I mean, there’s vocal people everywhere. Without fail, when I see a picture or a video of a cow or pig being cute, there’s at least 10 people thinking they’re the height of comedy by saying “oh yummy, steak/bacon”.
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?
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 🤷♂️
Not Guinea, but I saw guinea pigs raised for food in a village in Tanzania. The local who owned them found it hilarious that we keep them as pets in the U.S. He asked me what we call them, and after i replied guinea pig, he said they definitely don’t taste like pig.
From a food travel show some time back, it seems that a lot of places cook them with the hair on. Not all from what I saw, but not unheard of so maybe it’s a “don’t remove the fish head/eyes, some people like it” kind or thing.
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. 😃
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.
In hindsight my hypothesis seems pretty silly now yeah. Squirrel and rabbit aren’t really considered rich people food here in Pennsylvania, that’s for sure :P Rabbit is delicious. Still have yet to try squirrel as I don’t know any hunters (I’d gotten the rabbit from a farmer’s market)
Your gramps was a champ. The most useful thing I ever brought home around 9 years old was wild garlic.
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.
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.
Ah, well maybe certian parts of North America. I used to work with a guy who ate seagull eggs (from a small fishing outport in NFLD) and appartently they are not much different from chiken eggs. TIL.
Guinea Pig is on the BBC’s list of 50 foods to eat before you die. Or it was when I started eating my way through it years ago. I think it’s the only one I haven’t had.
Other commenter touched on one definition so I’ll explain the other.
Take a bunch of pictures of the woods, put them in a computer and have it tell you the most common colors to generate the a pattern of the most commonly found colors. Boom digital woodland camo.
Theoretically you’re using actual colors taken from a (or several) environments that you intend to be in. As opposed to a few colors picked by an artist because the artist thought they’d be the colors in those environments.
As for the squares I think it was just an easy way to formulate a pattern digitally. Plus it seemed futuristic at the time.
There is a link in the opening post with some background on Dual Tex.
It was an early attempt at having a pattern methodically designed to have macro and micro patterns, aka “dual textures” to help it work at closer and further ranges.
The squares were (on most iterations, some more primative tests had eyeballed patterns) derived from using a grid to create the pattern, with a grid being useful to help design a pattern with a good spread of colors.
Macro patterning is important to the military since observation and initial engagements usually occur in the multiple hundreds of meters, which is why US Woodland is derived from ERDL that has been greatly enlarged. If a pattern achieves good macro patterning, then micro patterning can help it work at closer ranges. Generally micro patterning is more useful in environments with lots of depth in them like jungles or woods, which is why patterns for those environments tend to be more complex than desert patterns.
Later digital patterns for uniforms that were created with computer assistance, like CADPAT used squares for the same reason of ease of design, and because it is easier to print patterns with distinct shapes rather than gradients. Multicam is an example of a pattern that is newer than CADPAT, which is using gradients.
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