ON FOOD AND COOKING - MEAT

The science and lore of the kitchen - Meat

Of all the foods that we obtain from animals and plants, meat has always been the most highly prized. The sources of that prestige lie deep in human nature. Our primate ancestors lived almost exclusively on plant foods until 2 million years ago, when the changing African climate and diminishing vegetation led them to scavenge animal carcasses. Animal flesh and fatty bone marrow are more concentrated sources of food energy and tissue-building protein than nearly any plant food. They helped feed the physical enlargement of the brain that marked the evolution of early hominids into humans. Later, meat was the food that made it possible for humans to migrate from Africa and thrive in cold regions of Europe and Asia, where plant foods were seasonally scarce or even absent.
Humans became active hunters around 100,000 years ago, and it’s vividly clear from cave paintings of wild cattle and horses that they saw their prey as embodiments of strength and vitality. These same qualities came to be attributed to meat as well, and a successful hunt has long been the occasion for pride, gratitude, and celebratory feasting. Though we no longer depend on the hunt for meat, or on meat for survival, animal flesh remains the centerpiece of meals throughout much of the world.
Paradoxically, meat is also the most widely avoided of major foods. In order to eat meat, we necessarily cause the death of other creatures that feel fear and pain, and whose flesh resembles our own. Many people throughout history have found this a morally unacceptable price for our own nourishment and pleasure. The ethical argument against eating meat suggests that the same food that fueled the biological evolution of modern humans now holds us back from full humaneness. But the biological and historical influences on our eating habits have their own force. However culturally sophisticated we may be, humans are still omnivorous animals, and meat is a satisfying and nourishing food, an integral part of most food traditions.
Less philosophical questions, but more immediate ones for the cook, have been raised by the changing quality of meat over the last few decades. Thanks to the industrial drive toward greater efficiency, and consumer worries about animal fats, meat has been getting younger and leaner, and therefore more prone to end up dry and flavorless. Traditional cooking methods don’t always serve modern meat well, and cooks need to know how to adjust them. Our species eats just about everything that moves, from insects and snails to horses and whales. This chapter gives details for only the more common meats of the developed world, but the general principles apply to the flesh of all animals. Though fish and shellfish are as much flesh foods as meat and poultry, their flesh is unusual in several ways.

Eating Animals

By the word meat we mean the body tissues of animals that can be eaten as food, anything from frog legs to calf brains. We usually make a distinction between meats proper, muscle tissue whose function is to move some part of the animal, and organ meats, such innards as the liver, kidneys, intestine, and so on.

The Essence of the Animal: Mobility from Muscle

What is it that makes a creature an animal? The word comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to breathe,” to move air in and out of the body. The definitive characteristic of animals is the power to move the body and nearby parts of the world. Most of our meats are muscles, the propulsive machinery that moves an animal across a meadow, or through the sky or sea.
The job of any muscle is to shorten itself, or contract, when it receives the appropriate signal from the nervous system. A muscle is made up of long, thin cells, the muscle fibers, each of which is filled with two kinds of specialized, contractile protein filaments intertwined with each other. This packing of protein filaments is what makes meat such a rich nutritional source of protein. An electrical impulse from the nerve associated with the muscle causes the protein filaments to slide past each other, and then lock together by means of cross-bridging, or forming bonds with each other. The change in relative position of the filaments shortens the muscle cell as a whole, and the cross bridges maintain the contraction by holding the filaments in place.

Portable Energy: Fat 

Like any machine, the muscle protein machine requires energy to run. Almost as important to animals as their propulsive machinery is an energy supply compact enough that it doesn’t weigh them down and impede their movement. It turns out that fat packs twice as many calories into a given weight as carbohydrates do. This is why mobile animals store up energy almost exclusively in fat, and unlike stationary plants, are rich rather than starchy.
Because fat is critical to animal life, most animals are able to take advantage of abundant food by laying down large stores of fat. Many species, from insects to fish to birds to mammals, gorge themselves in preparation for migration, breeding, or surviving seasonal scarcity. Some migratory birds put on 50% of their lean weight in fat in just a few weeks, then fly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers from the northeast United States to South America without refueling. In seasonally cold parts of the world, fattening has been part of the resonance of autumn, the time when wild game animals are at their plumpest and most appealing, and when humans practice their cultural version of fattening, the harvest and storing of crops that will see them through winter’s scarcity. Humans have long exploited the fattening ability of our meat animals by overfeeding them before slaughter, to make them more succulent and flavorful.

Humans as Meat Eaters

Meat became a predictable part of the human diet beginning around 9,000 years ago, when early peoples in the Middle East managed to tame a handful of wild animals — first dogs, then goats and sheep, then pigs and cattle and horses — to live alongside them. Livestock not only transformed inedible grass and scraps into nutritious meat, but constituted a walking larder, a store of concentrated nourishment that could be harvested whenever it was needed. Because they were adaptable enough to submit to human control, our meat animals have flourished and now number in the billions, while many wild animals are being squeezed by the growth of cities and farmlands into ever smaller habitats, and their populations are declining.

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 mouthfilling in a way that few plant foods are. Its rich aroma when cooked comes from the same biochemical complexity.

Boxes

Meat Fit and Unfit for Men and Gods

'Outside Troy, Greek priests sacrifice cattle to Apollo: first they lifted back the heads of the victims, slit their throats, skinned them and carved away the meat from the thighbones and wrapped them in fat, a double fold sliced clean and topped with strips of flesh. And the old man burned these over dried split wood and over the quarters poured out glistening wine while young men at his side held five-pronged forks. Once they had burned the bones and tasted the organs they cut the rest into pieces, pierced them with spits, roasted them to a turn and pulled them off the fire'.
— Homer, Iliad, ca. 700 BCE

'For neither is it proper that the altars of the gods should be defiled with murder, nor that food of this kind should be touched by men, as neither is it fit that men should eat one another'.
— Porphyry, On Abstinence, ca. 300 CE

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’s 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 to breads and pastries.

Food Words: 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 Saxons 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 centuries following the Conquest, the animal names survived in the countryside, but the prepared meats 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 the book 'On Food and Cooking' - the Science and Lore of the kitchen., Scribner (Macmillan Library), New York, 2004, p.165-172. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

About the Book

Before antioxidants, extra-virgin olive oil and supermarket sushi commanded public obsession, the first edition of this book swept readers and cooks into the everyday magic of the kitchen: it became an overnight classic. Now, 20 years later, McGee has taken his slightly outdated volume and turned it into a stunning masterpiece that combines science, linguistics, history, poetry and, of course, gastronomy. He dances from the spicy flavor of Hawaiian seaweed to the scientific method of creating no-stir peanut butter, quoting Chinese poet Shu Xi and biblical proverbs along the way. McGee's conversational style—rich with exclamation points and everyday examples—allows him to explain complex chemical reactions, like caramelization, without dumbing them down. 
His book will also be hailed as groundbreaking in its breakdown of taste and flavor. Though several cookbooks have begun to answer the questions of why certain foods go well together, McGee draws on recent agricultural research, neuroscience reviews and chemical publications to chart the different flavor chemicals in herbs and spices, fruits and vegetables. Odd synergies appear, like the creation of fruity esters in dry-cured ham—the same that occur naturally in melons! McGee also corrects the European bias of the first edition, moving beyond the Mediterranean to discuss the foods of Asia and Mexico. Almost every single page of this edition has been rewritten, but the book retains the same light touch as the original. McGee has successfully revised the bible of food science—and produced a fascinating, charming text.