No, but it’s not something you can just scale up. Americans eat an average of over sixty pound of beef each year and only half a pound of lamb. So to get the same economics for the two meats you’d need to increase lamb production by a hundredfold. But to justify that, you’d have to have a customer base and figure out a way to drastically increase the amount of lamb they eat. Beef is cheap because people eat a lot of it and people eat a lot of beef because it’s cheap. It would be extremely difficult for lamb to break into a similar cycle.
Well, I don’t think we’re going to get to the bottom of this any time soon. So far we have a few plausible reasons:
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American lamb producers don’t (or at least didn’t) know what they’re doing. (And why is that, in the first place?)
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Americans all got sick of eating lamb during WWII.
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Americans don’t like too much flavor in their meat.
In my Google searching, though, I think this has to take the cake for most creative reason (this comes from about halfway down the page on this link):
So it’s because we like our cold water, and cold water and lamb doesn’t mix.
So basically, lamb is not more popular, because it’s not more popular? I still don’t get why.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. But now it pushes the question back to a historical one: why was lamb not part of the industrial cycle to begin with, like it is in other countries?
Sheep are an efficient meat animal when land is limited, or of poor grazing quality. Thus islands like Britain & New Zealand, and places like the Scottish Highlands, work well for raising sheep.
In America, we have the wide-open plains of the Midwest, grassland prairies just about perfect for cattle ranges. It’s real easy to raise whole herds of cattle or pigs here.
So there’s no significant economic advantage to raising sheep, when you could just as easily raise cattle or pigs on the same land, and they fetch better prices at market. That was the way it was here 100-150 years ago, and now the beef & pork industries are so well developed, and people so used to cooking beef & pork, that it’s even harder for it to change.
One of the greatest things about my UK upbringing was exposure to chewy bacon and lamb. Lancashire hot pot, lamb chops with mint sauce - mmm! But I would say that most Americans never see their food before it ends up on the supermarket shelves. In the UK everyone lives within a few miles of a farm with sheep, cows, etc. And the cuteness factor probably doesn’t help.
We Americans tend to be quite provincial about our meats. It’s chicken, beef, and pork here. If you eat ostrich, rabbit, deer, or buffalo, people look at you weird. I include myself in that number, btw.
I’ve never had mutton, but everything about it, from its name to what I’ve heard of it, sounds awful.
It is the mint sauce that makes the lamb good, and you can’t get decent mint sauce in America. (If you look very carefully in the supermarkets here in Southern California you may find little bottles of something they call mint sauce, but it is dreadful, watery stuff, with hardly any mint. I have to get people to bring me jars of the real stuff from the U.K.)
Of course, as sundog66 will rightly point out, that does not really answer his question, it is another chicken and egg thing. But if Americans are fooled into thinking the stuff sold here as mint sauce is the real thing, it is no surprise if they find lamb and mint sauce, if they should try it, very disappointing, and not worth trying again.
To the best of my recollection, when I was a child, in England, we would have lamb more often than beef, pork, or chicken, I think because it was actually cheaper. (Actually, some of it may really have been mutton, but we did not make a strong distinction. I rather think that, so long as it was not too tough and gamey, the butchers would call it all lamb, regardless of the beast’s age.) Anyway, roast lamb, with plenty of good mint sauce, became and continues to be my favorite roast meat (despite the fact, I might add, that I generally like my food very bland), and I was surprised and disappointed (and, like sundog66, puzzled) on coming to live in America to find that there is so little in the shops, and that is so relatively expensive. You can get it here in California, and I indulge myself occasionally (with my imported mint sauce), and I was also able to get it when I lived briefly in upstate New York, but when I was in St. Louis for a couple of months I could not find any at all.
I am rather fond of liver too, and as a child in England I think it was always lamb’s liver that we would have. I vaguely remember once asking my mother about beef liver and her telling me that it was to nearly as good as the lamb’s. You can get sliced beef liver here in California, and actually it is OK, but I have only ever once seen lamb’s liver on sale (in a supermarket that has now gone out of business), and that was a whole liver rather than slices. It was quite impractical to buy it: I would have been eating nothing but liver for a week.
I do not think t-bonham@scc.net can be right. Sheep rearing is not confined to islands like Britain and New Zealand. They certainly raise plenty of sheep in Australia, which, if it is really an island at all, is a gigantic one. The United States is a huge country with all sorts of variations in climate and soil. There may be more good cattle country here, but I find it hard to believe that there is not also a lot of land that could be more economically used to rear sheep if only there was the market for the lamb.
I believe this goes back before WWII, the idea that lamb/mutton was a poor person’s meat. I was watching a movie the other night, from the 1930s, “Stage Door,” about actresses living in a boarding house in New York. Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, and Ginger Rogers complain constantly about being served lamb stew for dinner every night (Katharine Hepburn lives there too, but she doesn’t whine about the lamb).
When I tell people I raise and sometimes slaughter my own lamb, I get horrified “how could you?” responses. I usually explain that actual lamb can be anywhere from baby lamb (under 3 months and adorable) to well over a year old (almost adult). Most lamb is not “babyish” when they go to slaughter. I did sell a group of old ewes for mutton with their month old lambs- not my sheep but for a friend. They were going to wrap the lamb meat with the mutton, the Mexican said it was his favorite bbq meat and he paid several hundred dollars for it. It was a little too much for me though, I made my SO help him load the truck :(.
I don’t know about the uric acid/lean thing- I raise hair sheep which are extremely lean but the meat is sweet and mild. It may be a difference though between the traditional wool breeds raised for meat and hair breeds. I know many of the ethnic groups where lamb is common in their culture prefer the hair breeds.
If anyone wants to be converted to lamb, travel to Basque Country- Elko, Nevada. Go to The Star, get there early and make sure and tell the hostess you want to reserve baked lamb. Enjoy Basque family style sides and then get totally blown away by the best meat you’ve ever eaten. It worked for me- I did not taste lamb till I was 25 and that was my first time.
My grandfather was one of those guys. As a result, my dad never had lamb or mutton until he went to the army in 1959. Upon his return home, he promptly forbade my mother from ever serving it. I never had lamb until I had grown up and left home; I was 23 IIRC. I’ve still never had mutton.
One reason is that the American palate is tuned to animals that are predominantly fed on corn which leads to richer but less flavorful meat. Lamb, being on the “gamy” end of the spectrum is going to be less popular than beef or pork. In other countries used to grass fed meat, gamy flavors are more appreciated.
To add to this: remember that when people did try to raise sheep on what was considered prime beef land, they met with a lot of disasters. The range wars of old pulp Westerns and Tom & Jerry cartoons really did happen, and the cattlemen, with their larger spreads and head start, won out.
But honestly, even the beef consumption in this country is only a fairly recent happening: talk to some of those from the older generations still around, and you’ll find that pork was the meat to eat. In fact, my grandfather raised cattle, but I could probably count on one hand the number of times he actually ate beef. To him, cattle were for milking and for selling. Pork was for eating. A lot of the old farmers felt this way, and sheep just didn’t have room in that setup.
Hmmm, that’s odd. I’d never call lamb gamy at all. I really don’t like venison and elk and wild rabbit, because I do consider them too gamy for my taste. I think that I could be very happy on a diet of mostly lamb for my meat. I don’t know about mutton, I’ve never had it. But so far, I’ve loved lamb in every dish I’ve tasted it in, unless it’s overcooked.
I think that I will get some lamb for stew tonight.
Maybe “gamy” is not exactly the right word, but I know what Shalmanese is talking about: there’s a definite funk that lamb has (which can be quite gentle in young meat to very strong in mutton), so much so that I always ask if somebody likes lamb before I make it. My casual experience with lamb, whether going out to a restaurant as a group or before I prepare a dinner, is that a whole lot of people simply don’t like it.
I agree that the answer is the simple economic one given above. All cultures tend to the most efficient meats for their particular areas. Sheep and cattle competed in America and cattle won out. Beef is perfect for American growing conditions. It’s really the same reason why potatoes are by far the more popular starch than rice here.
Chicken, BTW, was once a fairly expensive meat. When the Republican National Committee put out an ad in 1928 saying that Herbert Hoover had put the proverbial “chicken in every pot” they were saying that he had made Americans prosperous enough to afford something that used to be a rare treat. Since that time industrial chicken farms have made chicken the least expensive of meats, and that boosted its popularity tremendously.
Many Americans did pick up a taste for French foods after WWI and WWII, so new tastes can added to the national palate. Bad tastes won’t be added. If the stories about the GIs are true, then an opportunity was lost to add lamb or mutton based on their demands, but that wasn’t the cause of the lack. That existed long before.
If there were some way to make lamb as inexpensive as beef tomorrow I guarantee you would see an enormous increase in lamb sales. (Lamb doesn’t taste any more gamy than beef, either, so that wouldn’t be a problem. I think what peole call “gamy” is just unfamiliarity.) But that would only happen if, say, mad cow disease broke out and all the cows had to be slaughtered. Otherwise the economics are against it and economics rule, baby.
I never even tried lamb until I was almost 40. It’s hard to find at most mainstream grocery stores, and when you do it’s almost always outrageously overpriced. I’ve never tried mutton.
I’ve been all over the Caribbean, and Mexico, and am amazed at how much goat meat is eaten thereabouts. It’s almost impossible to find in most American grocery stores, and if you ask for it you’ll most likely get a strange, puzzled look like you’ve shown a cat a card trick.
Come to think of it, I have never had lamb that wasn’t in an ethnic dish of some kind.
But I’ve also been all over the US and I’ve never been anywhere where a herd of sheep was common.
Okay, the sense I’m getting is that there are roughly two schools of thought on this matter:
Economy: When livestock raising and meat preparation practices were being established in the US, the conditions were not right for lamb and mutton to be economically worth it, and even though that may no longer be the case, it is now too entrenched.
Taste: American sheep farmers mistakenly raise lean lamb; Americans like their cold water and it doesn’t go well with lamb; Americans don’t make good mint sauce which is essential to lamb; lamb is too flavorful for Americans.
I’m now thinking it’s far more likely that the economic reasons (complicated though they may be) are the ultimate explanation, with all the taste considerations largely results of the unpopularity of lamb/mutton rather than causes.
Does that seem reasonable to everyone?
I wonder if the cost of lamb is really that much of a concern. I’ve never found lamb to be outrageously expensive if you’re buying from a proper butcher, as opposed to a large mainstream supermarket. Locally raised lamb is also cheaper than imported, for obvious reasons.
My butcher sells me lamb shanks at $2.99/lb. That may be more expensive than say, chicken legs (which he sells for $1.29/lb) or pork shoulder ($2.49/lb), but it’s on par with what he charges for stewing beef. Good-quality lamb loin chops are $6.99/lb, which is roughly the same he’d charge for a nice grill-quality steak like a Porterhouse. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that I’m in a neighbourhood where lamb is in high demand, so the trick is to figure out where the local Greek, North African and/or Middle Eastern immigrants buy their meat.
(he also carries oxtail and goat to cater to the local West Indian population, though those are stored in the back where they won’t scare the mangiacakes)
True, but the meat you buy in a butcher shop is on the higher end of the price scale. A lot of meat is sold for the production of packaged food. You won’t see lamb competing with beef, chicken, and pork in fast food chains, canned goods, and frozen dinners.
I’m not a huge fan of lamb, myself. It’s all right, but I find it a little bland, which is weird because it’s objectively more flavorful than chicken, which I don’t find bland at all. But I grew up eating mutton, the One True BBQ, so I think I subconsciously expect a lot more punch from my sheep meat than lamb tends to deliver.
That, and the lamb gyros I’ve had have always been…well, foul.