What’s for dinner?!

From the whole gang, I am the one who eats all his veggies. OK, let’s not exaggerate! I eat almost always all my veggies. And I am also the bravest one in terms of trying new foods. I am always ready to put my teeth on everything that is placed in my room and try if I like it or not. And I must admit that our humans are always trying to offer us a large variety of veggies. But let me get more into details.

Almost one year ago, Kirk wrote something about their menu. At that point it was only he and Spock (who replied to Kirk the next day 😀 ); we came in 3 or 4 days after. Not much changed since then, but maybe some supplementary explanations would be helpful. So, we still have a weekly menu that helps our humans to plan their groceries and shopping sessions in a way that we have always fresh veggies that don’t have to be kept in the fridge. And we still get four veggies every day.

I will write down some of the principles of our menu, just in case some humans are searching for inspiration.

• Four different veggies per day
• One veggie rich in vitamin C
• The veggies rich in sugar (like carrots) just few times per week
• The veggies rich in oxalates (e.g. spinach, parsley, carrot tops) just once or twice per week and not all in the same week!
• Watch out for the veggies/fruits that can irritate our lips and mouth (egg plants, tomatoes, apples…)
• Hay as much as we can munch, drag in the cage, play in etc.
• Pellets – +/-30g per day. Of course pellets with no cereals in them and especially for guinea pigs.
• For Spock and Data – some willow toys to chew. I and Kirk don’t really like stuff like this.

You may wonder why we don’t get any cereals… Well, it’s because Kirk (our flag butt) gets fat super fast and the humans are very worried regarding his health in general and his back bone in particular. So, we all suffer because of this. Also, you may see that increasing the pellets in our diet makes us to gain weight if we were not used with larger quantities.

We in particular don’t really like fruits and we don’t have a sweet tooth. The only fruits we eat are apples and pears, rarely and only if they are crunchy and not very sweet. I am the only one who likes tomatoes, and we, as a gang, don’t like zucchini, radish and other things that don’t come into my mind right now.

Our treats consist in dill, coriander, kohlrabi tops and other greens for which the humans really need to go to the market to get them. Which happens only in week-ends. We do not eat biscuits or any other processed food for guinea pigs that can be found in the supermarkets. It’s not that the humans never tried to feed us with something like this, it’s just that we don’t like it. We even gave up to those cereals bars as we found out they are full of sugar and a lot of other unhealthy components.

It may seem straight forward and not very complicated, but it’s not. And you know why?! Because we, the piggies, have also different tastes and whims. For example, Spock and Data don’t really like cucumbers. They eat it only if it is really, really necessary. Or we change our minds regarding some veggies: now we are passing through a period when we don’t really like bell peppers. So the hf had to prepare a special menu for next week with only one serve of pepper.

OK, I know, this is a lot of theory! But I will end this post telling you that this evening we’ve got egg plant and red bell pepper (none of us touched it yet!). And, of course, some nice photos featuring the handsome me and some veggies.