From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: The Fat of The Land
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 10:36:34 GMT


Here is an interesting passage that provides part of the
answer as to how the current taste for fatty meats 
first developed in the West.

                              ted


    
    The British landed gentry first took a liking to fat-
    laced beef in the last decade of the eighteenth century.
    In the year 1800, the British publicized their newfound
    love of fatted cattle with a nationwide tour of the
    celebrated Durham Ox, a giant bovine marbled with fat
    weighting in at nearly 3,000 pounds.  The legendary
    creature was housed in a specially designed carriage and
    with appropriated British pomp and circumstance was
    paraded through the cities and villages of England and
    Scotland for 6 years; eager spectators paid a handsome
    admission fee to gaze on its massive bulk.  In 1802 some
    2,000 people paid half a guinea for an engraving of the
    squarish roan-colored beast.
    
    The Durham Ox captured the public imagination .  In the
    land of John Bull and roast beef, this giant bovine
    seemed an appropriate symbol of the new British self-
    image.  The English and extended their reach and power
    around the world in the 18th century. By the beginning
    of the nineteenth century the Union Jack flew high in
    countries on every continent.  While the new British
    opulence was expressed in a myriad of ways, non proved
    more revealing than the new pastime of the landed
    gentry, the raising of prize cattle.  Although he landed
    gentry had long taken an interest in cattle, they had
    left questions of rearing to their herdsmen and
    peasants.  Suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, the
    landlords themselves turned to stock breeding with a
    zeal that at first surprised their fellow countrymen.
    Stock-breeding associations were chartered, their ranks
    filled with he names of Britian's most distinguished
    families.  The most famous of these was the Smithfield
    Club, which held its first public show in 1799.  In
    subsequent years the Smithfield Club stock show became a
    social event of immense importance, drawing the cream of
    British nobility and even the royal family.
    
    Wealthy breeders dedicated themselves to the task of
    rearing massive bovines for show at the various fairs.
    These portly beasts were paraded before their equally
    portly British masters at select agricultural
    gatherings, providing a kind of bovine testimonial to
    the opulence of the English aristocracy.
    
    Historian Harriet Ritvo observes that "in toasting their
    noble animals, the elite livestock fanciers were
    celebrating themselves.  The ruling class of England,
    still somewhat uncomfortable with its new position as
    empire builder, busied itself with creating lines of
    shorthorn cattle that could embody their new sense of
    self in the world.  Their preoccupation with he hobby
    reach absurd heights by the 19th century.  Such
    magazines as the QUARTERLY REVIEW OF AGRICULTURE
    described the prize-winning animals in amorous language
    that might have brought a whimsical smile to more than a
    few common yeomen:
    
        Irresistibly attractive . . . the exquisitely
        symmetrical form of the body . . .bedecked with the
        skin of the richest hues . . . ornamented with a
        small . . . head [and] prominent mildly beaming
        eyes.
        
    Livestock portraits became a favorite among Englishmen
    of the period.  Many a country estate and English
    drawing room boasted paintings of obese cattle in the
    foreground of a bucolic country landscape.  Some of
    Britian's best artists were kept busy drawing
    commissioned works of prizewinning cattle.  Popular
    magazines of the day always included engravings of cows
    suitable for framing in the homes of the British working
    class.  The artists were often instructed to accentuate
    the bodies of these creatures to show off their fat.
    The artist Thomas Bewick complained that he had once
    lost a commission because he refused to add "lumps of
    fat here and there" when the animal before him had "no
    such protrusions."  Some of these prizewinning cattle
    were so fat that their own legs were unable to support
    their massive girth and they often had to be wheeled
    into the shows.
    
    While the landed gentry professed to be interested in
    improving the general quality of British livestock, far
    greater attention was paid to the outward appearance of
    their prize animals and their family histories.  Early,
    on attention turned to lines of descent.  Breeders were
    obsessed with genealogy.  Countless hours were spent
    tracing lineage and ensuring purity of bloodlines.
    . . .
    Prizewinning cattle served as a physical metaphor for
    the wealth and prestige of the British ruling class.
    Cattle had figured prominently in the wealth of the
    English people as far back as any could remember.  In
    Roman times even Caesar had noticed that "cattle
    constituted the true wealth of the Britons."  Now that
    England was, itself, a great imperial power, the lords'
    cattle were shown off to the world and their own
    countrymen as a visible token of England's newfound
    greatness.  Historian Ritvo writes that these overfed,
    overstuffed creatures with stump legs, giant girth, and
    shortness of breath were the "ostentatious evidence of
    their owners' power of consumption."  In consuming their
    cattle, they symbolically consummated their role as
    rulers of the world.  Here was a new secular ritual, the
    eating of flesh marbled with he fat of colonial
    privilege.  Marbled beef became both the symbol of
    affluence and a measure of taste.
    
    The desire for fatty beef, at first a privilege of the
    rich, soon became an aspiration of the middle and
    working classes.  Ritvo says that the butchers of London
        
        bought the most celebrated carcasses and put them on
        display in their shambles, where the public could
        gaze on them, on last time before they were
        purchased by great ladies who liked to serve roast
        that could be identified by name.
        
    Eating fatty beef served as an initiation rite for
    aspiring Englishmen.  The taste for fat was synonymous
    with the taste for opulence, for power and privilege,
    for the values that made these island people the feared
    and envied rulers of the world.  Marbled beef brought
    the bourgeoisie and later the working class into the
    colonial fold.  B consuming the fatty flesh of the
    bovine, these other classes signaled their willingness
    to take part in the colonial regime.  This modern day
    baptism of beef aligned the classes i common pursuit.
    Now the English people, at large would live off the "fat
    of the land."  Between the late 18th and early 19th
    centuries the weight of cattle more than doubled in
    England. By the mid-nineteenth century the rest of
    western Europe had caught up with the new British
    breeding standards.
    
    The practical aspects of breeding fatty cattle were left
    to breeders like Robert Bakewell, who once boasted that
    he could produce "beasts who would put on fat in he
    tail".  Still, it was the rich, with their eccentric
    preoccupation with prize cattle , how established the
    culinary standard for the English middle and working
    classes, and later people on the European continent and
    the Americas, as each were initiated into the fruits of
    colonialism.

        From Jeremy Rifkin's BEYOND BEEF: THE RISE AND FALL
            OF THE CATTLE CULTURE, 1992, p. 60-3.
Xref: sparky rec.food.veg:12478 misc.fitness:9770