Dry aged

[Peter Dexter]

I visit a village with a center that butchers meat. The beef is always hung for a time before sale. We are omnivorous and have been so since our inception as a modern Homo species. That as contemporary humans we have found efficient albeit cruel ways to provide ourselves with animal protein can't be surprising to anyone. The methods of killing though are perhaps less cruel than the "buffalo jumps" practiced by native Americans for 12000 years.

 

[Jerome Marot]

I revisit that thread, which was presented to me while login on. The next picture is not beef, but pork. I treated myself to a jamón ibérico to celebrate the end of the year. Spain is famous for their cured hams. The pigs are fed with acorns (bellota).

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You can get it pre-cut and vacuumed, but it does not keep as well, so I bought the whole leg of pork and cut it myself.

Spain (and other parts of Europe, for example Germany...) has lots of oak trees. Humans can't really eat acorns but pigs can and they love that food. That allowed people to transform an abundant but otherwise inedible ressource into cured meat that would keep for the whole of winter. I know a place near Munich where city inhabitants were allowed to bring a pig to the forest to gorge itself on acorns in autumn. It is probably still allowed (I don't think that the rules have changed), but nobody does that anymore.

Some people speculate that the different religious prescriptions on pork meat are indeed linked to the fact that in some regions pigs use an otherwise inedible ressource and in other regions compete with humans for scarce food.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Interesting that in South America, that apparently, 6 domesticated pigs brought by the conquistadors escaped. Over the years these regressed and re-expressed the wild boar features of tusks and fur tgat had been bred out of them

Domesticated pigs don’t likely compete for food but were, instead, the village garbage eaters so nothing was wasted!

Of the Israelite Canaanites tribes, (under pressure of Pharaonic dominance of tribes in the fertile plains), fled to
the highlands, and uniquely for all Canaanite tribes, no pig bones ever found in any of the very numerous early typical Hebrew 4 roomed stone homes excavated to date. Only cattle that chew the cud and had split hooves.

I think that the pig might have been considered “unclean”, bringing “impurity” with it, as they ate food waste and by then concepts of ritual “cleanliness” and “purity” were well established including the idea that limestone couldn’t be contaminated, or debased but clay vases could.

So the culture classified and segregated all objects and people as either pure, already impure, capable of becoming impure

….or, uniquely limestone vessels, immune from contamination by contact!

In the same fashion, a woman during menses was unclean and needed, after flow had ceased, a ritual bath before she could be pure again and lie with a man once more.

So given the highly developed hierarchies of purity, it’s utterly reasonable, within such a mindset that pork would be shunned as unclean!

What impresses me is the great skill and traditions that were developed in the Christian West in using pork as not only a high quality food source, but that techniques of curing, seasoning and sausage making with pork became central to local and National culture.

Asher

 

[TimTom42]

It’s very brutal what we do, but really, Nicolas, we are still just apes, albeit with language, writing and gadgets.

I just had an extra, before bedtime snack of pineapple, blackberries, (carnivores of sheep they trap in their spikes), blueberries and several slices of freshly roasted succulent chicken!

I feel no guilt eating the unlucky birds!

We, like the blackberry plant and the lion, eat meat, merely because that our nature!


But I do think slaughter houses are cruel as the animals waiting can hear the noises and the yard is full of stinking poop that smells a 1/2 mile away. Fortunately my BMW, (that I just gave to my wonderful steel mechanic), has a filter that gets rid of all such of All such horrible odors. But it must be unpleasant for the cattle waiting for death!

Also sows are in a tight chained enclosure when the boar is brought to mount her and they don’t have a chance to even be social. It’s animal rape.

Chickens bred to grow fast, are packed in overcrowded shelves, overfed and some cannot even stand on their feet!

All this is do unnecessary, cruel and unfitting for civilized people.

But we go to a sanitized supermarket where the packed meats are clean with no blood and we can choose keeping out hands clean as the supermarket plays music as if food comes from the wand of a magician!

Asher

That's a really insightful and thought-provoking post, Asher. You bring up some really valid points about the cruelty of factory farming and the disconnect between what we consume and the reality of where it comes from. It's definitely a difficult issue, and it's good to see people taking the time to think about it and bring it up in conversation.

 

[TimTom42]

That does exists Viberate in France too as well as all over bunka knives the world.
SHAME.

Raising awareness and advocating for positive change are crucial steps in the right direction.

 

[Samuel Clark]

Jérôme,

I think that once the fungus has coated the outside with its mycelium, it out competes bacteria.

No doubt they are meticulous in washing (and I suspect they might even splash on the common produce spoilage inhibitor, potassium sulfite or similar, whatever doesn’t hurt the mold! These careful traditional steps, like wine making, could be like the family secrets in wineries. Just a guess. The claim is that the precisely controlled, moisture-removing low humidity cold air, and the fungus is all that is used.

Asher

This is true...