If dogs can eat carrion and not get sick, how do they do it?
It seems like this would be a good thing for food scientists to investigate. If they have special homones or digestive acids, we could manufacture them to remove the dangers of spoiling meat.
My personal preference is to leave spoiled meat alone but there is a huge market for rotten meat. That nice red cut of beef at the market may really be green under the various products “added to preserve flavor or color”.
Two hundred years ago it was thought necessary to hang ducks by the neck until the body fell off before the meat was properly ‘aged’ and I guarantee you that Native American Indians ate a bunch of rotten meat. Fact is, you can eat carrion all you want since you are an omnivore. You didn’t think all those recipes for road kill were jokes did you? Just follow some simple tips: Thoroughly eviscerate the carcass. Eat the rest of the meat as it rots, but hang it up to keep the other predators from stealing your kill. If you slice it reasonably thin and hang it in the sun it will last longer if you can keep the maggots out of it.
For that matter, meat stew was prepared more as a way to disguise the taste of rotten meat than to make fresh meat tasty. Because before refrigeration, meat was ‘fresh’ for about a week and ‘edible’ for as long after that as it took to kill something else. Salt pork was popular because it’s got a nice covering of fat which really doesn’t rot, it merely goes rancid. But it’s still usable for cooking. I can still hear granny yelling “Y’all come and git this. Hurry now, before the grease sets”.
“Survivalists” go out in the woods with a crate of military rations and a tent and fancy themselves mountain men. Bullshit. It’s not easy to live off the land as the Donner party found out.
Thought for the day: “No country is more than three meals away from a revolution.” Or to put it another way, the difference between a civilised person and a savage is a full belly. 'Cause sex is great, but people will start killing each other pretty damn quick when they get hungry.
Bon Appetit
I’ve seen my dogs yak up all manner of nasty stuff. Who says the don’t get sick.
Needs2know
If it is alright for us to eat rotting meat, how come it smells so bad?
We’ve evolved so our noses tell us “DON’T EAT THIS” when they detect certain inedible/harmful substances. My nose sure tells me to stay away from that flank steak with a week-old “use by” date - why is this if it is perfectly edible?
Just when did we start cooking our food? Did it make it more palatable to our prehistoric ancestor? How come we don’t eat raw meat anymore? I mean there are some things like Steak Tar Tar but I mean overall?
So, a local radio station is doing a pseudo survivor contest in the rockies. I invite you to peruse the following links. People will eat anything, if hungry enough.
Porcupine Roadkill
Squirrel Roadkill
Please note that I do not support these activities, I merely know of them.
WE’VE evolved our noses??? Carrion stinks to high heaven so we can find it more easily. The fact that YOU don’t like the smell merely means that you were raised in some alternative dwelling which reeked of sugar frosted flakes and baby powder instead of a dank cave smelling of carrion,incredible body odor,and menopause.
American Indians used bear grease in their hair and thought it was charming, but it smells like a dead bear to me.
For that matter, Apaches (and other) Indians would stop their horses in a full lather, slice a vein and drink some blood for energy before continuing. Sticking your face on the side of a hot, lathered horse to drink a couple cups of blood might offend your nose, but they grew up that way.
Heck, cooking your Yak meat over a dung fire and putting yak butter (which IS rancid) in your tea would make most people heave. If you are one of them, don’t take the backpack tour of Tibet. You might even want to avoid the annual Tibet festival in San Francisco.
Oral sex causes some people to gag, but most of us are fine with it with the exception of activities involving “lemonade” or “peanut butter”. I’ll leave that topic for another thread.
Forensic Pathologists have to deal with interesting smells on a daily basis (with the exception of the famous British Path, Sir. Bernard Spilsbury who had an olefactory dysfunction), but they still manage to eat…although the food HAS to taste like carrion and formaldehyde.
A lot of people don’t like raw fish, either. But we eat it here every day (along with SPAM musube). But while I love tako poke’ (raw octopus, onion, shoyu and seaweed), fresh opossum stew makes me gag. So go figure. It’s just what you are used to.