Naturally available grass that previously had rainforests over it?
I mean, yes, livestock eats grass but there's still a lot of livestock that eats beans.
I'd love to get hold of some, it'd be good for cooking chamois and tahr in my country.
Fun fact, goat is the most widely eaten meat in the world.
I am not sure there are a lot of recipes for this type of meat as it is claimed.
Mostly it is either slow roasted in an oven or slow cooked in a stew with some variations on stew ingredients.
The main difference is in the longer cooking time and in preparing the meat.
Traditionally people remove the lymph nodes from certain areas under the legs and some of the nearby fat tissue. Otherwis this tissue will give a really unpleasant taste/smell to the cooked meat.
I was under the impression (my personal take) that there are quite a few different ways to prepare them though, although the end result (the dish itself) is similar.
This is the wikipedia page talking about the most famous dish: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanfana
This is one of the recipes: https://aldeiasdoxisto.pt/artigo/531
Do you have a trusted source for this?
A quick search query using my favorite search engine tells otherwise. But that's just random internet information.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/most-consumed-meat-in-world_n...
Although to be fair, pork makes way more sense.
The article does not disprove the (somewhat vaguely) stated hypothesis.
That is true. Question is why. In NZ our beef is still exclusively reared on pasture (with hay and winter crops like brassicas for winter feed), I've never understood why there's such a move to feeding grain to cattle overseas.
- Feed lots can fit a whole lot more cows per acre.
- Corn tends to fatten up cows more (and more quickly) than grazing.
- Increased fat content = meat that grades higher and tends to sell for more meaning you also earn more $/lb on top of the other reasons.
Basically, it was determined that corn was the cheapest way to generate certain caloric targets. This achieved that objective and also secondarily helped with certain political objectives. So there's a whole subsidy and trade system around corn growth that basically stifles everything else.
The outcome for agriculture has overall been devastation for all but the largest operators. The "scale up" makes it impossible for all but the largest farms to compete. When my parents were kids in the 60s, a diversified, smallish farm was a sustainable thing. When I was a kid in the 80s/90s, they concentrated on bigger dairy or corn operations. Today, they're going out of business or make money selling doughnuts.
Also feedlots.
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/100636377572388864...
She summarises it in a single tweet at the end:
In places where there's limited land and a surplus of water,
it makes a lot of sense to optimize for land. So there, grow & eat crops.
And in places where there's a lot of land and limited water,
it makes sense to optimize for water. So there, grow & eat ruminants.
This idea that animals just eat the produce of intensive farming (or that grazing pastures are planted by men specifically for that purpose) is wrong in many parts of the world.
We have the obvious example of Argentina, where free grazing cattle uses the naturally available grass to get fed.
In the case of Southern Europe, there are also goats that have been used to clean the forests for a long time in order to prevent fires, and that provides for most or even all of their feeding requirements (besides fulfilling the important role of fire prevention).
The idea going around how animals are so inefficient per Kg of food/Kg CO2, fails to take into account (basically all the time) that part of those animals, only consume naturally occurring flora that is in no way planted by men.
P.S.: As an interesting related side note, there are a lot of cooking recipes for old goat in Portugal (the meat needs to be cooked differently).