Grrl Power #1448 – Meat dish concatenizer
Sydney hadn’t called on the part of her brain that stores normal meat dishes, and then suddenly the dam broke, and every recipe, meat related or not, spilled out.
Maxima does have an extensive shopping list, but an Earther can’t just go and buy a food replicator and expect it to work. For one, the plug isn’t compatible. But primarily, there’s no way something like that would run on 120 volts, or even 240. She’ll also have to buy the equivalent of a Mr. Fusion for each replicator too, and that just for household appliances.
From my understanding, the hardest thing about de-vegetarianizing is that the texture of meat becomes quite off putting, which honestly is understandable. A good piece of meat is about the best thing there is, but a gristly steak, or a drumstick with a bunch of tendons or a rib with some of those floaty cartilage bits at the end can be really off-putting, even if you’re fully on board with the omnivorousness. And I can see where even the nicest slice of a perfectly prepared porterhouse wouldn’t be cromulent to a vegetarian if they’re used to eating anything but meat.
Say you’re the Demolition Man, and you’re biting into your underground sewer burger, and you’re told it’s actually a rat burger. You’d probably pause before your next bite, and that’s if you don’t spit it out. Sure, 90% of your concern is that chances are, the rat meat isn’t USDA certified and you don’t know what kind of diseased meat you’re currently grinding up with your teeth. But part of that is reflexive. “Oh, no! Rat meat is gross!” But is it? People eat rabbit all the time. Also, I imagine, squirrel, groundhog, beaver, and all kinds of other rodents. Rat meat probably isn’t all that popular, not because it tastes especially weird or anything (I have no idea, maybe it does) but I have to assume that any animal under a certain body weight becomes more trouble than it’s worth to slaughter for its meat. Depending on the species of rat, they weigh from like a 0.25 to 1.5 pounds? And how much of that is meat? Honestly rabbits seems like they’d be on the edge of that effort/reward curve. Of course, any food is food if you’re hungry enough. I just mean there’s a few reasons we don’t mass-farm tiny mammals for their meat.
Anyway, I guess my point with the Demolition Man ratburger thing is that it isn’t so much that rat meat is gross, it’s that most people aren’t acclimated to the idea of eating it. I think there’s part of our brains that recognizes that all meat is kind of gross, up until we decide it isn’t. Chewing muscle and fat tissue that someone used to use to use as a leg… Just don’t think about it too much. Vegetarians arguably have thought about it too much. Though I suppose there are some people who are vegetarian strictly due to the reduced carbon footprint, I think the vast majority make the switch due to ethicalness and/or the gross factor.
I’m almost ready with the new vote incentive. I have the nude version almost done, but not the clothed one. I’ll try and have that ready for next Monday’s comic. It’s a non-censored (obviously) version of one of the panels from the topless watch party, but honestly, I got kind of bored with it, and started working on a different picture that I like quite a bit more. It’s actually quite far along as well, but I realized it’s kind of… spoilery? I think I need to wait on that one till the tournament progresses a little further.
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
For a moment, I thought where does the Pepperonin Stuffed Mushroom Risotto have meat? Milk, yes, but …
Then it hit me, it’s the same as with Pepperoni Pizza. When Americans say pepperoni, they mean salami. Yea, I get out. Nothing to see here.
yeah that always confuses me as well – it grinds my gear how they keep misappropriating terms… and its not like they dont HAVE pepperoni… they do… hell the spicy salami originall WAS pepperoni salami – thats where they got the name… they just took the least accurate part of that to shorten to…
*stares in confused American*
Um, Google and Wikipedia aren’t really shining any light on what’s objectionable or inaccurate about calling “spicy salami” pepperoni, nor @Hans comment about it not containing meat.
None of my American coworkers, of Italian descent or otherwise, seem to have a clue either, so mind taking a moment to explain?
pepperoni is the chili pepper used to make pepperoni-salami spicy, isn’t it?
Depends on where it is made.
Italy does not really have chili peppers (unless they are imported) so they likely historically (and therefore officially still) used bell peppers. Which are called pepperone in italian …
Remember that mostly Europe does not do spicy well.
The more you know!
Thanks!
There be though chiliheads on every country, more on some, less on others.
cry in calabrese…
italy has lots of hot peppers varieties.
Apparently “peperoni” is the plural of “peperone”, Italian for bell pepper. Italian emigrants to the USA started making a new variety of salami and for some never adequately explained reason called it “pepperoni”.
Shortening terms like this is very common, and not just in English. Consider the standard unit of time, the second. Why would it be called a “second?” Because originally it was pars minuta seconda, the “second small part,” following up the pars minuta prima, the “first small part.” These were divisions of an hour – the first division being 1/60th of an hour, and the second being 1/60th of that first division. But we shortened these to “minute” and “second” because that’s a lot easier to say. It’s the same for shortening pepperoni salami to just pepperoni – and in this case, the word pepperoni basically isn’t used anywhere else in English (or at least American English), so what’s even the point of adding in “salami” when there’s only one thing you could be referring to? This is simply the natural progression of language.
So in an alternate universe, ‘minutes’ could be called ‘prims’
I’m still a little miffed that “kilocalorie” (or “large calorie”) got abbreviated to “calorie”. So a calorie (colloquial) is a thousand calories (original unit).
don’t forget the uppercase ‘C’ Calorie is the one that stands for a kilocalorie, so if you see ‘200 Calories’, it actually means 200,000 calories
Or, someone just doesn’t know the difference and it can be spelt with or without capitals :P
Minute and second are navigation terms for subdivisions of a degree. Time originally was measured in hours only (and maybe bells), but when more accurate clocks were invented, they wanted finer subdivisions of an hour.
When in doubt, a ‘Chicago Carnivore’
casserolepizza. It’s like the Meat Tornado, although with Sydney she would WANT ‘too much’ of The Last Dab.And then there’s what happened to the term ‘mince meat’. Which annoys me as both an American and an admitted pedant. Mince meat now gets marketed as “sausage” even though there’s no casing thanks to a bunch of lying jackasses selling meatless “mince meat pie” around 100 years ago.
Thought Yanks called ‘mince meat’ ‘ground beef’? And that was just because of how it was produced
When did they start calling it ‘skin-less sausage’?
Not to be confused with “mincemeat”, the filling in “mince pies” – apples, raisins, currants, citrus peel, sugar, spices, vinegar, some form of fat (traditionally suet), possibly nuts, possibly brandy… Actual meat left the recipe in the late 19th/early 20th century (according to Wikipedia).
Fruit mince is different to mince meat
Mince pies are made with meat (maybe not always the good bits, but still meat)
peppers stuffed with salsiccia, breadcrumbs, egg and spices are great tho.
of course HE knows where it is lmao
Lets just say she is a Chobit…
I thought of the exact same scene.
I feel like if it’s known she doesn’t eat meat and the public finds out she is eating “meat”, she’ll have some exposing to do. And that replicator might be classified as a secret.
It’s meat imitation, like Heura and other fake meats. If replicators are secret she can leave out the part where it’s a perfect 1:1 imitation rather than textured soy.
If she’s only eating meat from the replicator, which I’m guessing would probably be kept at ARCHON HQ, it’s unlikely that outsiders would be in a position to find out. In any case, with alien tourism now publicly known (and probably pretty notorious after the “attempted Maxima kidnapping” incident), the existence of common alien technologies would become known, though perhaps not the fact that humans have gotten hold of some of them (the latter would be a difficult secret to keep in any case if they use the replicators for anything much more significant than providing Sydney a guilt-free burger).
It occurs to me that Sydney apparently dropping the objection that she wouldn’t have access to replicated food on Earth is a pretty strong vote of confidence in Maxima.
Rat meat can’t be gross, just ask a cat.
Humans think it’s gross, which is why you don’t see rat-flavored cat food.
Or bird-flavoured cat food, even that’s what they go for every time you let them out at night
I take it you’ve never seen chicken flavoring in cat food?
I presume they meant more along the lines of why you don’t see flavors like Bluejay, Sparrow and Crow. Fowl, which includes duck, chicken and quail, we seem to be perfectly fine with eating because we’ve raised them to be delicious
Chicken doesn’t count, and it’s usually not real chicken anyway
I don’t know what kind of cat food you get, but pretty much all cat food I buy here in Austria is mostly chicken. If it’s some other flavor than chicken it means it’s chicken with a bit of something else. (The “pure chicken” version of one brand I used to buy is called “extra chicken”.)
The bad kind of cat food also contains grain.
Cat food is some base (chicken and congealed chicken soup for the good quality, grain for the bad) with a bit of “flavor meat”, but all of that is basically leftovers from for-human meat production. Nobody breeds rats or sparrows so that cats can eat them.
Fairly sure rats and sparrows breed themselves, and cats still eat them
Or people from south-east Asia. Rat is commonly eaten in certain parts of India, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia and even China. There is even a culture in deep inland India called Mishmi where rat meat is one of the few sorts of meat that the women can eat, alongside fish, pork and wild birds.
Because – of course – your deity of choice forbids from treating women like human beings.
Why is it that nearly all religions we have ever invented enforce such a deep hatred of women?
There has to be some common cause.
I think the common cause would be the types of Males that started the religion in the first place.
You mean the men who usurped the female-led religions of prehistory. Such as when the cult of Yahweh drove out the priestesses of the original Canaanite religion and started doing evil things like forcibly circumcising the Levant’s population and attempting to ethnically cleanse non-Israelite groups in the region.
Or ask John Spartan.
If you want commonly eaten rodents roughly the size of a rat, try guinea pig (at least in some countries).
Members of the British Navy were know to eat rat in days of sail. Oh and tap out the weevils in the biscuits (the weevils were fed to the chickens)
Ships were typically infested with rats. They might try to eat the sailors’ food, so the sailors ate them, especially if they’d been at sea for awhile and rations were getting short.
Rats ate not only food …. “Madhouse at the End of the Earth” by Julian Sancton says the captain of the “Belgica’ killed the ship’s cat while raging; as a result the rats abounded and chewed up a lot of leather-based protective clothing – a bad way to start a sailing ship’s expedition to explore Antarctica. The ship got stuck in the ice and the crew keenly felt the shortage of gear.
It’s kinda greasy
I would try Kentucky Fried Shepherds Pie
“Is it made with REAL shepherds?”
German or Australian?
LOL. I do note that all Sydney’s choices involve ground or otherwise separated meat.
Except for Steak and eggplant.
… Eggplant is a meat?
We’ve seen the reset button also. Middle of forehead.
Don’t want rat? Try nutria..
I prefer capybara since it can be eaten during Lent.
Oh, wait, nutria is ‘fish’ too.
Is it classed that way because it swims? Nutria have been a pest in the Central Valley of California for several years. They burrow into the levees, and I think everyone here is bright enough to figure out what happens next.
Nutria, and a few other rodents that live primarily in water (cabybarra, beavers), are classified as fish by the Roman Catholic Church for dietary reasons. Eating meat (red meat & poultry) is prohibited on certain days, but eating fish is allowed. Enough poor Catholics, specifically Cajuns in the southeastern USA, complained about the lack of protein sources during the long Lenten period such that the Church caved and let them call those specific rodents “fish”.
The music dies?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but apparently alligator and crocodile count as fish for Lent, according to the Church?
The ‘only fish on fridays in lent’ is not a religious rule, it’s a religious ‘tradition’. The Catholic Church was approached by fisherman in Rome who couldn’t sell all their catches, asking for help. So the Church dictated that people have fish on fridays to help out the fisherman, basically creating a market for them.
It is not religious or biblical doctrine, just a rather socialist tradition meant to help fisherman, and in the modern age, they’ve waived any sort of stigma attached to it by not following the rule. Eat whatever you like on Fridays without a guilty conscience, ye Catholics!
Specifically, the rule is that some kind of personal sacrifice be offered up on all Fridays because that is the day of the week when the Christ was killed.
The tradition for centuries became abstinence from meat on Fridays, and fish meat was excepted from that.
A few decades ago, at least in the United States, any form of personal sacrifice became acceptable, such as extra time spent in prayer. Lacking that, believers are expected to abstain from meat.
Then there are local traditions, varying from the general tradition. I know of one, called the “black fast”, where no food at all is eaten on Fridays. You’d have to be pretty zealous for that one.
That is not true. I don’t know why people believe that story. It wasn’t some secret pact with a cabal of fishmongers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/04/05/150061991/lust-lies-and-empire-the-fishy-tale-behind-eating-fish-on-friday
https://dio.org/catholic-times/hey-father-why-do-catholics-eat-fish-on-fridays-and-when-did-this-start-2/
Rat would be perfectly edible… the idea of a rat-burger isn’t that strange in terms of nutrition.
It does, however, have the same problem as pork: The beasties resemble us *too much*, and as such are host to most of the parasites and diseases that see us as hosts….
A matter of parallel evolution, since we are like pigs and rats, opportunistic omnivores in roughly the same niche.
(No, those couple 1000 years of “civilisation” don’t put much weight in..)
There’s a solid reason rats and pigs make for very solid experimental “models” in biology. Especially for the bits where using humans is…Frowned Upon…
Physiologically, down to molecular level, they are *almost* like us. In certain ways closer than chimps or bonobo’s even.
So like with pork, they’re certainly edible, very much so, but you’d have to be bloody careful how you raise the rats, and how you prepare them.
And you *certainly* wouldn’t use sewer rats… That’s playing Russian Roulette with 5 chambers loaded.
It’s a little more than a *couple* thousand years of “civilization.” Not a lot on an evolutionary timescale, but closer to ten than two.
yeah actual civilization (unrelated people working and living together in a large society) began at least 12 thousand years ago, and even before that the familial groups hunter-gatherers lived in did some civilizationy things together, like art.
Yeah, but have you tried it *without* ketchup?
I took Animal Parasitology in while I was still a Biology major. It was years before I could do a rare steak again and I’m still paranoid about undercooked pork.
Get your rat-onna-stick. I’m cutting my own throat here.
Trying to break into the dwarf market? Don’t do what Glod Glodson did and use chicken cut into the shape of rats to save money…
Ketchup extra.
We breed certain rabbits for meat, others for fur, and still others as pets. Plus all the wild rabbit types.
Ahh…. I was enjoying Topless Tuesday.
How to serve Rat. Saute or fricassee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPoWGiQIhA
hopefully this guy is a better cook then baldric.
In my experience, there’s three types of vegan/vegetarian, and said type also gives a decent idea of how well a non-vegan would get along with them.
1: The Necessary Vegan- People who, due to any number of reasons, are forced into it. Usually illness. Most are easy for non-vegans to get along with.
2: The Healthy Vegan- They’re in it for the health benefits. Roughly 50/50 on whether they get along with non-vegans.
3: The Moral Vegan- Whether religious or because they just can’t fathom eating something that once lived and breathed. Odds are, if you aren’t vegan yourself, you ain’t getting along with one (there are exceptions of course)
Fun fact for if a moral vegan is being obnoxious about it:
Plants breathe, and are alive.
I’m about 75% certain that the Bosmer or “wood elves” in the Elder Scrolls universe are at least partly aimed at tweaking the noses of the vegan “one with nature” types.
The lore is that they’ve made a pact with Hircine (the hunter deity) to preserve the forest.
Which means they can’t use any of the plants and they’re strict carnivores. You don’t really want to drink their booze.
They do use bows, but I think they buy them from non-Bosmer who haven’t made that pact. Or something. ES lore is contradictory.
bow limbs can be made from antler and the string from gut. the green pact stays green.
I think your estimate of the percentage of obnoxious vegetarians is high. It’s just that the obnoxious ones are much more memorable, and the normal ones you might not even realize.
Also, eating a vegetarian diet to reduce your carbon footprint is also an ethical reason.
“Also, eating a vegetarian..” Oh, where is this going? “diet” Never mind.
I got one other type for you. I might be the only one of these, but…
4. The Accidental Vegan.
My ex is a Necessary Vegan. I don’t like making multiple meals for no good reason, so when I was cooking for her, I’d eat the same food. When I was cooking for myself or getting food from a restaurant, it would be whatever I thought seemed good.
Then she had an operation she needed a month to recover from, and by the time that month was done, I didn’t have good experiences with meat anymore, and I had really bad experiences with eggs and dairy.
I agree with BullCityFats that there are a lot of Moral Vegans that slip under the radar, because their morals include “Not proselytizing”. They’re not going to say they’re a vegan unless it’s necessary for some reason, and they’re not going to explain why unless they’re in a vegan-only environment. I don’t have a good handle on percentages, but I know I found out about quite a few of these after I became vegan. They were all people I knew and interacted with regularly, and prior to my becoming vegan, I didn’t even know most of them were vegan. I had noted that when I saw them eating, it generally happened to be vegan food (not all vegan food is immediately obviously vegan), but I’d been an omnivore with vegetarian tendencies for more than a decade before becoming an accidental vegan. I mean, technically I was one of those for decades, but it wasn’t really formalized until after I was no longer regularly required to eat the food my parents put in front of me.
Having thought about this more, I’m going to add a fifth type to the list. These are also pretty rare, but I’ve met at least a couple of them:
5. Immoral Vegans. These act a lot like the most obnoxious moral vegans you’ve ever met. However, there’s a big difference in motivation. While a Moral Vegan honestly believes in the moral reasoning they cite, an Immoral Vegan is actually just a vegan so they have an excuse to be obnoxious. A fictional example would be black hat man from XKCD. I would say something about how black hat man is an exception because he’s not always vegan, but considering the Immoral Vegans I’ve met, that could be a category feature.
Generally, Immoral Vegans will not admit to being Immoral Vegans outside of a close group of friends. It’s sometimes possible to identify them in what they say shortly before going on one of their vegan rants, if they spot an opportunity to rant from a distance and then go approach it. For most of the Immoral Vegans I would put on a list if I were to make a list, I’m just guessing based on such comments and maybe the fervor with which they rant. That said, I have been in that close group of friends with a couple of them.
This take really irks me. I generally do avoid meat, but I’m far from a vegan or even a vegetarian. Even so, for every obnoxious vegan I’ve encountered, I’ve seen hundreds of people online complaining about obnoxious vegans. Is it some regional thing? Most don’t even talk about why they choose vegan unless asked. Heck, I’ve even been asked why I didn’t choose a meat dish more often than I’ve talked food with vegans!
It’s really just overblown.
So are vegans
Thank you for your illuminating comment, clearly showing what is up! A critique and comment on a common argument definitely means a group of people who aren’t even part of the conversation should get flack!
Maybe not. My sister, who stopped eating meat for more health/diet reasons, says she no longer likes the taste.
On the whole “meat is gross as a default thing”, it’s really the opposite. Meat and all the other fleshy bits are naturally sought after by basically everything, to the point that even herbivores are opportunistic omnivores.
(The number of chicks I have seen eaten by sheep and horses would probably put most people off.)
Unsurprisingly, other animals contain most of the bits you need to maintain your own animal parts, and for that reason a lot of the cravings your brain gives you from deficiencies will point you right at meat. Most preferences, besides cravings, are things you pickup as you go, not something innate.
(Extreme bitterness being an exception, since that’s often a marker for poison).
Not going to lie, some of that stuff she rattled off sounds pretty tasty.
Rats are considered gross by some people because they eat trash and carrion. Some religions forbid eating animals that eat carrion, including Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i), which is why they are rarely eaten in the middle eastern and western societies. Other cultures eat them regularly.
Guinea pigs are the only fully domesticated rodent I’m aware of that is specifically raised for meat. They’re called “cuy” in the Andes region of South America, and can weigh 5-7 lbs.
As for rabbits, first, rabbits are not rodents and are unrelated to rats. They are in a completely different family. Rabbits raised for meat are usually larger than chickens raised for meat. Rabbits are commonly 8-10 lbs, with some specialty breeds like the Giant Chinchilla reaching up to 16 lbs, while chickens for meat area typically 4-6 lbs. Rabbit meat is low fat, low cholesterol, and quite nutritious. It’s so lean that you actually need supplemental fat/oil to survive if you only eat rabbit.
Big breath. I want beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes, lambs, rams, hogs, dogs, chicken, turkey, rabbits. You name it!
Man have I been waiting years to put that in context.
Problem with rats and other burrowing or scavanger animals in general is they have too many diseases or toxins in them, even with cooking. Our evolutionary survival biology made it so we like the taste of foods that are nutritious and calorie dense for us. Things that make us sick are not tasty.
We are too used to food as pleasure but we forget that the purpose is the food, not the pleasure.
Came down here to say this. If it was farmed rat meat, and I knew it was disease-free, I’d be willing to try it with much less of a squeamish reaction. Then again, I have eaten squirrel without a second thought…but maybe that’s because it wasn’t city squirrel.
To be honest, I don’t know if being from a rural/country area decreases or increases the chances of it having been a disease carrying critter. My brain definitely defaults to thinking of urban rodents as “less clean” from a culinary perspective, but I’m willing to admit that this is all perception, and I could have just gotten lucky eating country squirrel that wasn’t icky.
Here to hoping she don’t get sick from the sudden animal protein. I know it’s a little uncommon, but going without animal protein for a long time and then suddenly eating it can cause distress.
It seems like, given their level of technology, the meat proteins could be modified in someway to make them easily digestible. The down side to gong this route is that we would miss plenty of opportunity for scatalogical humor.
Remember that Sydney’s a pescetarian and not a vegan, so I’d assume her gut would be able to digest lean meats like chicken with no problems
Yeah, but this is Sydney we’re talking about. If she’s gonna cross a line, it’s gonna be with the aid of a rocket-belt. There’s a joint near my place that does things like take a hamburger and stack a bunch of gyro meat and Italian beef on top of it. I can totally see Syd going for something like that, and then going straight to technicolor vomit as a result.
A T-bone steak smothered in pork chops ;)
TUR-DUCH-KEYN!
While I would rather the story return to superheroics on earth and am kinda done with the space stuff, the reset button joke makes it kind of worth it.
I’m now suddenly curious since the topic is front and center – where do insects fall under for various types of vegetarians? Crickets are incredibly efficient sources of protein relative to their mass, for instance, and are neither mammals nor fish but are still animals.
Some vegetarians only avoid animal meat, or specific types of animal meat, so insects would be OK.
But many vegans won’t even eat honey because too many bees die during honey harvesting operations, so eating insects outright is completely off the table.
The practitioners of at least one religion, Jainism, won’t even eat tubers (po-tay-toes) because harvesting them 1) kills the entire plant and 2) could harm organisms living in the soil.
ETA to when she suddenly remembers Graxz and asks for Graxz double plus or Graxz x Carolina Reaper?
The reason John Spartan paused when he found out he was eating a rat-burger was because he wasn’t expecting it, not because it tasted ‘off’
Anyone else find the vote not working? Not just here but other webics, the vote is a blank page
Working again
I have tried vegan/vegetarian foods, while I am a carnivore, some of it isn’t bad… as a side dish. Like many Chinese dishes, it doesn’t last you long. Fake meat? hmmmm…. only if they get the taste right! Nothing ever made with vegan diet in mind ever tastes right. I’ve eaten rat on a dare, not my cup of tea. Wild rat is gamey, sewer rat? Ah no, anything that’s been flushed down is in it. I’ve been told corn fed lab rat is better, not that I plan on trying it.
Oh, what do you take as main course when you have pancakes? Pasta with pesto? Mac ‘n’ cheese? Seems weird to have them as side dishes, though I guess pancakes might do well as a dessert. I suppose you might add meat as a spice of sorts, but the meat would be the side rather than the vegetarian part of the dish if so..
I recall reading people didn’t like lobster until it was made fancy on trains. Only something a poor person would eat. Now many want to eat it.
Same might be said for rat? I know many like deer/elk, but having tried it, I don’t like the gamey taste of it :p Keep my meat fed from the ranch/farm :)
That tells me that the deer was by someone who either didn’t know how to handle the carcass between killing and butchering, or else didn’t know how to cook it. Properly prepared deer isn’t gamey at all. But I have to admit I haven’t tried elk, so maybe that is.
An old buddy grew up in a family of subsistence fishers on a cay in the Caribbean. Mom would send him out to the tide pools to get whatever was there for dinner – conch, lobster, whatever, no big deal.
That was in the 1950s
squirrel aka Tree Rodents.
And tastes a bit like chicken especially after your family’s been killing 100+/day hunting over 1100 acres of marsh and pines with squirrel n’ dumplings for dinner for days.
Even the dogs gave up on freshly cut treats after that many.
As for meat inspectors, yes you do find the occasional diseased meat ones when you skin them, but it’s rare. if they were sickly they did not grow up in the swamp.
Finally a topic I actually know something about (vegetarian since 1970—yeah, I’m old).
First, as noted previously pretty much every critter eats other critters. For those we think of as primarily vegetarian it’s called “adventitious” meat-eating. For that matter, a goodly number of our fellow sentient beings are also cannibals. (Fun fact—commercial chicken feed includes the bits of chickens that don’t get sold!)
Here’s the difference I find important—humans are the only sentient beings (AFAIK) that can *choose not to kill* to eat. For us it’s optional. Plus, it’s an affirmative choice—you have to actually go out of your way to chase something down and kill it to eat it. So asking the “reasons” for being vegetarian is not really logical. Better to ask what the “reasons” are for taking somebody else’s life. To me it’s at a minimum theft, and from there it goes up the scale of mortal sins real quick.
“You need protein [‘from animals’ implied] to build muscle mass” doesn’t get you there, because elephants. Okay? In fact, our cultural fetish over protein is laughable. If you get enough Calories to survive you’ll have all the protein your body needs, unless you’re eating only canola oil and grape jelly (or some other goofy monodiet like taro). And consuming more protein than your body needs for replacement and healing (and growth) is actually a bad idea, because it taxes systems like kidneys and liver, and the excess phosphorus can even leach calcium from your bones. And don’t get me started on carcinogens from grilling.
Finally, animal agriculture (that 10- or 12,000 years ago thing) is how we managed to create pandemics. Yeah, that innovation built empires, but destroyed probably just as many.
Yes, squirrel meat does taste a lot like chicken (dark meat). I killed it myself (1967) and I accept the karma for that.
I read once that beaver is basically inedible. They’re full of some really nasty chemical.
Which is funny because they’ve been farmed—still are!—for the expression of a gland in their butt: castoreum. It’s used in perfumery and as a food additive, was used as a kind of imitation vanilla for a while.
Meanwhile, cuy (aka, guinea pig) were originally domesticated for their meat, though it’s considered a delicacy. Sources describe it as basically similar to rabbit, which is basically similar to the dark meat on chickens.
OK folks, here’s the list, let’s start finding recipes and replying to thread!
VEAL BURGER
KENTUCKY FRIED SHEPARD’S PIE
PULLED PORK PAELLA
MEAT LOVERS PIII…CAN PIE
STEAK AND EGGPLANT
PEPPERONI STUFFED MUSHROOMS RISOTTO
CHICKEN CHURRO BURRITO
Confessedly I’m surprised that Cora would apparently be okay with Max buying a replicator and taking it back to Earth. I kinda thought the potential to acquire galactic tech was sort of on the down-low. Granted this entire endeavor is on the down-low, but *so far* they haven’t run afoul of any rules AFAIK, except maybe hacking that surveillance satellite.
That said, I’m not sure a replicator without a massive power source is all that worthwhile. “Fire up the reactor, boys, Archon is having space-steak night!”
About the rodent meat, first french colonists loved to eat beaver because they didn’t have the right to eat fat meat on a friday. They had a bishop send a petition to rome and the pope recognised that with their scally tail a semiaquatic living, beavers were a kind of fish and could be eaten during fasting.
Umm, no, Dabbles had a ‘problem’ with letting the Dirtlings get their grubby little mitts on her tech
The fact that the wider galactic community has openly visited Dirt means acquiring their tech (salvage, theft or legal purchase) is allowed
Remember: Dirt got an FTL-capable ship after the Fel-fiasco (they just weren’t allowed to keep the actual felled Fel-ship because it was hazardous to keep around)
Not to mention what SmugD is up to with the Alari (and that’s just the stuff he allows people to know about)
Humanity now has at least three means of FTL travel: the ship they got in trade for the fel ship Max took down, Sydney’s aetherium causeway, and Deus’ portal, built from the Skybreaker. He may also have the technology to build FTL ships, whether from the Alari refuges living in Galytn, or acquired using his portal. They not only have the means to circumvent any trade restrictions, but just by having achieved FTL travel, regardless of the means, most likely means those restrictions will be relaxed anyway.
The Xevoarchy is not a government. It’s an interstellar peacekeeping force. There most likely isn’t any “interstellar law”, just loose agreements between various spacefaring civilizations. While these civilizations generally agree that “it’s much better for the longevity of a species if they can overcome the great filters on their own.“, and Fracture Station chooses to enforce some rules about what can be taken through their travel gates, that does not make it interstellar law that’s enforced by a governing body, and that someone will be punished for violating it.
When Cora found Sydney on Fracture Station, she said that they’d have to take her ship instead of using a station gate directly to Earth because Sydney’s orbs wouldn’t be allowed through a gate, so apparently the rules are looser (at least to the extent of “we can’t really enforce them”) when people travel in their own ships.
Re: eating rabbit or squirrel…see “Brunswick Stew.”
“Philly cheese steak sandwhich, deep fried, wrapped in bacon.”
I love the irony of the simple fact that as I’m reading your comments about meat… I was eating my lunch.
Crackers with pate’ I basically made by blending some of the leftover liver and onions (with bacon, mushrooms, and garlic) that we had for dinner last night.
Liver is definitely on that “love it or hate it” list, and even then most people aren’t big on even trying it in the first place because it’s basically organ meat rather than “meat meat” (i.e., muscle tissue normally attached to bone, as opposed to the heart which is all muscle but still considered organ meat). I actually make a damn good liver and onions partly because I don’t just bread it and fry it until it becomes like eating an eraser.
On an amusing side note: when I was a teenager I had a part time job cleaning the butcher shop for the meat department of a local grocery store. One evening I found out how massive a cow’s liver actually is. (Consider that for your average beef cattle the liver is going to be about 20lbs, or about enough to fill a 5 gallon bucket sometimes with just a bit coming up above the top.)