Why do people across the world mostly only eat a few of the same types of meat (like chicken, beef, pork) when there are thousands of other animals to choose from?
In: 667
Fun fact: guinea pigs were bred as a food animal in Central America.
Modern sensibilities see them as pets and recoil from eating them.
A lot of the lines we draw are cultural and arbitrary.
However:
1. There are a limited number of species that can be domesticated
2. Of those, there’s often a cultural taboo to keep desperate people from slaughtering livestock for meat that are needed for dairy or labor.
3. Not all species are good at converting waste calories or inedible grass into tasty meat. (It’s only in modern times of overabundance that we devote vast tracts of land to growing food for livestock to eat.)
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