Nice note about the meat-orientated culture. To add to that, though, historically (and I find this, as you pointed out, a mostly Western thing, since coming fro

Nice note about the meat-orientated culture. To add to that, though, historically (and I find this, as you pointed out, a mostly Western thing, since coming from a southern Chinese culture I know that meats aren't elevated above other foods, ever) I'm pretty sure the role of meat in the dish's name is simply because every time anyone around the Renaissance era--foundation of Western cooking--would have made a huge deal about slaughtering a cow, and such names of dishes simply stuck with us since then. I wonder how meat came to be so dominant though. Funnily enough, when the Old World found the New World they found a land so plentiful in meat, instead of jumping up in joy certain parts of society actually started to find meat disgusting. So maybe it's not really just a Western thing, but meat's dominance is mostly a New World thing: According to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visualizing-a-nation-of-meat-eaters http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visual..., USA, Canada, Australia and NZ are far ahead of everyone else in per-capita meat consumption. And it doesn't seem to be correlated with per-capita GDP either. This might also means that meat's dominance is also very recent, and not universal even in modern Western culture. Maybe it's simply a matter of who has an older history of eating traditions, traditions that are responsible for toning down the meat-mania?