Article written by Jenny Linford
Repast: The Story of Food is a book I wrote in collaboration with and for the British Museum. The generously illustrated book uses 300 food-related objects and pictures from the British Museum’s extensive collection – chosen in consultation with the curators - to tell the story of food. The historic importance of meat to humanity is a strand throughout in the book. It is striking how for much of human history meat was prized as a special food, a high-status food enjoyed by the wealthy elites in societies, with animals offered to the gods in sacrifice, the appetising scent of roasted meat wafting up to the heavens. With meat regarded as precious, it was not wasted; every bit of the animal was eaten, fat extracted for use in cooking and as a fuel for lighting, hides used to provide clothing and bags, and bones utilised to make tools, weapons, instruments, decorative carvings.
Repast begins with a section on Hunting. For most of human history, human beings obtained food by hunting, gathering and fishing. The ingenuity of humans in fashioning weapons for hunting is apparent when one looks through the book’s pages. Here is a spear thrower in the shape of a mammoth made from reindeer antler dating from the last Ice Age, around 14,000 years ago, when these huge creatures roamed the earth.
On another page, one finds a Malaysian bamboo quiver used to carry blowpipe darts. In the dense tropical jungles of Southeast Asia, darts, sometimes tipped with poison, were used to hunt game, prized as silent weapons which could fire in quick succession.
Human inventiveness also saw the use of birds of prey as a means of hunting for birds and animals. Falconry was a favoured pursuit of royalty and nobility in a number of societies. It was a popular theme in Mughal art, as seen in an elegant late 16th century painting of Prince Daniyal holding a bird of prey in his right hand covered in a hawking glove. The courage of hunters in pursuing formidable, dangerous animals such as wild boar is celebrated in many cultures, including Greek and Roman myths which are depicted in various ways, including on splendid ancient Greek kraters (vessels used to mix wine with water).
Around 12,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, there came a gradual shift to growing crops and rearing animals as a means of providing food. Although the world contains over a hundred large terrestrial, herbivorous mammals, only fourteen of these have been domesticated. Of these, five have been particularly important: sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and horses. Domesticating wild animals was a long process of selective breeding, with humans choosing desirable traits, such as placidity, size or plumpness. Animals were reared for several uses: for meat, milk, as draft animals and as a source of transport and for their hides.
When we look at how mammals became domesticated, certain innate character traits are considered to have played a part. Sheep, for example, are timid, gregarious animals, which follow a dominant leader and lack strong territorial instincts, characteristics which are seen as aiding the domestication process. The fact that, as ruminants, they can live on grass and shrubs, made them very useful, as did their capacity to survive in a variety of climates and habitats. Domesticated pigs are descended from wild boars – animals which are omnivorous and inquisitive. Their natural habitat is woodland, but it is thought that they were attracted to the crops and rubbish heaps of early farming settlements and so lived close to human beings. Wild boar piglets, captured from the wild, could easily be tamed and then bred from, creating the domestic pig. Pigs have large litters and gain weight easily, so providing large carcases which made them valued meat animals. In China, the pig is such an important animal that the Chinese character for ‘home’ consists of a pig under a roof. The pig’s capacity to thrive on waste made them a useful animal for poorer households. Historically, the practice of keeping a pig for a year, fattening it up and then slaughtering it for its meat was widespread in both China and Europe, and still continues today. The fact that pigs ate waste, however, saw their meat forbidden in some religions, notably Judaism and Islam.
Fresh meat is highly perishable, so human beings set about finding ways of preserving it to make this precious foodstuff last longer. Drying and smoking meat is a fundamental way of doing this, with salt (itself long a luxury rather than a cheap basic flavouring) playing a key role in preserving. Today we are lucky enough to enjoy a rich world of charcuterie products - salamis, hams, sausages, pates, blood puddings – created over centuries of seeking to preserve meat. The skill, time and care which go into creating air-dried hams such as Italy’s Prosciutto di Parma or Spain’s Jamon Iberico sees them rightly regarded as luxuries.
Birds, as well as mammals, have long been valued as a source of both meat and eggs. Of the domesticated birds kept for these reasons, it is the chicken which is the best known and widely kept and consumed. The domestic chicken’s ancestor was the jungle fowl Gallus gallus, a bird native to the Indian subcontinent and to Southeast Asia. It is not known when and where the bird was first domesticated, but Southeast Asia is considered likely. Triggered by the gift to Queen Victoria of Cochin chickens, large, strikingly colourful birds from China, nineteenth century Europe saw a craze for chicken breeding.
The twentieth century saw the intensification and industrialization of livestock farming, with battery hens confined in small spaces rather than scratching around farmyards. Concerns over animal welfare, human health implications (for example at the routine use of antibiotics in intensive farming), the environmental impact of factory farming have seen a response in the rise of free-range meat production, the organic movement and a focus on grassfed meat. Consumers, concerned by those issues outlined above, are choosing to buy their meat accordingly. I, myself, have been buying my meat from Pipers Farm for a number of years now for these reasons.