meat

 Andrew (of Evolvify) got me looking up ancient Scottish diets. I found this article from 1890. I don't know how accurate it is, but I do know it is awesome (emphasis mine):

SCOTS FOOD.
THE Scots national vegetable was the green kale, of which nettles, leeks, onions, ranty-tanty (sorrel), carrots, and turnips were—most of them—probably late and—all of them—certainly inadequate and partial rivals. For unnumbered centuries the place of kale in Scottish domestic economy has been almost as peculiar as that of potatoes during the last two hundred years in the domestic economy of Ireland.

'Although my father was nae laird,
'Tis daffin to be vaunty,
Me keepit aye a gude kale-yaird
A ha' house and a pantry';

and indeed a 'gude kale-yaird' was as indispensable to the old Scottish cotter as the potato-plot is to the Irish peasant. A recent writer on Ireland has bemoaned the adoption by the Irish of ' Raleigh's fatal gift,' which he describes as a 'dangerous tuber' and a 'demoralising esculent.' No dangerous or demoralising tendencies attach to the green kale, nor has it manifested any tendency to 'swell the population,' except in a merely gastric sense. It forestalled the potato to some extent, which in Ireland had become the chief and universal food of the masses before the end of the seventeenth century, but did not come into general use in 'the land o' cakes' and kale till nearly a century later. For a long time the Scottish peasant's treatment of potatoes was curious and tentative. At first his view of them was probably identical with that of the housewife who refused potatoes offered by a neighbour—they would ' eat sae fine with the mutton,' she said—on the ground that' we need nae provocatives in this house.' He regarded them, that is, as less palatable than kale—(which is essentially the vegetable of a carnivorous race, in that it must be used as an adjunct of meat to be at all beneficent)—and less nourishing than oatmeal; and when towards the latter half of the eighteenth century the farmer began planting them in the fields there was a certain apprehension lest it should be attempted to substitute them for the latter. But the potato was bound to win in the end, and in the end the potato won, though the feeling of the Scot for it has never been excessive. He has mastered it, indeed, as completely as the Irishman—who is nothing if not lazy and disposed to rely on every form of energy, from miracles downwards, except his own—has been mastered by it; and he may now be said to have succeeded in making the most that can be made of it, whether as an article of diet or as a source of profit. Its fortune has somewhat modified the position of green kale, but the cotter's garden-plot is still the kale yard, and the time-honoured vegetable, though used less variously than of old, has not been ousted from its place in the nation's esteem. We should explain, however, that it was chiefly among the Lowlanders that kale attained to extraordinary vogue. It is a vegetable essentially Saxon and non-Celtic. The more unsophisticated Highlanders regarded its use as a symptom of effeminacy; so that the Grants who, living near the Lowland line, had grown fond of it were contemned as the 'soft kale-eating Grants.' When the Highlander indulged in such a luxury as broth he preferred the common nettle as more appropriate to the cateran. As for thei aboriginal mountaineer, his appetite for vegetables was chiefly fed on wild fruits and nuts, the roots of wild herbs, and the leaves of certain trees.

In the very early centuries oats and kale were probably far less important staples of diet among the poorer classes than they subsequently became. In the case of Europeans vegetarianism, like teetotalism, is essentially a modern fad, chiefly affected by persons more or less languid and unhealthy both morally and physically. A vigorous and energetic race is always carnivorous, and in later times it was simply the scarcity of flesh that,compelled the Scottish peasant to feed on it so sparingly. The aboriginal cave-dwellers were mighty eaters of meat, and as long as it abounded meat must have formed the chief food of the whole community. Abundant it seems to have been till at least the sixteenth century. Bishop Lesley records of the Bordermen of his time that they made very little use of bread, living chiefly upon flesh, milk and cheese, and sodden barley. The northern Highlanders, who also were marauders, ate flesh largely, and often ate it raw. Lesley, indeed, affirms that they preferred it dripping with blood because it was then 'mair sappie' and nourishing; but his information on the point appears to have been defective, for though they did frequently eat beef and venison raw their custom was to prepare it by squeezing the slices dry between wooden battens. One reason for this ultra-savage style of feeding was probably the original scarcity of cooking utensils, for the Highlander's antipathy to the arts of the craftsman was inveterate. But he was ingenious in a way, and contrived a kitchen-range and buttery of his own. That is, he built a fire, and over that fire he hung the paunch of his last kill, and in that paunch he seethed the flesh of the original owner. According to Lesley, the 'brue ' he got in this way was so excellent that not the best wine nor any other kind of drink might compare to it; and no doubt its quality was very similar to that of the strong Lowland soup called 'skink.' To his habit of battening himself on raw flesh may probably be traced the tradition that now and then he was addicted to cannibalism. (The men of Annandale were also famed for just such dietetic eccentricities.) No doubt the calumny—if calumny it were—obtained a wider and more permanent acceptance by reason of the fact that the authority of St. Jerome could be quoted in support of it. But, calumny or not, it had gained such credence even in Jacobite times in England that when the outlandish host appeared across the Border some nervous folk were seriously concerned lest they or any of theirs should be ravished away to grace some conqueror's board.

As a matter of fact, the ancient Highlander, or at least the Highlander of the later middle ages, was very temperate in food and drink. No doubt he now and then indulged in frantic ' spreeing,' especially after a more than commonly successful foray; but as a rule he despised luxury and eschewed both gluttony and drunkenness. He broke his fast with a light meal, and took nothing more till in the evening he dined in the great hall of his chief. Here the character and quality of the food provided were regulated to some extent by the rank of the guest. But all ate sparingly: corpulence—pace Sir John Falstaff an inconvenient endowment for the professional thief—being held in high abhorrence.

It is quite sad to think now that Scotland is one of the places of the world most affected by bad food. Rates of heart disease, alcoholism, and obesity are unusually high there. People think of soda and shortbread as being "traditional foods." I would say the dietary history of oppression of indigenous customs and adoption of cheap poverty foods as "traditional" is quite similar to what has happened with Native Americans or Pacific Islanders. There may also be some genetic predispositions unique to people who were hunter-gatherers (or mostly hunter-gatherers) until somewhat recently. 

Also, it explains how Andrew's potato skepticism may be an ancient cultural trait...

Edit: here is some Irish info from a similar source:

In hunting, the flesh was occasionally eaten raw, after the blood was squeezed out; but the Irish were more accustomed to this barbarous food, and Campion remarks, that the flesh thus swallowed "was boyled in their stomaks with aqua vitae, which they swill in after such a surfeite by quarts and pottles." They also, he says, bled their cattle, and baked the curdled blood spread with butter. A French writer, some centuries ago, describes Scotland as "pauvre en or, et en argent, mais fort bon en vivres;" and again, "assez des veaux et vaches, et par le moyen la chair est a bon compte."

 Last weekend I visited my friend Ulla Kjarval and her family's farm Spring Lake Farm (they also have a blog) in Delhi, NY. I met Ulla on Twitter and I've been buying from her farm for my Meatshare meetup group. It was wonderful to get to visit and spend time with them and their wonderful animals.

The animals were hard to spot in the tall grass and their farm really was huge, at over 300 acres. Farmer Ingimundur has been steadily increasing the amount of grass the pigs are eating, so they are mostly grass-fed, which is rare even on similar locavore-catering farms. Because of the amount of grass in their diet, the pork has a delicious savory beefy quality. 

Delicious spare ribs

Which is good, because I eat it a lot and so do they. Farmer Ingi says that because of all his contact with paleo/ancestral dieters, he has more fully embraced meat as healthy. He says he has lost considerable weight and has more energy than ever thanks to eating lots of pork belly for breakfast every day. That mirrors the experience Heath from Wooly Pigs, another pig farmer who has gone paleo with amazing results. 

One thing I'll miss about NYC is my meatshare group. Small farmers have a lot of trouble marketing their meat and I'm glad we've been able to buy so much from Spring Lake Farm. Both the farm and our group have overcome many challenges and we've learned so much in the process (sometimes the hard way). 

That's why next week I'm teaching a workshop in NYC about how to organize your own meatshare. I hope to educate the next generation of bulk meat buyers in NYC.

For the next chapter of my life I'm starting up Chicago Meatshare. And for everyone else I'm still writing that book about meatshare and how to plan one yourself. 

 Today I got a spate of seemingly random animal rights trolls. Fly by night nonsense? Nope, apparently I was featured on the Freakonomics blog. Normally this would be an honor, since I was a fan of Freakonomics when I was an economics major in college, but nope, they let James McWilliams write another animal rights nonsense piece on their blog, one that references a post I made over a year ago. What does that have to do with economics? Hilariously enough, one of the major objections I have to magazines and blogs billing McWilliams as an agricultural writer is that he doesn't seem to know anything about agricultural economics. He is a historian who ruffles feathers because he condemns the locavore movement. Some troglo-free marketers only see the latter and are just happy to have someone pulling the hippies down to Earth, while forgetting that animals play an essential and irreplaceable role in our agricultural economy. When I saw McWilliams speak on a panel with real farmers, I saw him ignoring what they said, cherry picking quotes to rationalize his fantasy-future utopia of magic robot vegetable farms where they is no death (hilariously, growing mechanization of agriculture often leads to more deaths).  

According to McWilliams, I am rationalizing unnecessary death. This is untrue. There is no way to rationalize any kind of death. The idea that some deaths are necessary and others are not is a quasi-religious way to look at the world. I was thrilled to see an animal rights philosopher, Joel Marks, admit that in the New York Times a few weeks ago:

In my case the plight of nonhuman animals at human hands became the great preoccupation. I could think of no greater atrocity than the confinement and slaughter of untold billions of innocent creatures for sustenance that can be provided through other, more humane diets.

In my most recent published book, I defended a particular moral theory – my own version of deontological ethics – and then “applied” that theory to defend a particular moral claim: that other animals have an inherent right not to be eaten or otherwise used by humans. Oddly enough, it was as I crossed the final “t” and dotted the final “i” of that monograph, that I underwent what I call my anti-epiphany.

A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

Unfortunately, complete moral relativism is just as silly as believing that it's immoral to kill animals. Morality does come from somewhere, and the evidence is that it comes our ancient tribal past where we evolved a moral sense in order to be able to cooperate with other humans beings as a community. Morality is about making our lives together better. 

James McWilliams totally misses the point I was making in that post and in later posts that animal husbandry is something we have a tough time with because it's not part of our evolutionary heritage. I've been watching Human Planet, the gorgeous documentary about diverse human lifeways around the globe, and one of the most striking scenes is of a South American Indian woman breastfeeding a baby monkey. They ate that monkey's mother for dinner, but this baby monkey is a treasured pet. They don't eat the animals they raise, those animals are part of their tribe. The idea that eating meat is wrong because eating babies (argument from marginal cases) and our pet dogs is wrong is the kind of idea that only someone totally detached from innate human morals would put forth. We don't ban eating/killing babies because babies are sentient! 

I was also making a point in that post that I didn't agree with how that farm was raising their animals, since they were perpetuating a breed that doesn't even have a sense of life and would die young even if you brought them to some kind of farm sanctuary. That's an industrial system dressed up in free-range clothing. 

I never considered myself part of the "compassionate carnivore" movement. There is nothing special about my engagement with my food. My desire to slaughter my own animals doesn't have to do with reducing harm, but achieving independence from a dying industrial food system. And yes, that means using and eating animals. Fertilizers based on mining un-renewable resources aren't going to last forever. 

If you are a visitor interested in learning more why I gave up veganism and debating animal rights, I suggest you head over to let them eat meat, a truly excellent site on the subject.

There are many reasons I became a vegan, but one of the main reasons was that I didn't want to support the industrial meat system, which is cruel to both animals and people, as well as destructive to communities and the environment. I know this point of mine has been controversial before, but I do believe that conventional meat is more unhealthy, not just because of the fatty acids, but because of other feed additives, hormones, antibiotics, and the continual stress animals are subjected to. I believe science will vindicate this position more and more in the future. The beginning evidence is there, it just needs to be further investigated. 

While I no longer believe that eating animals is immoral and I am no longer vegan, I do believe that animals that share characteristics with us like empathy deserve to be treated with empathy. The industrial meat industry treats neither humans nor animals with empathy. Foragers kill perhaps an animal a day or less, often offering that animals prayers of respect. Slaughterhouse workers kill hundreds of animals a day. It's not acceptable to kill fewer. In fact I know of a slaughterhouse that was shut down because they weren't killing enough animals a day and the USDA said it was inefficient to provide them with an inspector. The consequence is that slaughterhouse workers suffer repetitive stress injuries and there are some that suffer unusual autoimmune conditions as well, though the meat industry has done plenty to cover this up. But another consequence is callousness about life. Some studies have shown that presence of people who kill hundreds of animals a day in a community is associated with higher levels of crime. That doesn't surprise me at all. I've seen the undercover videos of factory farms and the brutality these animals are subject to. Only someone conditioned to accept brutality (or a psychopath) could commit acts like that.

And let's talk about community. As someone with a farm in the family and the desire to live a rural life, I'm loathe to support a system that destroys rural communities, driving small producers out of business (currently the matter of an antitrust investigation) and polluting the land and waters with waste.

Last year Don Mastesz from Primal Wisdom did a paleo on a budget series that I just remembered. The series advocated the consumption of supermarket industrial meat. I remember being rather disappointed, but not saying anything because I don't like getting into political arguments. It was based on a rather callous idea in the first place. He saw a poor family in Food Inc. and didn't believe their claim that they couldn't afford healthy food. He decided to design a low-carb diet based on spending as much money as food stamps provide. 

Some background: When I moved to New York City it was to work in public service. I accepted a salary that placed me below the poverty line. Millions of New Yorkers eat badly. Afford is such a loaded word. Perhaps a lot of these people actually could technically afford decent food if you just looked at their income. But many of them are caught in cycles of debt, not only from perhaps injudicious spending, but from our dysfunctional and uncompassionate health care system. Yes, the government will feed you garbage in public school for free, but when your medical bills come from the diabetes you acquired when you were only 25, it doesn't always pay them. Having gone to the ER when poor before, it's a bit like gambling. You might get your bills dropped when you apply for financial aid and you might get some medicare coverage, but you might not. Then these illnesses also affect many people's ability to work. 

Then there is the area of privilege. Yes, I ate decently when I was poor, but I am also very educated about nutrition and I grew up with a mother who attempted to teach me at least a few cooking skills. Not everyone has these things. 

So the Food Inc people got it wrong. That family doesn't need to eat at fast food joints. They could follow my plan, the whole family would lose body fat, the father would lose his diabetes, they would stop needing dental repairs, and they would then have the money he spent on medications for upgrading the quality of their food.

I wonder if Don would volunteer to come to East New York and actually work with a family on food stamps. The odds are that mom works full time and she was raised by public schools that shovel garbage into children's mouths and teach them the food pyramid without teaching them how to shop or cook. The odds are that there is no dad. The odds are that their apartment does not have the sort of kitchen most of us enjoy nor do they have good access to grocery stores. Given the state of public housing, the odds are that the stove is in disrepair, but maybe they have a microwave. I honestly don't think Don's experiment said much about the state of how the poor could eat, nor did it involve very good food. I really don't think that telling people to eat more factory farmed meat is a good solution to our current food system woes. I honestly believe such people would be very healthy on an affordable no veg oil/sugar diet that includes animal products from good farms in small enough amounts to be affordable. That's how the majority of tradition cultures eat. The truth is that we are going to have to get that into public service food projects (like those that deliver to elderly/homebound people), soup kitchens, and schools. And perhaps a return to home ec in schools would help. 

I try my best to not eat factory-farmed meat and I've been a higher carb advocate for some time now. Eating high-carb allowed me to survive on $10,000 a year while maintaining my commitment to grass-fed meat from small local farms. I also honestly feel better on a higher-carb diet. Meat has important nutrients, but you don't need a lot of it to get these. 

I've also resisted the assimilation of primal/paleo/ancestral with the low-carb community, since I believe they have different ideals and that low-carb has very little to do with the paleolithic or what foragers actually eat, besides the tiny sliver of the paleolithic where humans lived in far north environments and the few foragers of questionable health who eat mainly meat. The stupidity of some of these people is staggering. When I presented extensive evidence that even their beloved Inuit ate plenty of plants, all they could do is say "but vilhjalmur stefansson sayz." Never mind his habit of lying and why are we even talking about this since most foragers and cultures mistakenly cited by "paleo" diet advocates eat large amounts of carbohydrates?

When Don wrote his Farewell to Paleo post, saying he was leaving paleo for a high-carb diet (lol because the evidence that the paleo diet would have been high-carb is pretty damn strong) because of health problems, I didn't connect the dots. But now that I'm remembering his budget diet, it doesn't surprise me that it happened. There are lots of zero carb trolls that claim they are healthy on a supermarket meat diet, but as far as I know, all of those are men. For women, hormonal balance can be a much more tenuous matter. If you don't believe that the hormone-injected animals effect hormone balance, I guess you would also point to the fact they were eating cheaper meats that tend to be higher in omega-6 like chicken and pork. 

Thankfully, Don has come around and posted an update to his posts advocating industrial meat:

7/13/11 update: I decided that I don't want to endorse or appear to endorse the use of any meat produced by conventional methods of feeding the livestock grains, primarily corn and soybeans. Since animals consume 80% of the grain and soy produced by U.S. agriculture, this system drives the ongoing destruction of our topsoil both through crops and through grazing. Animal food production consumes 87% of all freshwater used in the U.S. each year, and thus is the primary driver of depletion of water reserves. This system also produces most of the water pollution occurring in the U.S. Our conventional livestock production system has enormous costs detailed in this article from Cornell University. Since I have known of these costs for more than 20 years, I feel embarrassed and remorseful that I wrote this series and other articles that endorsed the use of conventional animal products.

His wife has also written that she regrets forgetting compassion. This is great news. It's a bit of a shame that Don has gone on to advocate a very low fat diet and Chinese medicine for everyone, but I think it's great that he changed his diet in response to how it made him feel, whereas some low carb advocates would rather dose up with supplements than admit that a good diet probably wouldn't give them constant cramps and other health issues. And I'm glad he's fighting some of the paleo!stupidity, which means the paleo diet made up by people to fit their bias rather than one based on the real data.