Episode 17 Beef - Its Almost Never for Dinner

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Listen to "017 Beef - It's Almost Never for Dinner" on Spreaker.

017 Beef - It’s Almost Never for Dinner



Shipboard Salt Beef Cask
This would be in the galley - filled
from the barrels in the hold as needed
Making the connection that advances in ship building, navigation and cannon meant people wanted to spend (or wanted their soldiers to spend) months or even years at sea - meant the whole food preservation game changed.  When your armies (or well, in this case, Navies) have to be entirely supplied, and lack the ability to forage, a new food pipeline to supply a whole new military division has to develop – ta da! Naval Stores.  Something that hadn’t really existed since the heyday of Mediterranean Navies of antiquity.  The fact that naval warfare rearranged British landowners priorities which displaced peasants, which created a class hopeless enough to emigrate to the New World is a strange set of cause and effect I had never considered.





Salt Beef supplies the sea!   

 





The cow as a traveling supply depot makes lots of sense after digging into the whole thing.  At this point it is pretty one off – but the industries that now use all the non-edible cow parts are extensive.  Fortunately, as a society we are ending the view that cow poop is waste.  What we will settle on (Bio-gas?  Fertilizer?) remains to be seen.  But sooner we end the American Idea of “throwing away”, the better.  Sure stuff will remain disposable, but we need to have a plan for each thing’s next. 


Reinvest in the Carbon Cycle Now!

Related Media: (I’ve just listing the newer cookbooks because they assume this is new to you, and you want to learn, instead of admonishing you for not knowing, which is more the thing in late 19th and 20thC cookbooks)

Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book: A Cookbook. Berkeley, CA: Tenn Speed Press, 2007

McLagan, Jennifer.  Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal: A Cookbook. 


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