From George Monbiot, who is a greenie and vegan, in case you didn’t know.
As I have said many times, if your ancestors were European serfs, their main source of red meat was the pig.
Pigs fatten on refuse.
Cows fatten on grains, and in the Middle Ages, they were too useful as draft animals and mil producers to be raised solely for consumption.
Sheep, especially when the wool trade took off in the days of the Hanseatic League, were also too useful to be raised solely for food. It’s with the rise of the wool trade in England that the Enclosure began– under Henry VII.
Because all of those other animals were useful for other purposes, pigs became the peasant’s protein.
This tradition continued in the New World. In many American homes as late as the middle of the twentieth century, ham was the main course for Thanksgiving.
This tradition is not as widespread, although I’d rather eat pork than domestic turkey any day.
Maybe pigs will be a solution to some of these ecological problems that are associated with meat consumption.
never lived near a hog factory farm, I’ll wager!
Aside from odor, pig waste is one of the biggest problems in industrial farming.
Of course, it’s a lot of potential energy going to waste…
I have actually been in several!
Pig slurry is highly valued for it’s
Nutrient value as organic fertilizer
Throughout the world. Many farms
Are constricted to first obtain the
Slurry and meat production is a
By product. However, The US
Energy policy currently provides
A subsidy to gas blenders to use
Grain based ethanol and the consequence
Have been higher priced grain and
A significant reduction in US meat
Production. Savor you ham while you
Can retrieverboy, next thanksgiving you
Can make your choice between meat
And fuel for your auto. We can always
Blame higher meat prices on Obama.
I’m going to blame the Russians.
blaming Obama is ridiculous. The subsidies for grain based ethanol have been government policy for decades. Like most subsidies, it has no political affiliation. (though of course it’s laughable how many “get government off our backs” conservatives happily take subsidies)
But there is actually a constituency of people who demand this as a fuel.
I think it’s a pretty poor choice for a fuel source.
It is currently a horrible choice of fuel source. I’m all for doing research into ways to produce it more efficiently, like by growing low-imput algae in vats. But corn ethanol is purely a product of politics and greedy corn companies.
Corn farmers and big oil are the only people
I know supporting food for fuel while millions
Starve
And secretary of ethanol Smallsack
A couple years ago I was at a conference and saw a talk by a board member of (either the NCGA or ACGA). He spent the first ten minutes complaining about how unfair it was that the media said they were “stealing tortillas from the mouths of Mexican children”… and spent the rest of the time talking about how excited they were that government subsidies were going to allow them to expand however many million acres of corn for ethanol production and how much money it would make them.
Meat tastes GOOOOOOOD. That’s the truth. Mmm.
on sheep. The wool production, like anything else, drops off as a sheep gets older. Moreover, wethers have this drop off PLUS not being able to have lambs. So once you’ve had a flock for about 7 or so years, the older sheep get butchered out at fall/winter, when feeding the flock becomes more difficult.
YOUNG animals are a rich man’s food. OLD animals are the meat of the poorer classes.
Yes, pigs were popular — they gain weight on stuff many animals won’t eat. But they don’t do well in certain climates (the desert, for example, or most non forested areas). Mostly, folk ate what they raised in the local area. Pigs were certainly popular, especially in cities, but they certainly were NOT the only meat of poor folk.
In areas where there were rivers, etc, fish, eels and other aquatic creatures were common foods too.
http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/middle-ages-food-meat.htm
Peggy Richter.
Yes. they were.
I suggest you check out the Charter of the Forest, which came around the same time as Magna Carta.
The big thing was to give peasants the right of pannage of hogs in the forest.
Swine was the peasant food. It was and always will be.
In Romania, all the hogs are killed, I think for either Easter or Christmas.
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/forests/Carta.htm
are you talking strictly England? I was presuming you were talking more or less the whole of Europe.
Nutrition and the early-medieval diet KL Pearson – Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 1997 – JSTOR … 177-95; Page 7. Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet … The inhabitants of Kelheim and Kirchheim also ate substantial quantities of sheep, goat, and horse meat, while those at Barbing favored poultry over sheep and goats and consumed very little horseflesh. …
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.20561/abstract We present here the results of a large-scale diachronic palaeodietary (carbon and nitrogen isotopic measurements of bone collagen) study of humans and animals from a single site, the city of York (U.K.), dating from the Roman period to the early 19th century. …… The isotope data suggest dietary variation between all archaeological periods, although the most significant change was the introduction of significant quantities of marine foods in the Medieval periods.
The consilience of historical and isotopic approaches in reconstructing the medieval Mediterranean diet …Abstract During the Middle Ages, … in an isotopic study of two inland Italian human populations that are separated by approximately 850 years in time. Stable carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotopic values observed in human dentin and bone collagen from the sites of early medieval Castro dei Volsci and late medieval Rome are consistent with diets that differed substantially. As the North Atlantic opened to fishing and food preservations methods improved, Mediterranean peoples increased their fish consumption dramatically, and in doing so, met the religious directives of the Catholic Church.
The use of strontium and barium analyses for the reconstruction of the diet of the early medieval coastal population of Gdańsk (Poland): A preliminary study
From this pilot study we can conclude that in the early Middle Ages in the Baltic Sea basin, seafood was included in the diet from early childhood and at the same time the diet contained calcium-rich milk products (also rich in minerals). The lack of sex differences may indicate the absence of a sex-specific nutritional strategy in childhood and early adolescence………The most commonly eaten animal meat was that of cattle, pigs, sheep and goats
Diet in medieval Denmark: a regional and temporal comparison Abstract The aim of this research is to explore regional and temporal patterning in diet in medieval Danish populations. δ15N, δ13Ccoll, δ13Cap values were obtained from 154 human bone samples from three sites located in the Jutland peninsula of Denmark. These sites span the medieval period. The results suggest that the medieval Danish diet was composed of C3 plants, terrestrial animals, and freshwater and marine fish in varying amounts. The data also suggest some regional patterning in diet, but little temporal differences in the composition of diet
Marine animals, where available, appears to have been a major portion of diet. I’m not saying pigs weren’t significant. I just question that they were as dominant as implied.
Peggy Richter
http://books.google.com/books?id=yW-GfElbafQC&pg=PA145&dq=medieval+pork+diet&hl=en&ei=2WmWTP-GL4KB8gbgkp2NDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=medieval%20pork%20diet&f=false
I’m talking northern European cultures.
No chance of eating much mutton until the wool industry took off.
I’ve not known a northern or Eastern European diet or custom that does not involve sausages– pork sausage.
That’s because the pig is the dominant red meat in Europe until the Industrial Revolution– then you can eat beef.
http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Food.html
in the book you reference it actually says: “there were occasions when meat, mostly CHICKEN or pork….” So even the book you reference indicates that it wasn’t just pork. See also page 146 of the same book: “the peasants also derived protein from VARIOUS meats, although not to the extent that the nobility did. Peasants had access to FISH in some local ponds and probably also ate some chicken and pork.” Again, not indicating pork exclusively. Wool started in Roman times and even during then and thereafter, there were meat and milk sheep such as the Wiltshire horn and Frisians.
http://historymedren.about.com/od/foodandfamine/a/fresh_meat.htm
also http: //www.bahs.org.uk/32n1a2.pdf –Medieval Sheep and Wool Types…Sheep were found everywhere in England
during Saxon times, as .judged by the number of place names that embody a reference to sheep. The Saxon wools I have
examined ‘were comparable with those of the Roman period …
The main function of sheep in the early Middle Ages was to provide milk to make cheese for winter food; wool, manure and meat were by-products in that order of importance. The Lutrell Psalter dated 134o shows some sheep being milked.
Food in medieval times By Melitta Weiss Adamson — roughly page 33. page 40 talks about the herring and it’s extensive use.
Pork was certainly dominant. it was not exclusive.
Peggy Richter.
Their diet was mostly grain.
That’s diet of agricultural workers and peasants the world over.
What I was talking about was their main source of red meat, and it seems that the pig was about all they had.
Pigs are peasant food. And always have been.
If this book got a vegan to say meat might be OK in some instances, I’ve definitely got to read it.
Although it’s something that the slow food movement has been saying for quite a few years now (and something small farmers have known for thousands). Meat: sometimes the best way to obtain food from the land.
evolutionary wise, the main reason H. Sapiens is not a chimpanzee is meat eating. If you’ve caught the latest “becoming human” on BBC, you’ll note the most current info is that meat eating started EARLIER rather than later in the divergence from the MCA of chimps/humans. It’s fairly clear that the large brain size has required protien available only as meat. One may argue as to active hunting vice scavenging, or that the method of raising animals can /should be improved but these are philosophy issues, not the science of human biology or any ‘requirement” of predator to “care” for prey.
With rare exceptions, the worst care humans give their meat animals is better care than being eaten alive by hyenas.
It’s impossible to live on the planet without impacting something and competing /damaging some life. those who feel this is immoral need to find a different universe with other physical laws. Those who are concerned about global warming and the damage to the environment need to address the root issue, which is too many people on the planet, not what they happen to eat.
Peggy Richter.