Cuy

One day, while we were wandering the markets in Pisac, our teacher directed us to a restaurant he wanted us to try. I soon realized that this restaurant was different from any other I'd been to before, because as soon as I walked in, I heard squeaking. I look to my right, and there is a whole complex made to house guinea pigs. then the smell hits me. I look over to the oven in front of me, and I realize that the guinea pigs I was just looking at were about to be on my plate.

It would likely be impossible to have this kind of restaurant in the US. We eat plenty of meat, don't get me wrong, but in the US, guinea pigs are pets. Eating one would be heartless, and putting them on display while they're still alive would either be shaming the customer, ignorance, or sadism, depending on how you spin it. Places like Red Lobster (a crowd favorite) can get away with this type of display because lobsters are far removed from everyday life and exclusively used for food, but guinea pigs are too close to people's hearts to be eaten.

This raises the question of where we draw the line between friend and food in terms of animals, and the answer is that it depends entirely on arbitrary societal norms. In the West, dogs are man's best friend, in some parts of Asia, they're a tasty meal. In India, cows are sacred, in America, beef is a staple. There are people in America who will feed their pet chickens and then stop at Chik-Fil-A for a nice chicken sandwich. Some fish are pets, others are food.

To an extent, it depends on how much the animal is valued and why. In the West, dogs became companion animals that were also useful for hunting. This gave them a sentimental value as well as a practical one, so it became taboo to eat them. In parts of Asia, however, these trends did not emerge, so they were eaten like any other animal. Likewise, in India, cows are sacred and could be people who were reincarnated into cows, so they were protected. In the West, no such belief emerged, so we eat beef.

So there I was, an American, who'd had guinea pigs as pets before, digging into a plate of cuy. As they say, when in Rome...