I'm left curious what the 20 pound rodent was. Capybara?
"In Venezuela, capybara meat was so popular that sometime between the 16th and 18th centuries, clergymen petitioned to continue eating it during Lent. Although biology says otherwise, the Catholic Church agreed. They declared that the capybara was a “fish” and therefore acceptable to eat during Lent."
This lines up with how it took 300 years for the giant tortoise to receive a scientific name. The process to get this required delivering a specimen back to England, and they were just too delicious.
Is it true? There are museum record of skeletons from the early 19th century, which is around the right time, and there are Latin names from around then too.
It was an era of science where the easiest way to observe an animal up close in detail was to first shoot it with a gun. Makes you appreciate how far we've come with things like high speed cameras, batteries for record length, gps tracking and precision optics.
The anecdote from the article about Darwin realizing, mid meal, that the bird the ship's cook had prepared for him actually had research value and running off to salvage parts from the kitchen is almost darkly hilarious - must have been crazy to be doing research at a time when someone serves up the thing you're looking for, not knowing anything about its significance or why you're there
If you think that's a strictly historical phenomena you're underestimating how humanity operates. I done research cruises in the Arctic and there was multiple instances of the ships crew not realizing, understanding, or caring about the scientific mission. Instances like samples being naively destroyed because why would someone put tubes of ice in the overflow freezer, etc etc.
Funny enough, I'm not too critical of it. I can't drive or operate a ship. Humanity is a bunch of disparate people trying to accomplish things together and sometimes it leads to very funny scenarios.
It's been a long time since I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but one of the things that struck me at the time was how concerned the narrator was with how everything tasted. It was released 10 years after On the Origin of Species, so I imagine we had yet to develop a food supply stable and generous enough that most people would be happy to let all that good protein just keep wandering around in the wilderness. As the line goes, "If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"
I guess a play on Jonathan Swift's 1729 A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick
Not to spoil it too much, but this concept is part of the plot of the movie The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a thoroughly silly and fun claymation movie with Charles Darwin as a main character (along many pirates and Queen Victoria). It’s by Aardman Animation, which is famous for the Wallace & Gromit films.
I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...
The encyclopedic CRC handbook used to (maybe still does?) list what different metals, minerals, and other materials taste like. It seems a lot of people felt taste was an important sense to make use of.
It’s pretty amazing that meat is a substantial part of our diet yet most people probably only eat 3-10 different animals.
Edit: I forgot about sea food. So I guess its higher for many, but some people dont eat much seafood. Regardless, I still think it’s interesting that we eat a minuscule fraction of land animals.
I think this is an obvious side effect of industrialization. We got really good at factory farming chickens/cows/pigs/etc. and catching/processing certain fish, like tuna, sardines, salmon, etc. so that's the cheapest meat to get to market and the cheapest to buy, so that's what we eat. There's room for regional variations, like more seafood is around the Mediterranean sea compared to the Midwest US.
Then, most cookbooks call for these in recipes, so it becomes more in demand. This causes something of a cycle.
There are foods I would eat more if it was more available, like salt cod was very common in an area I used to live (with a lot of Portuguese ex-pats), but where I live now, it's only common around Christmas (because demand from the Italian Americans I live near now rise around this time). My buddy hunted an elk a while back so I was flush with elk meat for a while and if it was available and economical, I'd buy elk steaks from time to time, just to change things up.
Maybe domestication more than industrialization. Were there other animal species that used to be more commonly grown by farmers that disappeared with industrialization?
Not disappeared but lost significance: goats, Camel, horses (for meat), rabbits, eels, various poultry, and of course a 99% reduction of the commercially grown varieties of pigs, cows and chicken (now called „heritage breeds“)
Goat meat is still eaten by 70% of the world's population apparently - and perhaps surprisingly Australia is the single largest exporter.
But it's certainly a niche market compared to the big 3. Even lamb/mutton is only eaten at 1/6th the quantities of beef worldwide.
Was goat, lamb and mutton ever big in the US? How little lamb is available was one of the things that stuck out to me when moving from Germany to the US many years ago
That’s it. There where not many animals that are good for domestication. For example rabbits and pigeons are beeing eaten in France but even here it is uncommon because the have to much bones in relation to meat compared to a chicken or cow.
Other animals are to hard to domesticate. For examples lions.
>I think this is an obvious side effect of industrialization. We got really good at factory farming chickens/cows/pigs/etc. and catching/processing certain fish, like tuna, sardines, salmon, etc. so that's the cheapest meat to get to market and the cheapest to buy, so that's what we eat.
I think you're right, or at least it's a major reason.
Before this article I have also observed that the only wild animals that people generally eat (at least in much of the developed world) is seafood. Most other meat, for most people, is farmed. Its not uncommon to eat fish that someone caught from the ocean, but it is uncommon to eat a bird that was shot out of the sky.
Deer is pretty common because of hunting, especially in America and probably Scotland too. Any wild animal that is a problem is still eaten e.g kangaroo in Australia, boar in Hawaii.
Well, I would say it's the most common. But it still seems like a vast minority of people eat it with any regularity. I'm not sure what that measure would be. Something like once every few months. As opposed to "I tried it a couple times." kinda thing. I eat it a couple times a year maybe which I think is more than the average person.
Right. Likewise, there are many unusual materials we could make our houses out of, but for economic efficiency we mostly make them out of some combination of wood, stone, clay, steel, and chemical binders thereof.
For sure. I've heard vegetarians call this idea complex "carnitarianism". If you suggest to most Americans that they eat dog or horse or elephant, they'll be horrified. But we're perfectly comfortable with eating animals designated as food.
I live these contradictions myself. When I meet individual cows, I'm often charmed. Or my friend keeps chickens that I enjoy feeding when I'm over. I would have a hard time eating the animals I had met, but I had a burger for dinner last night without the slightest problem.
Bangladeshis often buy live cows to slaughter for Eid celebrations. My cousin posted a picture of a live cow chilling in their house, hanging out with their kids, etc. I remember riding one around our yard (which was in the middle of the city) and making friends with it.
People who live closer to the slaughtering process have a more flexible view of the pet/food distinction.
Can sign this. I was on a farm with my girlfriend and she was shocked that the people there played and enjoyed time with the animals they are going to slaughter.
You don’t have to eat what you don’t like. However, you could (un-)train yourself to like what you didn’t like before.
Over the lifetime our cognition, through conditioning, accumulates or eliminated emotional associations with things. E.g. the common person from our culture that didn’t know they were eating a dog would have a visceral physiological response to the associated disgust their brain launches once they were told that in fact they ate the dog.
And it’s okay, these associations exist and people have initially little control over them.
But people in cultures other than ours don’t have this association conditioned, and for them it’s perfectly fine to eat dog.
This shows that this is just a thing in the head, not physiological. I used to be together with a farmer girl and she saw and raised a cow with her father from it’s beginning until it’s meat ended in her stomach as chewed through juicy steak.
Who’s “right” here? Nobody, it is what it is. Everything is possible.
That's because a burger has become its own "thing", far removed from the "Cow". Like a chicken breast has become a "thing". Also calling meat with a different name (beef vs cow meat, pork vs pig meat, poultry, venison, etc) further removes the animal from what's on your plate. It's like in software, you use an OO language but you don't often stop to thing what's happening behidn the scenes.
Neither here nor there, but that "meat by a different name" is most likely due to class divides in England after the Norman conquest. The French(ish) speaking Normans were the upper class getting the finished product, so the language reflects that - beef(boeuf), pork(porc), and, a mostly forgotten one, but poulet for chicken. Whereas the farmers/lower classes - those dealing with the animals themselves, were speaking Old English with Germanic derived words - pig, cow, chicken.
Twenty years ago, I lived in San Jose's Almaden Valley, a block away from a dairy farm. On our walks around the neighborhood, we used to pick hay and feed it to the cows.
One day, my daughter named three of the cows: Treemore, Chicken Nose, and Looneycake.
Chicken Nose had a pattern on her nose that looked like a chicken. I don't remember what the other two names meant.
Around that same time, we went to a friend's barbecue. His dad was a butcher, and he cooked the thickest steak I've ever seen. It must have been two inches or more.
"Cooked" may be overstating it. When he brought in the steak on a platter, it was all loose and jiggly, with blood dripping out of it.
When I asked him about it, he said "That's not blood. It's juice!"
I kind of lost my taste for beef after that. Pork too.
But some exceptions apply. I don't enjoy a hamburger or a pork chop, but on occasion I would have a hot dog or a piece of crisp bacon.
I guess if the meat is disguised enough I don't mind it as much?
He was right. One of the first steps of slaughtering is draining the blood. There isn't much left by the time it gets to the butcher. The red liquid you see after cooking red meat is myoglobin, which lives inside the muscle tissue itself as opposed to the vascular system. It also turns blood-red in the presence of oxygen.
Blood is hemoglobin, and circulates the body, delivering oxygen to where its needed. Whereas the "juice" from a piece of cooked meat is myoglobin, stores oxygen inside muscle cells until needed, and is responsible for the red color of meat in general.
Yes, and in fact cultures that place fewer limits on what animals are edible are probably the sane ones (or at least logically consistent ones), and not the "weird" ones.
There was actually a movement to find more animals to domesticate. J. Draper dives into some fascinating history of it, and also a discussion of how to read historical sources, in this video on the man who ate the heart of a king: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GmsP0zwAno.
As an aspirational, on/off vegetarian this always strikes me as extremely funny. People (particularly the "omg BACON" mega-carnivore types) get sooooo precious about certain types of meat being "gross" or "weird", and it often has a particularly racialized dimension (a lot of the COVID-19 stuff made this way worse, IMO). To me it's like, meat is meat; so long as there's no infectious organisms in it then it's really all the same stuff and I'm going to eat it. Anyone who gets too picky about what kind is acceptable to eat kind of needs to get over themselves (IMHO). Sure the texture and flavor changes, and I can respect people having some preference there, but if you're going to wimp out over eating sweetbreads or horse then at the very least you have to drop the "I eat MEAT, sorry if that ///OFFENDS/// you" schtick.
The same is actually true of plants. My grandparents ate many different aromatic plants, and even had many different grains they planted like buckwheat or millet.
It is, but it's already been done for many animals that simply haven't had the levels of industrialisation of meat production applied to them as have beef/chicken/pork.
We have force evolved preferred food animals (and plants) to maximize productivity and tastiness. Other kinds of animals are expensive and don't taste good enough to justify the difficulty in bringing them to market.
How did you obtain it? I've been wanting to try it ever since I missed the opportunity when on vacation in Australia as a kid. But it's been difficult to find in the American Midwest.
Had a little shindig on the weekend and a friend brought it along. I don't usually buy much meat, but it's in reasonable distribution here in Australia. You can also buy emu and, I assume, crocodile. Once bought a farmed crocodile at a market in China with a Kiwi friend. They asked if we wanted it killed, we said yes, the next 15 minutes were horrible... they had a hell of a time decapitating the thing with a cleaver then both the head and the body kept walking around moving for another full minute or so. Serious dinosaurs, like giant snake-chickens. The meat isn't that tasty, tastes kind of like chewy chicken, but it was a memorable.
Rabbit is MUCH less gamey than any "north American bush meat" I've tried. Though I've only ever tried "industrial" rabbit, so maybe it was bred to taste better?
But yeah... more gamey than rabbit is my opinion. Pretty close to inedible. We put it in a pot-pie with a bunch of other stuff, so it wasn't horrible.
The Voyage of the Beagle is a fun read, with many little asides about what the animals Darwin ate tasted like. Puma meat was one he called out as particularly delicious and remarkably like veal.
To me it seems ftxbro is jesting at the fact that Darwin studied a "useless" subject rather than something practical and marketable, like modern liberal arts majors saddled with tons of debt.
"In Venezuela, capybara meat was so popular that sometime between the 16th and 18th centuries, clergymen petitioned to continue eating it during Lent. Although biology says otherwise, the Catholic Church agreed. They declared that the capybara was a “fish” and therefore acceptable to eat during Lent."
Found this after a bit of googling