MEAT CONSUMPTION AND CONTROVERSIES IN MODERN MEAT PRODUCTION

THE HISTORY OF MEAT CONSUMPTION

The Scarcity of Meat in Agricultural Societies 

Around the time that our ancestors domesticated animals, they also began to cultivate a number of grasses, plants that grow in extensive stands and produce large numbers of nutritious seeds. This was the beginning of agriculture. With the arrival of domesticated barley and wheat, rice and maize, nomadic peoples settled down to farm the land and produce food, populations boomed—and most people ate very little meat. Grain crops are simply a far more efficient form of nourishment than animals grazing on the same land, so meat became relatively expensive, a luxury reserved for the rulers. From the prehistoric invention of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, the great majority of people on the planet lived on cereal gruels and breads. Beginning with Europe and the Americas in the 19th century, industrialization has generally made meat less expensive and more widely available thanks to the development of managed pastures and formulated feeds, the intensive breeding of animals for efficient meat production, and improved transportation from farms to cities. But in less developed parts of the world, meat is still a luxury reserved for the wealthy few.

Abundant Meat in North America

From the beginning, Americans have enjoyed an abundance of meat made possible by the size and richness of the continent. In the 19th century, as the country became urbanized and more people lived away from the farm, meats were barreled in salt to preserve them in transit and in the shops; salt pork was as much a staple food as bread (hence such phrases as “scraping the bottom of the barrel” and “pork-barrel politics”). In the 1870s a wider distribution of fresh meat, especially beef, was made possible by several advances, including the growth of the cattle industry in the West, the introduction of cattle cars on the railroads, and the development of the refrigerated railroad car by Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour.

Today, with one fifteenth of the world’s population, the United States eats one third of the world’s meat. Meat consumption on this scale is possible only in wealthy societies like our own, because animal flesh remains a much less efficient source of nourishment than plant protein. It takes much less grain to feed a person than it does to feed a steer or chicken in order to feed a person. Even today, with advanced methods of production, it takes 2 pounds of grain to get 1 pound of chicken meat, and the ratios are 4 to 1 for pork, 8 to 1 for beef. We can afford to depend on animals as a major source of food only because we have a surplus of seed proteins.

WHY DO PEOPLE LOVE MEAT?

If meat eating helped our species survive and then thrive across the globe, then it’s understandable why many peoples fell into the habit, and why meat would have a significant place in human culture and tradition. But the deepest satisfaction in eating meat probably comes from instinct and biology. Before we became creatures of culture, nutritional wisdom was built into our sensory system, our taste buds, odor receptors, and brain. Our taste buds in particular are designed to help us recognize and pursue important nutrients: we have receptors for essential salts, for energy-rich sugars, for amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, for energy-bearing molecules called nucleotides. Raw meat triggers all these tastes, because muscle cells are relatively fragile, and because they’re biochemically very active. The cells in a plant leaf or seed, by contrast, are protected by tough cell walls that prevent much of their contents from being freed by chewing, and their protein and starch are locked up in inert storage granules. Meat is thus mouth-filling in a way that few plant foods are. Its rich aroma when cooked comes from the same biochemical complexity.

CONTROVERSIES IN MODERN MEAT PRODUCTION

Meat production is big business. In the United States just a few decades ago, it was second only to automobile manufacturing. Both industry and government have long underwritten research on innovative ways to control meat production and its costs. The result has been a reliable supply of relatively inexpensive meat, but also a production system increasingly distant from its origins in the family farmer’s pasture, pigsty, and chicken coop, and troubling in various ways. Many innovations involve the use of chemicals to manipulate animal metabolism. These chemicals act as drugs in the animals, and raise worries that they may influence human health as well. Other innovations involve the animals’ living conditions, which have become increasingly artificial and crowded, and their feed, which often includes reprocessed waste materials from various agricultural industries, and which contributed to the origin of mad cow disease and the persistence of salmonella in chickens. The scale and concentration of modern meat production, with hundreds of thousands of animals confined in a single facility, have caused significant water, soil, and air pollution. Enough consumers and producers have become uneasy about these developments that there is now a modest segment of the industry devoted to meats raised more traditionally, on a smaller scale, and with more attention to the quality of the animals’ life and meat.

HORMONES

The manipulation of animal hormones is an ancient technology. Farmers have castrated male animals for thousands of years to make them more docile. Testicle removal not only prevents the production of sex hormones that stimulate aggressive behavior, but also turns out to favor the production of fat tissue over muscle. This is why steers and capons have long been preferred as meat animals over bulls and cocks. The modern preference for lean meat has led some producers to raise uncastrated animals, or to replace certain hormones in castrates. Several natural and synthetic hormones, including estrogen and testosterone, produce leaner, more muscular cattle more rapidly and on less feed. There is ongoing research into a variety of growth factors and other drugs that would help producers fine-tune the growth and proportions of fat to lean in cattle and other meat animals.

Currently, beef producers are allowed to treat meat cattle with six hormones in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but not in Europe. Hormone treatments were outlawed in the European Economic Community in 1989 in response to well-publicized abuses; a few Italian veal producers injected their calves with large quantities of the banned steroid DES, which ended up in bottled baby food and caused changes in the sexual organs of some infants. Laboratory studies indicate that meat from animals treated with allowed hormone levels contains only minute hormone residues, and that these residues are harmless when ingested by humans.

ANTIBIOTICS

Efficient industrial-scale meat production requires that large numbers of animals be raised in close confinement, a situation that favors the rapid spread of disease. In order to control animal pathogens, many producers routinely add antibiotics to their feed. This practice turns out to have the additional advantage of increasing growth rate and feed efficiency.

Antibiotic residues in meat are minute and apparently insignificant. However, there’s good evidence that the use of antibiotics in livestock has encouraged the evolution of antibiotic-resistant campylobacter and salmonella bacteria, and that these bacteria have caused illness in U.S. consumers. Because resistant bacteria are more difficult to control, Europe and Japan restrict the use of antibiotics in animals.

HUMANE MEAT PRODUCTION

To many people, the mass production of livestock is itself undesirable. In a series of legislative acts and executive orders dating back to 1978, Switzerland has mandated that producers accommodate the needs of their animals for such things as living space, access to the outdoors, and natural light, and limit the size of herds and flocks. The European Union is also adopting animal welfare guidelines for meat production, and producers in a number of countries have grouped together to establish and monitor their own voluntary guidelines.

Mass production has certainly made meat a more affordable food than it would be otherwise. But because we raise meat animals in order to eat them, it seems only just that we try to make their brief lives as satisfying as possible. It would certainly be a challenge to raise meat animals economically while taking their nature and instincts into account and allowing them the opportunity to roam, nest, and nurture their young. But it’s a challenge at least as worthy as finding a way to trim another 1% from production costs.

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FOOD WORDS

 MEAT

The English word "meat" has not always meant animal flesh, and its evolution indicates a shift in the eating habits of English-speaking people. In the Oxford English Dictionary first citation for "meat", from the year 900, the word meant solid food in general, in contrast to drink. A vestige of this sense survives today in the habit of referring to the meat of nuts. It wasn't until 1300 that "meat" was used for the flesh of animals, and not until even later that this definition displaced the earlier one as animal flesh became preeminent in the English diet, in preference if not in quantity. (The same transformation can be traced in the French word "viande".) One sign of this preference is Charles Carter's 1732 "Compleat City and Country Cook", which devotes 50 pages to meat dishes, 25 to poultry, and 40 to fish, but only 25 to vegetables and a handful breads and pastries.

ANIMALS AND THEIR MEATS

As the novelist Walter Scott and others pointed out long ago, the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 caused a split in the English vocabulary for common meats. The Saxon had their own Germanic names for the animals - ox, steer, cow, heifer, and calf; sheep, ram, wether, ewe, and lamb; swine, hog, gilt, sow, and pig - and named their flesh by attaching "meat of" to the animal name. When French became the language of the english nobility in the in the centuries following the Conquest, the animal names survived in the countryside, but the prepared meat were rechristened in the fashion of the court cooks: the first recipe books in English call for beef (from the French "boeuf"), veal ("veau"), mutton ("mouton"), and pork ("porc").

By Harold McGee in "On Food and Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen", Scribner, New York, 2004, excerpts pp.122-124;127-129. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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