Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?

Mike Archer, Professor of Evolution of Earth and Life Systems Research at the University of New South Wales goes on to explain.  Its an interesting perspective on the often stale vegetarian-meat eater debate.

Salted bones in the Girona market

“And those?’ I asked, pointing to a pile of white things in the corner of the butcher’s counter.  “Salted bones,” she said, “huesos salados.” This was in a small market in Barcelona a few years ago.  For soup, explained the owner.

So on my salt trail in Catalonia in northern Spain, I mull over salt bones.  They don’t quite fit my culinary expectations.  I’m not sure I have them pegged right.  But here is my mulling for what it’s worth.

Salt bones. Bleached white. Bristling with crystals of salt.

They conjure up images of bones of dessicated animals dead of starvation in the desert. Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Dem Bones.  Though none of those are salted, of course.

They hint at a characteristic color of the cuisine.  Funny how cuisines have colors. Not so funny, actually.  There are reasons that I want to post about sometime. Native Hawaiian cuisine is purple: poi, limu, octopus. Contemporary American cuisine is technicolor.

And then there are white cuisines.  North European plates with white fish, white potatoes, white asparagus. Meals of the Mughals on moonlit nights with white rice and white koorma.

White in Catalonia: salt, salt spray, bacalao, white beans, white mold on the cured meats.  White for dessication,  for salt and hot sun, for bare-knuckled survival.

Bacalao and salt fish in the Girona market

All the time in this the most sophisticated of food cultures with its world ranking restaurants (El Bulli is less than half an hour’s drive, el Celler de Can Roca, second in the Michelin rankings, is in town) a barely-forgotten poverty lurks in the background.

So here in Girona I ask the butcher down the block, how many I need for a pot (using hands to indicate the size) of soup.  Two.

And why?  To give flavor and to make color. What color?  White.  Ah. So I exit with two bones (about $3.00).

And next morning I rinse off the salt and add them to a pot of water, reminding myself that in spite of all the hype above, these are not so different from ham hocks, except they are not smoked and have no bits of red meat attached. And that these are used all over Spain, not just in Catalonia, produced on an industrial scale. Recently 20,000 kilos of illegal salted bones, row upon row of hanging net bags filled with white bones, were seized by the government in Cordoba.

And a quick google yields dozens of recipes for using the bones to make caldo blanco (white broth).  That color again. Not a broth color in my culinary history where I learned that onion skins helped make a chicken broth yellow, that browning bones and adding red wine gave color and flavor to a beef broth, and that you didn’t make broth with pork bones in any case.

Anyway, just to see this caldo blanco, I rinsed the bones quickly to get rid of the excess salt, and put them in a pot of simmering water.

Salt bones in simmering water

And after a couple of hours.

Salt bone broth (caldo blanco)

I let the water evaporate so you can see the bones. Sure enough there is a white broth.  It’s salty, to be sure, but not horribly so and besides it would be used to make one pot meals of garbanzos and vegetables and meats that are descendants of the olla podrida (puchero, cocido, escudella in Catalan).  And it tastes surprisingly meaty for two dry bones.  And they have given up a surprising amount of fat, perhaps from the marrow in the bones. It did not gel when cold though.

So there you have it. Salted bones for caldo blanco, white broth. Something that rather upset my culinary categories.  Always a good thing.

One last thought.  So far as I can see, salted bones did not make it to Mexico, either with the original arrival of Spaniards, or with the later waves of migration in the late nineteenth century and then in the Franco era.  One more of the many preserved meats that didn’t.

EDIT. And no, for the various people who asked.  No you do not de-salt the bones before cooking.

To what extent do you think that whole sacrifice thing was just nice little sideline for keeping the priests well fed? And, by extension, their flock, once the priests had had their fill.

That’s what Jeremy asks.

Don’t psychologists say that their three great unanswered questions are sleep, laughter, and religion?  Far be it from me to go where psychologists dare not tread.  And I have no more than a folk theory of the psychology of sacrifice.

I would say, though, that there is no way to understand cuisines in the ancient world (say from the first written records ca 3000 BC up to around the beginning of the Christian Era) without facing up to sacrifice and the feast that follows.  It’s simply everywhere, all around the world. It’s Confucius and Leviticus and the Rig Vedas, Celtic chieftans and Roman emperors, Aztec warriors and Greek athletes.

This came as a surprise to me when I first started doing food history, though I suppose it shouldn’t have done.  So if you’re in the same boat here’s a refresher.

Americans are just ending their big feast, Thanksgiving, and perhaps that’s the way to get in to the sacrificial feast.  Thanksgiving is not a typical meal.  Most people eat turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie only on that one day.  But it is an emblematic meal.  It shows you are a member of your family, it shows that your family like others across the nation is an American family,   and it retains muted religious overtones.

Well, sacrificial feasts were like that, not in what you ate but in being emblematic.  They were not typical meals, they were blow outs with lots of meat and lots of alcohol, they were eaten by all the warriors or citizens or athletes or fraternity, they showed you were a member of the tribe, chiefdom, kingdom or empire.

They came after a sacrifice. What’s sacrifice?  Well, it’s a deal, perhaps a bribe.  You say to the gods (who are still pretty much like humans, perhaps the ancestors, perhaps even an emperor, certainly with desires like hunger and thirst) that you will feed them in the hope that in return they will ensure that you have lots of children, bountiful harvests, and success in battle.  Perhaps even that they will keep the cosmos running.

If that sounds like the Chamber of Commerce theory divine-human relations, well, that’s not so far off, except that in the absence of money, gifts of food serve instead.

And actually, it’s a very straightforward and appealing theory, much easier to understand than later religions with their promises of personal transformation. It lives on today in all the desperate moments when people say “If you let X live/prevent Y from coming to pass, I will do Z for the rest of my life.”

Anyway to get back to food, the gods everywhere had a penchant for aromas, easier to digest if you were a spirit than solid, solid flesh, and the particular aromas they liked were roast meat and alcohol or incense (though they certainly didn’t say no to other offerings of grains or fruits or what have you).   So animals were led in procession, they were killed in front of the assembled company, parts of their body were roasted on the altar, and if all was done correctly–this was a big multimedia event with prayers, songs, incense,  salt thrown on the fire turning it yellow and blue, smoke, sizzling flesh–they would look out for those who gave the sacrifice.

Then, and here the cook in me is frustrated, came a pause when the animals were butchered and dressed, when a meal was prepared (by whom, what else did it include), and then came the feast.

These could be small events for just a few people.  They could also be huge events for thousands.

So back to Jeremy’s question. For some, it was an easy-to-understand insurance policy when times were uncertain, it was a way of connecting with the world of the spirits when you were less than certain about boundaries between life and death, waking and sleeping, consciousness and dreams.   And from the economic point of view it did a good job of dealing with the meat of large domestic animals that if delicious and empowering was also perishable and came in a arge package that made it imperative to deal with it quickly.

For some it was undoubtedly a nice little sideline. Nice little sidelines have been a feature of human history from our earliest records, and have certainly never been limited to sacrifice.

And thus for some reformers–most of the founders of the “world” religions, it was to be got rid of and replaced with a more meaningful experience.  This was a slow job, even when the reformers got the power of the state behind them.  Sacrifice kept slipping back in everywhere, for all the reasons given and more–people did not want to be reformed by new church and state, they liked feasts.

But what I want to know is what the records are scarce on: the actual execution of these ceremonies.  What went on?  Who organized what? How long did they take to plan? How was the meat cut up?  Who dealt with the blood and ashes?  It’s my hunch that will teach us much more about the ancient world than speculating about whether or not it was all a scam.

It is worth remembering how much “Starving in Spring” dominated peoples lives until very recently. In fact in some cases it still dominates the terms we use in relation to food. Consider “Spring Lamb”, it is now a ubiquitous term associated with lamb in general, to the point that it is quite meaningless. When asked most people think that the terms means that the lamb was born in Spring and associate the term with happy lambs gambling (a very lamb term) on green fields.

Actually the opposite is true. “Spring Lamb” is ready to be killed an eaten in Spring, which means it is born in Winter. Another name for it was “House Lamb”, because it was housed, not put onto pasture:

1867
“The spring lamb, occasionally called house lamb, especially by some foreigners, it is presumed from the circumstance of its being born during the winter months, when its tender life, if not carefully housed, fed, and kept warm, would perish, remain dwarfish, or become sickly. Its flesh is prized for its unseasonable character, and, although delicate and tender, is quite insipid and no way nourishing.

The old-country fashion of preparing house lambs was, many years ago : ” As soon as the lambs are born they are put into a warm outhouse. Some white peas and bran are mixed together and placed near them, with a little fine hay and a chalk-stone to lick. The dams are turned into good grass, and brought to their lambs four times a day. Every lamb is suffered to suck as much as it will. By this process they become extremely delicate.” But in this country it usually lacks the pleasant flavor that grass imparts to the flesh.”

The type of lamb that is now thought of as “normal”, that is fed on pasture, is called “Grass Lamb”:

1852
“grass lamb makes its appearance now much earlier than formerly: the quality much depends upon the winter season; if a mild winter they may really be fed upon grass, but if the contrary, they must be fed with prepared food, which increases their size but diminishes their quality.”

If you want an idea of what people thought about the two types of lamb:

“House lamb may be obtained throughout the whole year, but there is no great demand for it before February”.

In other words you ate Grass Lamb as long as possible, Spring/House lamb was a second rank product. It also likely why mutton, rather then lamb was the main sheep meat eaten. There are similar stories for veal v beef, poultry etc. It is difficult to imagine how different this relatively recent way of life is to what is often though of as “tradional”. New born lambs kept in dark sheds, fed on chalk and dried peas – wonderful.

Thanks Adam.

1. The big Italian pasta company Barilla is taking on traditional Mexican pasta.  Of course for ages the Wal-Mart chain has been selling Barilla Italian-style pastas.

But now they have ever-larger quantities of traditional Mexican-style pastas made by Barilla such as fideos, municiones, coditos, letras that used to be the stronghold of Mexican companies such as La Moderna.

Can the Mexican companies possibly withstand this corporate powerhouse?  I wait to see.

2. Mexican meat packers are offering more and more pre-seasoned meats.  Arrachera and fresh cecina have been in the grocery stores for years.  But I think yesterday was the first time I had seen carne al pastor ready-packaged along with the other two, this time from RYC, a company in Puebla a hundred miles south west of Mexico City.

Ready-prepared carne al pastor neatly packaged  will doubtless be snapped up by the all small street stand owners and comida corrida proprietors who stock up at these box stores. In fact there’s a great essay to be written on how changes in street food follow changes in corporate marketing strategy.  I don’t have the knowledge to do it but someone should.

3.  Sam’s in León (our local shopping town, booming shoe manufacturing center) improbably carried flour tortillas made in the suburbs of my little colonial town, Guanajuato.  Now may be that’s just a gesture to the local.  But it means that one family here is right on the ball and making out.  After all, we are not in flour tortilla country.  So this family got the machinery, started making them, sold them to Wal-Mart.

Wait for further updates. I’m going to try to get an interview on how this all happened.

Even so there are some dishes that just cry out for study.  One of these is the thin slices of breaded (or egg and breaded) meat.  This shot around the globe (from Latin America to Japan to India to the Middle East) in the nineteenth century (the late nineteenth century I suspect), being variously called a cutlet, a milanesa, a schnitzel, or that Texas specialty, chicken fried steak.  It’s a dish that requires both fresh meat and breadcrumbs of a fairly fine kind of bread.  Is that why it doesn’t appear (assuming it doesn’t) much, much earlier?

Here’s a brief discussion of chicken fried steak and its Mexican counterpart, the milanesa.  It was prompted by my friend and writer for the Dallas Morning News, Kim Peirce.

I’m not sure that I agree with the commentator that the origin in Central European.   Nor do I know when the milanesa, a dish that doesn’t make it into English-language Mexican cookbooks but is an absolute staple in Mexico, made it to Mexico.  It could have been brought by German or Italian immigrants both of whom turned up in Mexico in the late nineteenth century.  Or the French come to that, though the choice of the word milanesa does suggest some Italian connection.

Any contributions to this debate would be most welcome.

As an example, consider this quote from Monica Eng (though she is simply one of many one could quote). Earlier I posted her provocative piece on watching the killing.

I skid to a screaming halt when I run across this in her article.

“Ethical meat options have expanded faster than you can say “ex-vegetarian.” Between 2002 and 2007 U.S. organic meat sales grew tenfold (from $33 million to $364 million), according to Chicago-based Mintel research group.

This doesn’t even count the sales growth in meats that are free-range, grass-fed and natural—less restrictive standards than organic, in which livestock is required by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to have been fed organic feed and be free of hormones and antibiotics.”

So if I eat non-organic meat (or less restrictively meat that is not free-range, grass-fed and natural), I’m not ethical (or moral as I’d rather say)?

This seems to me not only ridiculous but positively dangerous. Consider the two definitions of organic we talked about a few posts back.

1. Having no chemical inputs. I could say in response that it is not ethical to deny animals the medicines we ourselves use.

2. Being small, local etc. Well, this is not a guarantee of virtuous meat. I live where cattle scrounge on bare hillsides, authentically small and local, but not a good life for the cows nor for the diner.

The latter point needs more consideration. But for the moment, please, stop. Ethical is not equivalent to organic.

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/10/ethicalorganic-hang-on-a-second-please.html/feed 0 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/10/shrink-wrapped-pigs-head-mega-supermarket-guanajuato.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/10/shrink-wrapped-pigs-head-mega-supermarket-guanajuato.html#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:52:34 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=587 A propos the comments on watching the killing of animals for meat, a couple of photos.

It is accompanied by shrink-wrapped “maiz para pozole,” that is, hominy for the classic meal in a bowl, pozole.

Monica Eng doesn’t just ruminate about this but actually turns up to watch cattle, pigs, chicken, and fish killed and even kills her own crabs. Here’s the link to “morality bites.”

It’s an interesting tour, or perhaps pilgrimage would be a better word. And I was intrigued to discover that the author isn’t the only one. There’s actually a small but growing “watch the killing” movement catered to by smaller slaughter houses and organic farmers.

The more that I think about it the more the pilgrimage seems the right word. To obtain forgiveness for having eaten meat, you go on a long and arduous journey and end up participating in the sacrifice.

I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand on this. I’m an unrepentant meat eater. I grew up having known a fair bit of the protein I ate in its living form. The butcher’s shop proudly displayed the whole carcass with its prize badge as best of the show next to it. So just by happenstance, killing and eating were always connected in my mind.

But if it hadn’t been that way? If I’d only known meat as plastic-wrapped, pre-cut muscle meat, no faces, no innards?

Is sacrificial tourism or pilgrimage a desirable or necessary condition for eating meat? I’m not sure. If you have clear ideas about this, I’d love to hear about them.

But just because immersing oneself in another world is such fun, here are some highlights.

A new state of the art exhibition center.

Showing your bull

Black legged Suffolks and Hampshires, snub nosed Texels, Roman nosed Charolais and Romanovs, and splendidly horned Rambouillets, here being prepared for competition.

The champion Swiss and her calf

And contemplating the local tequila