(ELI5) Why do animals that live in the same environment and eat the same diet taste different? (For example sheep and cows)
In: Biology
[removed]
It’s mostly due to the different levels of fat in the meat (and how exactly the animal stores fat / what it is composed of), different density of the muscles, and slightly different diets. For example, grass-fed and grain-fed diets given to the same animal will give different tasting/texture meat, and the activity level of the animal, and how much it eats/how quickly it puts on weight will affect the taste. Also, different “cuts of meat” from the same animal can have remarkably different texture — compare beef ribs with beef steak with beef tenderloin. We often prefer to eat different cuts of different animals, which makes the difference in taste even more noticeable.
This is also why, for example, lamb (young sheep) and mutton (old sheep) taste different. Mutton is more “gamey” and less tender because the animal is more mature, leaner (no sheep equivalent of “baby fat”) and has an entirely grass/vegetation-fed diet rather than milk.
I read a story about an evangelical trying to start a conversation with a person on the street and he is asked that since goats, sheep, and cows all eat the same grass why are their droppings so different. The evangelical admits that he has no idea and the passerby says “You admit to not knowing shit so what more is there to say?”
But, I was thinking, they don’t all eat the same grass. Goats aren’t grazers, they are browsers. They eat from shrubs and such. As for the differences between cows and sheep look at their wild cousins. Buffalo, not bison, live in the lowlands well water is easily available. They can afford to excrete wet sloppy shit. Sheep live on the hillside away from water and they need to conserve water by squeezing their shits dry.
As reguards the flavor of their flesh. If I recall what I read years ago properly, a goat stores uriatic acid in its flesh do its best to soak it in milk before cooking it. Perhaps it’s also a way of conserving water. So, there are lots of things that effect flavor.
I do know that some plants when eaten provide different caloric yields to the animal depending on the animal that is ingesting them – so in a sense plants have evolved adaptations to either attract or repel particular seed dispersers. Ie. if a tortoise ate a strawberry it’ll have ingested 20 calories meanwhile a chimp eating a strawberry may ingest 40 calories. Perhaps this caloric yield can explain the difference in taste amongst animals?
If you take apart the Astronaut Lego set to expand your Pirate Lego setup and your Knight Lego setup, all you have left are Pirate and Knight stuff. The individual blocks might have been used to make a space shuttle, but now they’re part of a pirate ship or draw bridge and you think of it as one thing.
It’s not like mixing chocolate powder into your milk to get chocolate milk. It’s not two flavors adding together. One thing is being taken completely apart to make more of the other.
Even though sheep and cows eat the same grass, when they eat it they break it apart and assemble it into more cow and more sheep. So when you eat the cow or sheep you’re not eating what they ate, but what they turned it into, which is more of themself.
The same reason you can build different things with the same set of LEGO blocks.
The food just provides the building blocks, the vast majority of what food provides is simply the glucose to convert into energy and tissues, most vitamins and minerals just aid these processes. The DNA and genome is what lays out how these building blocks are put together.
Just imagine that cows and sheep both ship with the same set of LEGO blocks, but they have different instructions to put them together.
All animals have a slightly different (or _very_ different, in the case of comparing things like mammals and fish) structure to their muscle tissue, based on the percentage of different types of muscle fibres.
See, muscles aren’t one thing: there’s different types of muscle cells within mammalian tissue, specifically Type I fibres and Type II fibres (which are broken down into subtypes, too).
* Type I fibres are “slow-twitch” fibres, which means they work slower than other types but they can do it for much much LONGER. These are the fibres that are found extensively in things that need to work for a long time and do it very consistently, but don’t necessarily need massive power.
* Type II fibres are “fast-twitch”, which means they give a LOT of power and do it really quickly, but can only hold out for a few seconds to a minute before fatiguing. These are found in high amounts anywhere that needs a lot of power suddenly, but not indefinitely.
The percentage of these muscle fibres between animals and muscles is why different cuts of meat (e.g. sirloin vs oyster steak) taste different and have different textures.
Between animals, what composes these cells also varies! So one species might have a relatively higher amount of iron in their myoglobin within muscle cells, while another species might have lower myoglobin but higher sodium, that kind of thing. Variations in natural sugars and chemicals called glycoproteins will also factor in, lots of things really.
When your 5 year ask really hard questions. Um because um they taste different because welll hmmm um its because God made them that way.
Actual ELI5: Sheep and cows taste different because they are made of different things, it’s the same reason they look and sound and feel different.
ELI12: The way that the cells of a cow and a sheep take food and make it into more parts of the animal are not the same. When a cow builds fat or muscle, it builds it from slightly different proteins and fats than a sheep does, and in different ratios. Humans have a very good sense of taste that can tell the difference between these ratios and different proteins.
Latest Answers