Seriously, horse meat isn’t even exotic by American references. It is easily found in western Europe although almost never in the U.S. The most mundane meat that is almost impossible to find in the U.S. is mutton (grown sheep meat). Lamb is easy to find but good luck finding mutton even in a huge city unless you pay a farmer to kill the sheep yourself.
When I worked at the corporate headquarters of an urban focused Boston area supermarket chain, one of our new stores had a showcase exotic meat collection for sale. We had everything from alligator (very good and almost mainstream in parts of the South), rattlesnake (also good but hard to farm on a large scale), to lion (not that great), bison (pretty good), ostrich (almost mainstream also).
I can’t see certain cultures having a problem with donkey or llamas either.
They don’t need greens since they eat things that eat greens. Plus, they eat the whole thing, not just the muscle, as we (westerners) do.
From what we can tell through chemical analysis of Neanderthal bones, it appears that they ate hardly anything besides meat. Likewise, the traditional diet of the Eskimo was very light on the non-meat side. So, depending on the type of animal products you consume and how you prepare them, “greens” aren’t so important even for humans.
The evidence doesn’t show that. It shows that a majority of their protein was probably comnig from animals sources. All that really shows is that they weren’t eating many legumes or nuts. This isn’t really terribly different to a lot of recent HGs where protein comes almost exclusively from animal products and plants provide almost exclusively carbohydrate. Hell, a lot of Americans have a diet like that.
Thais are notorious scofflaws. There’s hardly a law on the books that they won’t break just on principle, up to and including murder. Anonymous violent crime is rare, though (what violence does exist is usually the result of personal feuds and such), but theft is not uncommon. Bangkok is much safer than many Western cities, but even though the concept of “don’t take other people’s stuff without permission” exists, you’d best watch your belongings, especially in tourist areas.
I’ve eaten scorpions in China. A smaller variety. They were actually quite good. Rather buttery. I could imagine kicking back with a bag of them in front of the tube some evening.
Why not? You only need micrograms of this stuff daily to survive. By eating raw meat you are essentially replacing your body’s internal nutrient store as it is depleted a perfect ration of the same nutrients.
Of course carnivores have evolved to survive on thier diet. They don’t need things like vitamin C in their diet and are able to sythesise it themselves.
Just a thought, is it likely they get all the other stuff by consuming some of the grasses etc that the herbivore/omnivore has consumed and is in the process of being broken down in dead animals corpse
The Caribbean island Dominica. They have pet cats, but there is no problem cooking one, even if it is your neighbor’s cat. I was offered some at a party, but couldn’t bring myself to try it.
As has been said, other animals have different nutritional requirements than humans do. Almost all animals can synthesize Vitamin C, for instance, only primates (like us humans) and a few rodents can’t. Other animals can synthesize (or their intestinal bacteria can) different essential amino acids, so most herbivores don’t need to concern themselves with eating enough protein of the right types. Humans who don’t eat animal protein will die unless they are careful about what sorts of plant proteins they eat. Horses and cows can just eat grass and live long healthy lives. And so on.
Our dietary needs have co-evolved with the diet our early ancestors ate. So since our early primate ancestors probably ate a lot of fruit, when that early ancestor had a mutation that destroyed its ability to produce vitamin C it wasn’t a lethal mutation like it would be for many other animals. So the exact balance of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients is different for different species. Our bowels are adapted to expect a certain amount of vegetable fiber, if humans don’t eat enough we can get digestive problems. Lions are adapted to expect 100% meat. But that can include things like skin, hair, organs and bones, not just muscle tissue. Metabolizing protein for energy creates urea, our kidneys aren’t evolved to deal with a diet of 100% meat, but a lion’s kidneys are.
Yum. Shark. I quite enjoy it. Most of the ostrich I’ve had has been in jerky form.
I’ve never had antelope, but it’s probably similar to American pronghorns (which most hunters incorrectly refer to as antelope): the backstrap and some of the other good cuts of meat are tasty, but the cheaper cuts ain’t so hot.
I’ve had llama and alpaca, as well as turtle, although I didn’t know until after that it was turtle (in Peru).
Ostrich is really good. Shark, snake, bear, frogs, beetles, grasshoppers, squid, snails, horse, ants, and buffalo are all meats that I’ve eaten and enjoyed, however most (except for the bear, beetles, grasshoppers, ants and squid) are expensive and hard to find around here.
Although the original paper published by Pettitt focused on the amount of animal protein in the bones, his analysis also concluded that meat was the primary source of the total calories in the Neanderthal’s diet (or at least the later Neanderthals that he studied).
Koalas are supposedly unpalatable because they eat only eucalyptus leaves, and their bodies accumulate eucalyptusiness. I’ve never eaten one myself, understand.
If you cut open a starfish you’ll find that there really isn’t much inside them except tubes and gonads. I don’t know if the gonads are edible. You can certainly eat other echinoderms like sea urchins and sea cucumbers.
Coral is mostly rock with a thin layer of polyps. Jellyfish can be eaten, so perhaps some kinds of coral could be edible. But you aren’t going to get much out of them.
As for worms and such, plenty are edible, earthworms certainly are, others can be toxic.
I saw roasted starfish for sale at a Beijing food market. I didn’t try it–suspected there was not much tastiness inside.
Of the other exciting things–scorpions, millipedes, beetles…–I did try a couple of roasted silkworm pupae. They were not very nice to eat at all, leathery on the outside, bitter pulp on the inside.