eggs and meat from small farmers when possible. Harvest Market and the Farmer's market make it easier to find, although they're so expensive we have to be sparing.