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

[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.