Third draft
Cuy Bono?
[issue]A morning meeting with some of your ministers is just starting when your sister @@RANDOMFORENAMEFEMALE@@ bursts into the room andburstsinto an angry complaint about how, when her family went out to dinner at a fashionable new Titicacan restaurant yesterday evening, her young daughter was brought to tears by finding guinea-pig on the menu.
[validity]meat-eating is legal; capitalism (so that privately-owned restaurants are possible); immigration is legal (so that this restaurant’s owners & staff could be relatively recent arrivals)? Adult?
[option]"At first she was delighted to see that they had a pen of guinea-pigs, which she thought was a petting zoo, until one of the waiters explained that those animals —which his people call 'cuy' — were actually there so that diners could choose which ones to have as the meat for their meals. She was still crying right up until she finally got to sleep that night. It shouldn't be allowed! Some kinds of animals are food but some kinds are just pets instead, at least in civilized countries like ours, and the law should make it clear which are which."
[validity]unrestricted
[effect]pet-owners have to account for every dead goldfish or stick-insect
[option]"But the guinea-pig has always been an important meat animal for the Titicacans, and it's really tasty too, I remember that from when I was posted at our embassy there," remarks @@RANDOMNAME@@, your Foreign Minister, salivating slightly. "Not only should we continue to allow using guinea-pigs as meat, there are so many other foreign delicacies that we should encourage restaurants and shops here to stock as well: Scandilund’s reindeer cutlets with cranberry sauce, for example or Tasmanian devilled platypus eggs."
[validity] unrestricted
[effect]@@CAPITAL@@ has restaurants serving every meat from aardvark to zebra
[option]"All meat is murder!" @@RANDOMNAME@@, your Environment Minister protests. "It’s a slippery slope: First, people eat the flesh of ‘domestic livestock’, then they eat the flesh of animals traditionallybeenkept just as pets… and then, maybe, they even ‘graduate’ to cannibalism! This incident is just more proof that we should outlaw meat-eating altogether."
[validity]cannibalism is not legal
[effect]only outlaws eat meat
Changes from second draft: initial explanation considerably changed, with some material moved in from the first option; first option shortened accordingly, and what's left there re-written; second option shortened & slightly rewritten; second option's 'effect' line slightly altered; third option shortened slightly (and the interrobang removed).
EDIT: Also, just removed 'Ostrich a la king' from list of foreign recipes in option 2.
Changes from first draft: initial explanation expanded, with a small amount of material moved from the first option; second option has suggestions of where to cut, if it “needs” shortening (although I think that it’s more realistic for some speakers to be a bit wordy instead of everybody in every issue just describing their views in the fewest words possible…), shown by strike-throughs; third option’s text expanded but its validity [slightly] restricted.
Notes
‘Titicaca’ in RL is the name of a large lake on the Peru/Bolivia border, high in the Andes mountains. It was used as the name of a nation in at least one episode of British classic radio series ‘The Goon Show’ (which has already given NationStates issues ‘the Spon Plague’ and the dreaded ’lurgi’…), whose writers made joking references to Peru sometimes because comedian Michael Bentine — a regular cast member for the first two or three seasons — was half-Peruvian.
Yes, the Peruvians really do eat ‘cuy’.
Aztecs eating axolotl fired with chili peppers is also historically accurate (according to a label that I read once in the aquarium section of Kew Gardens), although admittedly this dish might no longer be on the menu in modern RL Mexico (because, apart from anything else, axolotls are now very hard to find), so hopefully this reference is allowable…
