There is no more "natural" meat. Animals are genetically designed to produce lean meat which in fact is uneatable - dry and tasteless. So the meat is injected with soya and animal proteins as well as with starchs (to give it consistency). It is "pre-marinated" and massaged. It is not meat in the conventional sense. There is no more "meat" anywhere these days.
7 comments:
J,
I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. There are plenty of processed products on the market as you describe but it is still possible (at least in the US) to buy natural meat if you look for it (and are willing to pay a premium). I'm sure that even in Israel you can get "organic" or "biologic" meat that is not processed. Or you can visit an Arab village and buy a goat.
K
Is an endogamic cow, genetically engineered for lean meat, pumped full of artificial hormones and antibiotics, "natural"? Its meat is good and tasty, but natural is not. On other hand, the meat of a semi-savage cow of the pampas (which does not exist anymore) was hard and inferior. I am not for going back to Neanderthal food, like eating wild rice, because it is much worse than modern varieties. Wild species "do" everything to be unpalatable and nocive so they will not be eaten. I am only pointing out how far we have distanced ourselves from "Nature". The meat we buy in the supermarket is not the same meat that my grandfather bought from the butcher. Victorian recipes are irreproducible because their sugar is not our sugar, their meat is not our meat, etc. The name is the same, but the reality is different.
I think it depends on the ingredient. All the pre-industrial and semi-industrial forms of sugar such as panela (loaf sugar) and muscovado (brown sugar) are still available if you want them, if not always in the regular supermarket. White sugar is by definition a refined industrial product that has been available only since the 19th century and being almost 100% pure sucrose, is unchanging over time. In pre-modern times sugar was an expensive luxury - the classic Jewish cake honig lekach (honey cake) depended on local honey for sweetening. Cakes have gotten sweeter as sugar has become cheaper - my parents found most American cakes to be much too sweet for their taste and my mother's own baked goods used much less sugar than is typical today.
Also our modern cakes depend on chemical leavening (baking powder) which is a modern (19th century) invention (and which did not alway reach the more distant shtetls even in the early 20th). Many of my mother's recipes for cakes were yeast based (e.g. babkas) or egg foam based (sponge cake) for this reason.
I would say that modern meat is BETTER in most cases than what was available to our grandfathers. In Poland at least, eating tender cuts of grilled steak as in Argentina was largely unknown. A chunk of bony beef (probably an aged milk cow that was no longer producing or a male calf) was added to the soup pot and boiled for hours until tender and everyone would get a little bit of meat with their soup. But the peak was reached maybe 40 or 50 years ago and there has been a decline as you describe as the market (and economics) demanded leaner cuts.
The food of our youth, when our taste buds were more intact, and enhanced by memory of mother love, always tastes better.
K
That is what I am saying. Modern meat and modern food in general is BETTER than the original. I dont want to go back eating wild rice or other wild cereals (my dear wife's speciality) or the meat of the skeletical nomadic cattle of the Nigerian Sahel. Young people and my family have no idea what natural meat was, and think it is somehow better or purer than the meat available in the supermarket.
Did you know that in the USA and elsewhere Jews largely control the cattle-trade and other forms of mass-industrial agriculture?
How is that working out for the health of average Americans?
Nayra, I didnt know that because it is untrue. You could always buy Kosher food if that is your problem.
Nayra, you know that Jews are required to sacrifice Christian children in order to bake their matzoh. The elders of Zion have take over the cattle trade in order to fatten up the Christian children - they are much tastier that way.
PS This is a secret. Don't tell anyone.
K
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