Red meat is GOOD for you! How Americans got it wrong...

Acg67 wrote: »

LOL

"NINA TEICHOLZ"

Quacks gonna quack

"The justification for this idea, that our ancestors lived mainly on fruits, vegetables, and grains, comes mainly from the USDA “food disappearance data.” The “disappearance” of food is an approximation of supply; most of it is probably being eaten, but much is wasted, too. Experts therefore acknowledge that the disappearance numbers are merely rough estimates of consumption."

Then uses food disappearance data to support her points later

"About 175 pounds of meat per person per year—compared to the roughly 100 pounds of meat per year that an average adult American eats today. And of that 100 pounds of meat, about half is poultry—chicken and turkey—whereas until the mid-20th century, chicken was considered a luxury meat, on the menu only for special occasions (chickens were valued mainly for their eggs)."

Correlations are bad, unless they support my POV

"Ironically—or perhaps tellingly—the heart disease “epidemic” began after a period of exceptionally reduced meat eating. In other words, meat eating went down just before coronary disease took off."

Because we ALL know how accurate Victorian cause of death certificates are, right????? And their diagnostic capacity. We can totally look at their data there.

Lordy. I'm not-quite expert in Victorian history, though very close, and I'm RIGHT THERE with people wanting to debunk myths about the 19th century....but this is the sheerest nonsense.

1.) Dickens was coming from Britain to the US. The poorest people in the US were ENORMOUSLY richer than the poorest people in Britain at the time...who were richer than the poorest people anywhere else in Europe at the time. That's why so many wanted to immigrate! Labor was in short supply, and so the average wages were (and STILL ARE) the highest in the world among any large-ish country, though of course high levels of immigration always depressed wages, so it wasn't a steady relationship. Dickens, like many travelers before him, was astonished at how rich the common man was, and that was how he expressed it. In London, a HIGH level, skilled working-class man often had a roast on Sunday alone, while lower-skill and lower-paid workers sometimes never enjoyed an entire cut of beef.

2.) Chickens were primarily raised for eggs, but all but a few of the roosters were eaten as capons, and old roosters and hens weren't really seen as formal market food for the most part because they weren't good enough but were eaten at home on the farm. When you're talking about a population that's over 70% agrarian/agricultural at this time, that's a LOT of birds missing from the data. The "Sunday roast" for a farm family was often a whole bird instead, usually old and slow-cooked. CAPONS were a luxury dish. Yard birds--which most of America had access to before WWII--were NOT!

3.) Ranching wasn't really much of a "thing" until the 1830s. Texas independence, the settling of the West, and the building of the railroads into Chicago to create the Chicago meat packing industry caused the relative price of beef to PLUMMET in the US compared to anywhere else in the world at the time. Land insanely cheap, and the big cost was the labor to watch and later drive the herd. (Heck we still get the cheapest beef!) Before then, cattle were kept for milk and labor. Cows would calve once a year. The cow's milk production was then split between that of the farmer and the calf. After the calf was weened, the farmer would continue to milk the cow. Usually, calves that weren't being kept for oxen or for more milk cows were killed for market in the fall, but depending on how much land the farmer had and how much milk he needed, they could be killed earlier. Prices, obviously, varied seasonally. Anyway, comparing the 1850s beef consumption in the US to beef consumption in 1910 in the US or even in 1800 would give you a VERY, VERY wrong idea.

4.) Heart disease actually exploded in the Victorian era with the first ever obesity epidemic. The middle and upper classes were getting hideously fat because they stopped walking everywhere and took carriages, and there were a ton more people with sedentary jobs. During the "long" 19th century, for example, the US went from about 90% agrarian to less than 50% right before WWI. Even among the middle/upper classes, most entertainment before the Victorian era was "cardio"--dancing, riding, walking, and hunting. But in the Victorian era, that changed. Dancing was much less vigorous, racing was looked down on, and in general, the sedentary behavior grew enormously. It's mainly because the middle and upper class Victorians were the first "dignified" generation. They walked, they didn't run; the men wore black instead of bright silks; when they gambled, it was around tables or on other people's exertions, not their own. That's why people suddenly became interested in exercise as we now know it. People were getting ridiculously out of shape and, for the first time, being fat and out of shape wasn't merely something that eccentric people did but that hundreds of thousands were concerned about. The "health fads" of the 1800s (sometimes with peculiar religious overtones) paved the way to the glorification of sport in schools (and modern professional sports) in the late 1800s to early 1900s and in general created a change in society about "health" (though not entirely healthy itself...) that lasted through the 1950s to 1960s or so, when it was seen as "stodgy." Then in the 60s, the hippies co-opted "healthy living" in a new form that was very offputting to most Americans--BIG on the mystical crap--so it kind of fell by the wayside until detoxes and cleanses and other nonsense became mainstream again in the 1980s...when we were starting to face a wave of the most sedentary behavior and cheapest food ever that together spelled serious trouble!

I'm a vegetarian who always found red meat to be incredibly constipating back when I did eat meat, which is why the bulk of my consumption usually leaned towards poultry and fish. I just read this for lolz, because I knew y'all would deliver. I was not disappointed.

MamaBirdBoss wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Here's the full meal description:

At eight o’clock, the shelves being taken down and put away and the tables joined together, everybody sat down to the tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, all over again. Some were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates at once. As each gentleman got through his own personal amount of tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, he rose up and walked off. When everybody had done with everything, the fragments were cleared away: and one of the waiters appearing anew in the character of a barber, shaved such of the company as desired to be shaved; while the remainder looked on, or yawned over their newspapers. Dinner was breakfast again, without the tea and coffee; and supper and breakfast were identical.

Yes, and comparing this diet to the average diet at the time is like describing a cookout or buffet and what guys eat there to what everyone eats at home. It's designed to seduce the middle-class male commercial traveler. :P "Travel with us next time because our food is AWESOME!"

You also left out the next bit:

""Will you try," said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of potatoes broken up in milk and butter, "will you try some of these fixings?"" And later...."and if you complain of indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will "fix you" in no time." Because of the meal. Because it's so rich--unusually so!

You can actually look at US and British cookbooks of the era, BTW, and at party menus. (Parties were high on the meats, anyway.)

Oh, one last thing. Do you thing "A chicken for every pot" meant the same sort of thing as "Foie gras for every pot?" Or do you think it's more likely that he meant that every family should have a decent supply of food?

(A chicken that you would put in a "pot", btw, and not roast would be an older chicken, hen or rooster.)

I hope you don't think I was suggesting that was an ordinary meal. I was providing the context (and the rest of the menu, which seemed more remarkable than beef at breakfast).

(I actually have and read lots of older cookbooks, from a variety of periods.)

Now I want to go home and throw some steak on the BBQ.

But it's 10:30am.
I'm at work.
I have no steak at home.
My husband doesn't know how to BBQ steak.

Sad day

Just made these on Father's day for my husband and a few guests and we did chew the fat afterwards. All things in moderation but I need to stay away from threads like these until I get more established as a woman watching her calories. Le sigh.