Rat cuisine becoming popular in Russia

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3952964/Waiter-s-rat-burger-Rodents-menu-Russian-restaurant-considered-quite-delicacy.html

I admire this search for more variety. Admittedly, whether the rats are farmed or simply killed, the meat will likely be rather nutritionally-poor, unless the rats are culled from rural areas. Imagine eating a rat, however raw,  after it has had a lifetime of pilfering  junk food from peoples' bins?  UUUghh!

[JeuneKoq]

I'd rather eat squirrels. They're cleaner, wild, and have been eaten raw by the Ainus people for centuries.

The Ainus are a groupe of people from Hokkaido, an island in the North of Japan. Squirrel brain is considered a delicacy over there, and is eaten raw. They remove the organs and haché the whole squirrel body, with its bones and cartilage, so as to render those edible. they eat that raw too.

Source: an interesting manga comic some classemate lend me, "Golden Kamui". The author has done a lot of research on these people for his comic, and hunting methods in general.

[TylerDurden]

Rats are not as disgusting as you might think. Rodents are a national cuisine in places like Peru. I ate a roast guinea pig in Cuzco once. It tasted of bland, farmed chicken so I strongly suspect that they were intensively-farmed, intensively-inbred and raised on rubbish. Now, if like some unscrupulous Venezuelans, I had eaten some raw wild capybara(the biggest rodent of them all in modern times), I am sure it would have been amazing in taste.

[dariorpl]

Imagine eating a rat, however raw,  after it has had a lifetime of pilfering  junk food from peoples' bins?  UUUghh!

It's even worse than that. City rats typically spend lots of time in sewers, where not only will they live and feed on putrified cooked food feces, but they will be constantly bombarded with all sorts of chemical toxins, from the poisons that city officials use to reduce the rodent population, to the legal and illegal drugs and other toxins that people excrete in their feces and urine and bathwater (from toxins eliminated through the skin), to detergents, soaps and other chemical solvents normally flushed down the drain and into sewers. Also dyes and paint, heavy metals, it would be impossible to even enumerate all the toxins that go into sewers on a regular basis. Not to mention industrial waste. City sewer rats are quite likely the most contaminated animal lifeforms on earth. At least when you go by large populations. Obviously there are individual or specifically regional cases where certain other animal lifeforms would be more contaminated.

[jessica]

The article is poorly written in that a nutria is not a rat or at least not a rat in the traditional sense. It is a less domestic type of wildlife that lives an amphibious lifestyle in riparian environments. It's meat would undoubtably be more delicious if not a bit more fishy than that of a terrestrial urban rat.-Roguefarmer