I have eaten giraffe.
I read somewhere that zebras are hard to domesticate (they’re ill tempered), so they never became common beasts of burden/food.
OTOH, in Korea people eat dog meat.
There are cultures in the Pacific in which pigs are kept as pets, raised in the home, they sleep in the beds, women even nurse them. But at feast time, they still eat 'em.
-
Is giraffe meat reminiscent of another kind of meat?
-
Is giraffe farming done, being that they’re herbivores? Or are they just too big to control?
I was present a few years ago for a post mortem exam on an adult giraffe that had died in a zoo. It was a royal pain in the ass. Each leg had to be amputated and carted away in order to make working with the trunk easier.
Also, consider how long it takes for the animal to reach slaughter weight (I do not know the answer). During the ostrich craze a decade ago, one of the cool things about the birds was that they went from hatching to slaughter in under a years time. Also, their food/care was relatively cheap.
I’d love to be able to answer this one, but it’s still on my list.
I don’t think they’re particularly prolific breeders and judging from the little I’ve seen on some of those ‘zoo vet’ programmes, they require a level of care and management that might make commercial farming impractical - except perhaps for a niche market.
I’m not sure what the public demand would be for giraffe meat anyway - they’re quite embedded as docile, aesthetically-pleasing giants in the public perception. I reckon a lot of people would object to it quite strongly - in the same way as they might if we started farming kittens for the table.
Well … they don’t call you Mangetout for nothing 
I imagine it might be best served in a baguette.
Sci-Fi notwithstanding, no human being has ever eaten a Velociraptor, Triceratops or Brontosaurus. (I was tempted to say … ever eaten a dinosaur, but that might have seemed provocative.)
I have heard stories of Mastodon or Mammoth being found frozen in glaciers and subsequently eaten. Of course contemporary humans ate Mammoth like it was going out of style…
It tasted like game - closest thing I can think of is kudu or wildebeest, but…herbier? I had it barbecued.
Nope, they aren’t farmed (although lots of different antelope are “farmed” here) - it was from a cull (a lot of the weirder foods are - that’s how my wife ate elephant).
A couple of these are obvious.
The vast majority of our meat animals are domesticated animals. Sure, modern people still eat wild animals, especially wild fish, but there are very few people even in modern America who haven’t eaten a wild animal or two. But in total pounds the amount of wild meat pales next to chicken, cow, lamb and pig. So domestic animals account for the vast majority of animals eaten, therefore the domestic species raised where you live will be the vast majority of animals you eat. But some animals are more expensive to raise, so who’s going to slaughter their $10,000 alpaca to serve for dinner?
Next is geography. Even if people in the US regularly eat wild deer and possum they aren’t going to eat giraffe, because there aren’t herds of wild giraffe wandering around. People can only eat the wild animals that live nearby, unless they are jet-setting adventurous gastronomes. So people in the US don’t eat kangaroo, while people in Australia do, even if people in Australia eat much more lamb and chicken than kangaroo it isn’t unknown for kangaroo to be eaten.
Then there’s difficulty in collecting the animal. Very rare species like platypus aren’t going to show up on the menu even in Australia, simply because there aren’t very many of them, they’re legally protected, and even if they weren’t it would be difficult to catch enough of them to be worthwhile. Same with swans, swans can and are eaten, but in many places it is against the law to hunt them. Or an animal might be domesticable, but it just hasn’t been domesticated to a high degree. So until 30 years ago nobody in America was going to eat ostrich or alligator, even though ostriches and alligators can be raised commercially, simply because there were very few ostrich or alligator ranches until recently. The list of animals that could be commercially raised for food is pretty large, it’s just that someone would have to take a risk farming that species and no one has done it yet.
And then there’s issues of palatability. Some animals just don’t taste good, according to the taste of the person eating them. Sometimes this is simply due to cultural conditioning…many Americans eating grasshoppers wouldn’t be able to taste them objectively, and would declare them disgusting simply because they have a prejudice against insects. Many people think carnivores don’t taste good, some species are tough and stringy. Other species contain nasty chemicals…you aren’t going to be able to serve monarch butterflies for dinner to anyone, because their bodies are full of nasty stuff they get from milkweed.
And lastly we get to issues of culture. What is “proper” food. Even people who don’t hunt wouldn’t get nauseated at the thought of eating deer, yet might get nauseated at the thought of eating horse. Yet in many countries horse is eaten regularly, even in Europe. Pigs, dogs, cows, and insects are eaten with enjoyment in some places, regared with revulsion in others. Some of these food taboos are thought to arise originally from pragmatic rules of thumb that made sense for the time and place they originated, but have hardened into religious taboos. Or they could come about as a way to differentiate yourself from a neighboring group. If your enemy regularly eats horse, you declare that eating horse is disgusting and proof of the enemy’s degeneracy. Or it could be a way to enforce a particular way of life…so ancient Israelites declared themselves herders, and shunned most seafood.
So, putting these two statements together, giant squid tastes like ass and ass is pretty tasty 
Which leaves me wondering what Giant Squid Ass tastes like. 
You never know what can happen. An incident made the news here a few years ago in which a Thai laborer working in Israel made off with and ate his boss’s rare exotic fish. He had no idea this was a rare and expensive fish; he just saw it and decided he wanted to eat it. Didn’t think anyone would miss it.
Chicken
risotto con sepia
I’m sure that even in Thailand they have a concept of “don’t take other people’s stuff without permission.”
Slight >>Hijack<< we cannot live on a diet of pure protein alone so how do lions and other carnivores manage it?, where do they get their greens from, if any
Well, they don’t. There is also fat in the diet. As for vegetables, they can get the same vitamins and antioxidants from the liver.
I feel rather left out here - I’ve only eaten ostrich, shark, kangaroo and worm*.
*The others were quite tasty, but the worms were not. :eek:
My class were on a field trip with an SAS guy, who, with only a small tool kit, showed us how to make a fire, scrape the worms and cook them. He said they had lots of protein. After we all had a bite or two, he took a chocolate bar out of his pocket and ate it in front of us. :smack: