This is absolutely not true. I am in the Sacred Valley and there is a cuy farm in front of my house.
They live in their own feces, it smells terrible. The owners feed them the cheapest food possible. They are slaughtered after a few months as soon as they can have babies and get to 700g+. They could live a lot longer.
You are generalizing, I have seen them breed in Ecuador and they only feed them fresh cut grasses and fresh fruits. But like any animal there are different farming conditions from one place to another.
The same conditions you saw for those cuy I have seen for cows here in a California Dairy farm.
I am not passing judgements on eating meat. People may choose for themselves. However you accuse me of generalizing when in fact you made a blanket statement that is frankly patently absurd. I've lived in Peru for more than a decade and traveled all over Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Columbia.
Sure they are fed grass, because it's cheap. But generally fruit isn't given to cuy unless it's fruit humans wont buy or eat. Again because it's cheap. I've seen more than a hundred Cuy farms as an environmental activist, not only one. This is universally true. Cuy are harvested young, fed efficiently for profit, and kept in enclosures to ensure they are easy to catch and keep predators away, again for profit. Nothing about that is any better or worse than chicken or cattle factory farming.
Your comment made it sound as if Cuy farming is some noble and humane form of farming when in fact it is the same as any other farming business built for maximum profit and economic efficency.
The answer to my question "why lie?" Is because you saw and likely ate cuy once and want to justify your actions. Your actions need no justification, do what you want. But don't pretend that your exoerience is somehow superior to factory farmed beef, because it isn't.
My sister and I had pet rabbits growing up but we ate all the offspring. My dad told her it was chicken in the rabbit stew for years until she came home from school early one day while we were halfway through butchering them 😭. After the secret was out we had whole rabbit and she ate something else lol
You'd be surprised at how many things you'd find delicious until you are told what it actually is.
I ate cat once. Semi-knowingly. Part of me knew it was but it was a once in a lifetime experience to I did not object. The worst part is that it doesn't taste quite like any other meat and its not bad.
I don’t doubt it but I really need to hear more about this “once in a lifetime experience”. I mean, I hope you don’t eat cat multiple times but what kind of “alluring opportunity” was it?
I didn't eat multiple times but I had went to a shop in China. It wasn't explicitly cat meat but I wanted to take pictures of the meal for my friends back home and the staff would not let me. They even threatened to take my phone if I didn't try to stop taking pics lol.
Zha Jiang Mian noodles was the dish. I believe. I knew something was fishy because of the whole secrecy thing and as soon as I took a bite I knew the "pork" was not in fact pork because it did not taste like pork at all. My stomach also did not agree with my decisions afterwards.
The main one that can be problematic supposedly is human. The reports of how it tastes changes from person to person and if you get your food from the circus it may taste a little funny.
I mean, that means they were delicious lol. You just didn't want to know that they were delicious. I'm sure that, if properly prepared, I'd be pretty tasty, but I don't think most people would want to find out.
Yeah they were delicious, I just didn’t want to eat anymore after finding out. They were properly prepared/and cooked, served at a popular family owned restaurant/steakhouse in a small farming/ranching town.
They were originally domesticated for meat. They eat grass (which humans cannot) and turn the indigestable fibers of tough mountain grasses into protein, they also grow quickly and reproduce quickly. Makes sense the Andean cultures would domesticate them.
One thing many don't think of about this cultural staple of many South American countries is that they also do not have access to large grazing pastures. It is easier to raise the small mammals vs the flat acerage needs of big mammals. I haven't had cuy yet either.
Though when you look at this based on topography being far more varied it makes sense why they raise them for meat.
I’m not vegan and probably never will be, but your comment made me think: if we invented a machine that could create food out of inedible substances, we’d consider it an incredible scientific breakthrough.
This is essentially how we use many livestock animals: as biological machines that convert grass and otherwise unusable plant matter into food. I don’t know that I feel great about that. I’d never thought of it in those terms before reading your comment. I know that’s not what you were getting at, but this shit lowkey fucked me up.
Many animals have the same issue and it's why they eat meat. It's natural for us to eat meat, and there's nothing morally wrong with that Biology. The issue is, we know how to raise and butcher meat ethically, but we don't because that costs more money than capitalism is willing to part with. People should try to eat less meat and choose more sustainable meats where they can, not because eating meat itself is wrong, but the production of meat under capitalism is unethical.
Great comment. I think reducing consumption is ideal because it seems quite possible that even under a more ethical economic system, it may be infeasible to ethically produce the required amount of meat.
Well, I'd say another part of the issue is the culture of consumerism that runs alongside everything else. Richer countries overall tend to be more wasteful and more demanding of product they don't need. I'm not saying it's not ok to have nice things, but when I watch one of my coworkers get 5 or 6 Amazon packages almost every day, well. Clearly we have to take a little responsibility for our culture. I think it's possible to eventually get to ethical consumption, but we're gonna have to make stuff that lasts and be happy with WAY less "stuff" over all.
I know what you mean, friend. This insatiable demand for more has contributed to all manor of unethical conditions. From the slave wages and brutal conditions required to provide affordable products, to the offshoring of pollution, and undermining of developing institutions, we have really done a number on billions of people.
Beyond that, I think we’re doing a number on ourselves. Not to endlessly opine the ills of western civilization, but this shit feels so hollow. Every major cultural event is a superficial cash grab, memes that are literally just marketing campaigns (seriously a new viral water bottle every year????), worst of all, a near complete lack of community and ever worsening social cohesion. The last part isn’t entirely attributable to the prevailing economic conditions, but certainly *the death of the third place* is largely attributable to our consumer culture and the MBA psychos who exploit it.
In Europe, butchering and in many respects raising meat ethically is largely a non-optional legal obligation (although imperfect, and I'm going to stay away from the topic of halal and kosher exceptions). And where there are current issues, things have at least are progressively moving in the right direction such as increasing regulation of battery farming.
It's no surprise that ethical treatment of animals is a very low priority in undeveloped and developing countries, but that's not so much capitalism per se as poverty and being able to afford to eat protein at all. But for other countries, most notably the US, you're right that the pandering to capitalism whatever the ethics is a problem... but Europe is showing that a different path does exist, and people in countries like the US have a choice to vote for people to take them that direction if they wanted.
We’re so removed from knowing what it’s like to harvest animals for food. I don’t mean to be graphic but for example it breaks my heart every time I put a knife through a lobster’s head to make a lobster roll. I grew up with chickens too and when we would kill them to eat was always awful. If you eat meat I think that’s something you should experience just to know what happens if you choose to consume animal products.
Most people are happy to stay totally ignorant of the hypocrisy in criticizing the eating of certain types of animals. Absent specific criticisms of how the animals are raised or slaughtered of broader scientific concerns like endangered species, nobody has the right to judge what is acceptable for other cultures to eat. Vegans are the exception, since they consider all meat eating unethical.
I, too, got suckered into eating it in Quito about 30 years ago. Once they told me what it was I thought I was gonna be sick right there on the sidewalk.
Kinda curious how they served it that you weren't able to tell instantly. We tend to serve them with the bone still there and it's pretty obvious that it is a small mammal, because of the legs. We also eat the head, which is pretty obvious yeah, but I guess a restaurant won't serve the head in a platter.
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u/grungegoth 25d ago
I unknowingly ate guinea pig at a hotel buffet in Quito
tastes like ... small birds, or chicken