Could you eat your pet guinea pig? In recent years, that deceptively simple question has become a classic example in cultural anthropology classes of the subjective nature of our attitudes to food.
Think about it. On one side of the Great Guinea Pig Divide stand Andean indigenous cultures, who have long treated the furry mammal as nutritious fare, best served grilled. On the other side are European and US cultures, where the animal is considered a beloved pet to cuddled by kids, not put on a roasting spit.
While western children would doubtless react with horror to the idea of eating these little creatures, to indigenous cultures in Ecuador and Peru it seems equally strange to cherish them as pets. In other words, how we treat guinea pigs is one of many small ways in which we define our sense of “exotic”.
As any anthropology class will also teach you, labelling others as “exotic” or “weird”, because of food or anything else, also makes it easier to demonise them. Look, for example, at how in the western media the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan was often presented alongside scandalised stories of China’s wet food markets.
Anthropologist Paul Farmer noted a similar demonisation of “exotic” foods during the Ebola epidemic of 2014 in west Africa, when westerners exaggerated the role played by the consumption of “bushmeat” on the spread. “The Ebola-era obsession with bushmeat is neatly enough reflected in commentary about Wuhan’s wet markets, where (one imagines) caged civets pace, eels and strange fish squirm and flop and pangolins shed scales like golden tears,” he wrote in April 2020.
However, there is another side to this. Culture can often be more malleable and fluid than we realise, particularly in a globalised age. Gideon Lasco, an anthropologist from the Philippines, has been studying the issue of how and why Andean cultures eat guinea pigs. His research, recently presented on the social science website Sapiens, starts by noting that this food is a social divider not just between Andean cultures and the west, but inside countries such as Peru.
Indigenous Andean cultures have eaten guinea pigs, known as cuy, for centuries. But in recent decades, urban Peruvians, particularly those of mestizos descent (ie with mixed European and Andean heritage), have stopped, knowing westerners viewed the practice negatively.
More recently, however, notes Lasco, two striking trends have emerged. First, some western tourists have started to view sampling guinea pig dishes as fashionable, linking it to “bizarre foods bragging rights”. While globalisation has already brought numerous different ethnic dishes from around the world into western supermarkets, chopped guinea pig is not yet on sale in Walmart or Sainsbury’s, hence its value as an “experience”.
Second, some educated Peruvians have also become more interested in defining and championing what makes them unique in a globalised world by creating a new form of cuy haute cuisine in Lima. “As eating ‘local’ becomes more fashionable around the world, wealthier elites have been rediscovering time-honored indigenous foods and beverages,” Lasco writes.
“Culinary gentrification” — to use a phrase coined by Raúl Matta, a Peruvian anthropologist — has a dark side. Most notably, rising demand for cuy meat is turning a cottage industry of cuy farming (which mostly entailed families keeping guinea pigs at home) into an agribusiness (where they are often kept in unpleasant conditions). The Peruvian anthropologist María Elena García says she was horrified to see “female guinea pigs are continuously impregnated until they are slaughtered”.
But this shift also has a more positive side by creating a new source of income and protein for some farmers. And now there is another unexpected twist caused by globalisation: development groups are trying to import these ideas to Africa.
As Brigitte Maas, an associate professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, recently told The Conversation platform, countries such as Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon already have local traditions of eating guinea pigs (or similar rodents), but in an informal, homegrown and sometimes furtive manner.
However, Maas says pilot projects have now started to see if guinea-pig farming could be a viable agribusiness to boost nutrition in these parts of Africa. “It’s important that the whole value chain is developed,” she adds, lauding the creation of “stakeholder platforms which [connect guinea pig] producers, traders and restaurateurs”.
Those furry creatures, in other words, are no longer just a sign of global differences but of cultural malleability. That may not make western kids feel any better about the idea of their pets being grilled. But the issue should be used to help them (and adults) to recognise how subjective our assumptions are, and that these need not be set in stone, or cages.
Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at gillian.tett@ft.com
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