Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
6
T
HE
F
AT OF THE
L
AND
M
ost people today turn up their noses at lard, which is strange since the name comes
from the Greek
laros
, meaning 'pleasant to eat' via the noun
larinos
meaning 'fat'. 'Fat' too
is a dirty word now, but in the days when people coined expressions such as 'fat of the land',
'bringing home the bacon', and 'cream of the crop', anything well endowed with edible oils
was highly desirable, since it provided a concentrated form of energy.
For that reason, fat is particularly relished in cold or harsh climates: the Inuit are
renowned for their prodigious appetite for seal blubber, while Afghanis traditionally eat vir-
tually everything in a pool of warm grease taken from the huge, bosom-like appendages of
fat which flop around on the buttocks of their sheep. But it is also in demand in warmer
countries from people who have to sweat for a living. HR Davidson, in a 1948 textbook on
pigs, states:
Fat can be consumed with relish more or less in proportion to the amount of phys-
ical labour being carried out by the consumer. This relationship is much more import-
ant than that between temperature and consumption of fat, which usually receives more
prominence. Very large quantities of 'fat backs' from the American packing houses are
consumed by the negro and other workers in the cotton producing southern states of the
USA, where the labour is hard and incomes low, but the temperature high.
1
William Cobbett put it more bluntly: 'The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well
cruder kinds of fat tended to be a working class preference not only because they provided
energy but also because they substituted for more expensive cuts of lean meat. Davidson
continues:
A cheap and easily managed source of animal fat is of great value to poor agricul-
tural workers, and even yet these form the greater part of the world's population. So
long as animal fat is available, the necessary protein can be obtained from vegetable
sources very much more cheaply than from animals … Until recent times the predom-
inant demand has been for a lard-producing type of pig rather than for one which would
