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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 g

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.

efitz 3y ago
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.
wpietri 3y ago
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.
- xattt 3y ago
  In the same way we, as a collective, ascribed value to certain rocks and metals, certain living things have been designated as edible. There is beauty to a freshly cleaved piece of anthracite (like your cow example), but an industrial pile of coal does not.
- boredemployee 3y ago
  While what you said is funny and made me laugh, I completely relate.
- protoman3000 3y ago
  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.
- BagelGuy 3y ago
  Cognitive Dissonance is a powerful force.
- gnrlst 3y ago
  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.
  - googlryas 3y ago
    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.
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  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?
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    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.
  - Bjartr 3y ago
    To add detail for the curious: 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.
- skc 3y ago
  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.
- rayiner 3y ago
  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.
  - bratwurst3000 3y ago
    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.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  My sister and I used to play with lobsters on my grandmother's sun-deck while we were waiting for the water to boil.
jldugger 3y ago
Domestication is hard work, yall.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  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.
dfxm12 3y ago
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.
- jessriedel 3y ago
  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.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Maybe domestication more than industrialization. Were there other animal species that used to be more commonly grown by farmers that disappeared with industrialization?
  - bratwurst3000 3y 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.
  - tfourb 3y ago
    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“)
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GmsP0zwAno.
retrocryptid 3y ago
Well. Have you tasted possum or raccoon? They're pretty gamey.
- kagevf 3y ago
  Just curious - have you tried rabbit, and would you consider it to also be gamey?
  - dinkblam 3y ago
    rabbit is very tasteless (not unlike chicken) while hare is quite "gamey"
  - retrocryptid 3y ago
    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.
contingencies 3y ago
That reminds me I have some kangaroo ("roo ragout") in the fridge.
- ardkf 3y ago
  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.
  - contingencies 3y ago
    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.
mihaic 3y ago
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.
thunkle 3y ago
And within the few animals we only certain parts of those animals
tech_ken 3y ago
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.

efitz 3y ago

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.

wpietri 3y ago

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.

xattt 3y ago
In the same way we, as a collective, ascribed value to certain rocks and metals, certain living things have been designated as edible. There is beauty to a freshly cleaved piece of anthracite (like your cow example), but an industrial pile of coal does not.
boredemployee 3y ago
While what you said is funny and made me laugh, I completely relate.
protoman3000 3y ago
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.
BagelGuy 3y ago
Cognitive Dissonance is a powerful force.
gnrlst 3y ago
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.
- googlryas 3y ago
  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.
Stratoscope 3y ago
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?
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  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.
- Bjartr 3y ago
  To add detail for the curious: 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.
skc 3y ago
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.
rayiner 3y ago
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.
- bratwurst3000 3y ago
  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.
aidenn0 3y ago
My sister and I used to play with lobsters on my grandmother's sun-deck while we were waiting for the water to boil.

jldugger 3y ago

Domestication is hard work, yall.

wizofaus 3y ago
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.

dfxm12 3y ago

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.

jessriedel 3y ago
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.
ajmurmann 3y ago
Maybe domestication more than industrialization. Were there other animal species that used to be more commonly grown by farmers that disappeared with industrialization?
- bratwurst3000 3y 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.
- tfourb 3y ago
  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“)

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GmsP0zwAno.

retrocryptid 3y ago

Well. Have you tasted possum or raccoon? They're pretty gamey.

kagevf 3y ago
Just curious - have you tried rabbit, and would you consider it to also be gamey?
- dinkblam 3y ago
  rabbit is very tasteless (not unlike chicken) while hare is quite "gamey"
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  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.

contingencies 3y ago

That reminds me I have some kangaroo ("roo ragout") in the fridge.

ardkf 3y ago
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.
- contingencies 3y ago
  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.

mihaic 3y ago

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.

thunkle 3y ago

And within the few animals we only certain parts of those animals

tech_ken 3y ago

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.