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Excerpt
Meat is gross, but it tastes good
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May 18, 2000 | Meat-eating is itself a solution to overpopulation, even as overpopulation largely eliminates the eating of meat. A lot of meat in the diet means a lot of animals on the land eating a lot of subsistence grains, and this equation leads directly to the starvation of agrarian people. The historian Fernand Braudel hypothesized that the success of Asian cultures was due in part to their largely vegetarian diet, which allowed populations to grow large and spread across an efficiently managed expanse of land. That these populations were largely vegetarian only because they didn't have the grain base to support a meat diet is the other side of this suggestion.
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food By Sallie Tisdale
Riverhead Books
In all this long history of meat-eating, there is a parallel history of solemn concern. People have been almost as occupied with what it meant to eat meat as with getting the meat in the first place. Eating meat is, traditionally, a matter of ceremony, sacrifice and ritual gratitude. Eating a lot of meat, as Europeans and Americans like to do, has always been seen as a dangerous act, an act fraught with the possibility of psychic and spiritual ruin. Vegetarianism, too, has a long history, particularly among the religious. The Enlightenment was marked by a wave of Christian vegetarians who saw meat as a coarse, primitive food, representative of feudal and embattled times; they believed civilized people avoided flesh. "These were of course problems and controversies of the elite," notes Massimo Montanari. "When exhortations for nutritional rationality and perhaps vegetarianism reached peasants or workers, the effect was grotesque if not ridiculous." The European Renaissance, that enlightened emergence from the Dark Ages, put an end to such silliness as praying over a dead deer. Today we prefer the casual approach. Many Americans like to think of themselves as religious, but only in ways that don't interfere with the day's plans. We've never had a coherent sense of ritual and we've never wanted one. The sacrifice and ceremony tribal people felt was required with meat-eating was not so much lost in the technological and industrial revolutions as it was deliberately destroyed. This is not a fey reference to the distant past; the same concerns and suspicions are with us today, buried under nutritional campaigns and acrimonious arguments over animal rights. Underneath, we're quite superstitious, I think, but conventional wisdom, the attitude we share publicly with each other, has always been that it's best to march into the future and throw the past away. Only in modern times have large numbers of people been able to eat meat with regularity, and we've tried to do so as much as possible without noticing the thousands of years of history that hitched along. Americans have always eaten a great quantity of meat. An 1851 recipe for "bean soup" calls for six pounds of beef. American carnivorousness was simply another European habit, but Americans found they could take it to an unimagined degree because they had conquered a country unimaginably large. The hills, shores and plains were sparsely populated and filled with game of all kinds, with fish, fowl and beast. When these wild creatures were mostly eaten up, the empty expanse beckoned to herds of livestock, flocks of domestic birds, even farms of fish.
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