Guinea pigs were bred as livestock by the Inca in South America. They used to be a dish reserved for nobility but now us plebs have access to Cuy in the supermarket. 😃
Some people still do raise them for food 🙂
When you’ve got not fridge and the environment isn’t always condusive to curing and preserving meat, it’s very handy to raise an animal that’s a smaller amount of meat (say one meal) than something like a goat, pig, chicken or cow.
They breed easily and rapidly, eat scraps and vegetation that humans normally don’t. So folks keep a herd of Guinea pigs and just slaughter whatever they need for a meal.
It’s very clever and much more environmentally friendly than clearing forest for larger animals.
That they would be reserved for nobility seems like it must be wrong. These are tiny animals that wouldn’t take much effort to raise. A small family could easily eat one. Just grab a pair and start raising them.
It’s not like a cow where you need large amounts of grazing land and then when you kill it, you have huge amounts of meat to deal with.
This is why animals in English have three names. One for the animal, raised by the commoners with Germanic origin (cow). One for the meat, eaten by the wealthy with French origin due to the Norman conquest (beef). And one used in scientific contexts coming from Greek or Latin (bovine)
My guess would be the meat to prep work ratio. Smaller game seems like it would be more effort to skin and clean vs. larger ones like turkeys and deer. Just a guess however, anyone know for sure?
It’s surely not any different than a squirrel, ground hog, or wild rabbit. People eat those all the time. Even meat rabbits seem comparable in size to a guinea pig. You can also just put them in a stew.
Also, as I mentioned, larger animals are also more difficult because you can’t just kill one for dinner. If you kill a deer, you have to process it to preserve it or share it with a larger community. Ain’t no freezers.
Side anecdote: My grandfather, as a 9 year old, used to go squirrel hunting and bring them home for his mom to cook. Before you go thinking this is some redneck thing, it was long island, less than 50 miles from Manhattan. It would have been during the war though.
Maybe not “reserved” but eaten less frequent? Let’s say a poor peasant during that time owned 10 guinea pigs and had the choice to either slaughter one of the little guys for one single meal, or sell some to the higher-ups and buy less expensive food that will last for a week or two, then it would make sense if the peasants ate less of them than nobility even if it wasn’t explicitly forbidden.
Fun Fact; they’re called “Meerschweinchen” (“little pigs of the sea”) in German as they were imported by Spanish sailors (as food, not as pets). I know they have been used as lifestock in South America way before that, but the sailors were basically the first ever time Germans heard about those animals.
The only thing I find a little weird about this picture is that it isn’t skinned. You can buy frozen whole rabbits in Germany, but they’re always skinned. Is this a hairless breed or did they somehow remove the fur?
Makes more sense than Guinea pigs considering they’re from the other side of the world from Guinea.
I think in this time Guinea was a name for a far away place and not necessarily the origin.
There are hairless (mostly) guinea pigs, also known as house hippos. Not sure if that’s what they used here though. I don’t feel like I’ve ever seen an all pink one, they usually have some brown or black but 🤷♂️
“Mum can I have a guinea pig?”
“We have guinea pig at home!”
guinea pig at home
Pretty genius. Should sell more pets this way and cut out the pet-store middleman altogether.
What, you guys eat pig all the time. Frigging humans, ooo I like eating the flesh of animals. Not like that!
This absolutely crossed my mind earlier today when I ate rice and shrimp that I had to peel for myself. Their long antennae things and little legs made me think of the time I heard someone say that they’re the cockroach of the sea. They may be, but I still ate the shit out of them and they were absolutely delicious.
Lobsters are the cockroaches. Shrimp are more like, crickets maybe in the pecking order of the food chain and shell density. But basically all the shellfish with exoskeletons are super similar to bugs. Crabs are clearly basically spiders.
And if you can accept that, you can eat land-based insects, which honestly, in general, taste fine.
I’m not sure why someone is so disgusted by eating a pastry made with cricket flour but can eat a whole plate of shrimp they have to peel themselves.
‘you guys’
‘Frigging humans’
…Are… are you not a human?
Asking for science, naturally.
