Pet Food

When I was in third grade, we had a paraplegic class pet named Chester. Over the weekend, we would all take turns taking Chester home with us and taking care of him. Here in the United States, we call Chester’s species Guinea Pigs, and keep them as pets. In Peru, They are called Qui, and are raised and eaten for dinner. This disjoint between our two cultures takes a certain kind of Cultural Relativism to rap your head around. Usually when I tell people that I’ve eaten Guinea Pigs, they give me a weird look and say “Ew. Did it taste like chicken?”

To this I inform them that No, it does not taste like chicken, it tastes like Qui.

People also find it strange when I inform them that there, they have soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In America, we have such a strong sense of Ethnocentrism that the idea of eating Rodents and Potato soup at 8am is weird, strange, and kind of gross. But is simply because we do not know what it is we are calling weird, strange and gross. It’s the same concept as “don’t nock it before you tried it.” Qui is actually very good- an unusual taste, but good. And when your up in the Andes mountains, a nice warm cup of soup is welcome at any time of the day, and fits very nicely with the rest of there food palate. But we have trouble seeing things from their perspective. To us it is weird because we don’t know it and don’t care to understand, which causes us to miss a lot of truly wonderful things in life.

This disjoint doesn’t stop at their food. Something very, to us, interesting, about the culture of the Peruvians living up in the rural mountainous areas is that they always welcome travelers, and are always very friendly to everyone. While we were there, our bus broke down, near a farm where a family was building a house out of mud bricks. Our guide spoke a few words with the family, and we ended up spending the good part of an hour learning how to make mud bricks and helped them build there house. This was their HOME, the place where they were going to live. But they still allowed us to help them build it, because we were curious and they were nice. That is something you would not see here.  We were told that in there culture, you took strangers in, and were kind to everyone, and helped each other out when in need. It was common place that if there was a traveler that needed food and a place to stay, you let them in, fed them what you had and gave them the best bed (these people are very poor, keep in mind), then in the morning, point them in the right direction, and wish them luck. Here, our values are too much on our own success and well-being, while there’s are on kindness and hospitality. We can learn a lot from other cultures, and many conflicts would be avoided if we just looked at things with a bit more cultural relativism.