A few of you have mentioned rabbit. Was eating rabbit meat common before World War II? Because is seems rare today.
Thanks. I knew that refrigerated trucks caught on during my parent’s lifetime, but got the date a little wrong. Makes sense that they were influenced by the interstates.
Wild hare differs considerably from domesticated rabbit. It’s a much leaner meat and has a stronger flavor. The family I stayed with in rural Scotland in the '70s always had a number of hare carcasses hung out to age, since the father was a groundskeeper who regularly shot the animals as part of his job. Being able to dine on them was one of his perks.
***The Grapes of Wrath *** opens with Tom Joad and his buddies catching and roasting a rabbit (hare, actually), something with which Dust Bowl inhabitants were certainly familiar.
Eating rabbit was far more common than it is today, though the animals seem to be making a comeback. I see them often in supermarkets in both Canada and Russia. They’re easy to raise at home, so long as you have a hutch out back. It’s the butchering of them that would put me off keeping them.
From talking to my dad before he died I gather that it was. Note that both my parents were definitely city-people, from St. Louis. Animals like chickens, rabbits, and pigeons don’t take much space and were livestock that city dwellers could keep.
It’s prevalent in Europe, but rare in America. Because Americans are fussy, prissy, squeamish pussies. “Oooooo, I can’t eat Bugs Bunny!!!”
Neither do Americans eat much lamb, or duck or goose, or game or game birds, or offal. Because Americans are fussy, prissy, squeamish pussies.
Same here. (Born 1950, San Diego, lower middle-class.)
I have fond memories of tuna or salmon croquettes - I didn’t get fresh tuna or salmon until I was something like 10 years old.
We only had SOS [creamed chipped beef on toast] when my dad was away, he had been in the army and some bright wit decided to modify the huge trucks to be field kitchens, and they made anything that could be made with chipped beef, flour, dried eggs, dried milk - he had an intense dislike for SOS, french toast, scrambled eggs, pancakes … he had some dislikes - tuna casserole was one so we rarely had it. I rather like it when made from scratch but being allergic to mushrooms makes eating casseroles based on canned soup gets tricky for me so I tend to avoid casseroles unless I know the ingredients.
mrAru, being career Navy would invite guys back to the farm for holidays, or to habg out on the weekend so they wouldn’t be stuck in barracks. One festive Thanksgiving he brought a couple of the regulars and a new ‘city boy’ and when they asked, were told ‘fresh not frozen turkey’ so the city boy was totally caught unaware when they all trooped outside to catch and slaughter the bird 
He decided to come into the house and peel taters and do other mess crank duties.
Mom was born Amish, to me that is my childhood comfort food =) I can cook most of her repertoire still =) my comfort food of choice is ‘cabbage soup’ that has sort of evolved from a soup found in an archeological dig at Halstadt’s salt mines. You can look at the ingredients and see pretty much the waves of invading agriculture in the recipe changes [I tweaked the recipe to make it more food pyramid oriented, and I refuse to use salmon as the protein - tried it major yuck to me but a good hunk of speck is right down my alley!]
I will eat pretty much anything that doesn’t eat me first, I have a liking for a good hunk of horse tenderloin - good lean meat, braises beautifully. Love rabbit, duck, goose, pheasant, venison, quail, pheasant … grew up in a household that believed that if you shoot it, you eat it [except for stuff like predating dogs/coyotes/large cat] and never trophy hunt/fish. I have eaten dog [Korean friend took me home to dinner, it was a case of lets screw with the white girl. They were amazed that I ate it and asked for seconds even after finding out it was dog. Not bad, would eat dog as long as it wasn’t someone pet.]
cat was unique but it was spiced and sauced so i couldnt get a true taste of it
I think there was some of that with my 30’s-born parents: depression-thinking that limited food choices to truly cheap stuff so “luxury” chicken was off the menu, tuna casserole was on it all the time. I recall my mom would freeze (cheapest, not-even-good-fresh) sandwich bread well into the 90’s.
I think city chicken dates back to the Depression, when chicken really was more expensive. It’s a thing here in Pittsburgh too, although it’s never been one of my favorites.
(Can you make city chicken with actual chicken? Like, put pieces of chicken on the skewers and season it and such?)
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and don’t specifically remember mom fixing a lot of chicken for dinner. Most times that we had chicken it was the occasional bucket of KFC. On the other hand, my folks had a freezer full of beef in the basement, which explains why beef was usually what was for dinner. (Cue “Hoedown”…)
In terms of the amount of chicken being supplied - the poultry industry output has increased massively in the last 10 years to the extent that is supplies more meat than almost all of the rest of the meat industry put together.
I expect that this huge supply, perhaps oversupply is why chicken is so cheap.
I was talking to a guy who is a senior financial controller for a very large UK industrial food producer, trade, processor and supplier, and his comments were that although total meat production has increased, it has been dwarfed by the expansion of poultry - worth also mentioning that other poultry related products have increased massively - these products might not be quite what you imagine since they are used widely in other processes, not just human consumption - for example in pig and cattle feed and other industrial processes.
Where is it al coming from? Well you might imagine it has something to do with genetic modification - but that’s only true in part in the feed used to produce chicken.
Here is a little info on world production, the largest percentage increase is from Latin America especially Brazil at around 6% per year whereas most of the rest of the world is less than 3% increase. Even though EU has moreorless doubled its production this is still a slightly smaller share of the market than in year 2000.
Interesting to note that Argentina has also increased chicken production hugely whilst the corresponding beef output has been fairly stagnant until very recently.
Although this does not necessarily prove that chicken prices have fallen in real terms - since demand has increased and is projected to increase further, it does provide one part of the equation.
Wholesale prices fluctuated just like any commodity but there have been many warnings over the last few years that prices would increase, but these have largely not materialised
The supermarket!
Well, to be humble, there was really no other option
I wouldn’t say steak as such… but certainly beef. I came from a large family in the heartland and we bought plucked and gutted frozen chickens in a plastic bag from Mennonites $2-3 each. Organic, local, fresh, free range. We’d buy 3-4 dozen at a time when they stop at our house.
But we also bought 1-2 4H cattle per year, that would be processed at the local locker. And we’d 95% of it as hamburger meat (as discussed above by AHunter3). And our standard dinner used 3+ lbs. of beef per night. Chicken was always more of a sometimes meal.
And prior to WWII wasn’t eating horse meat at least somewhat common? The Wikipedia article on horse meat makes no mention of it ever being eaten in the US, although it discusses its use in the cuisine of many European countries. I would expect that many immigrants from these countries would have continued eating it after arriving in the US. It does mention it being used in dog food in the US prior the the 1960s.
Years ago some of my neighbors had a big banner hanging on their garage door that read “Obama legalized horse slaughter!”, which presumably they considered a bad thing.
In the US, especially in frontier days in the west, a horse was more valuable as a beast of burden and as transportation than as food, so a cultural taboo developed regarding eating them. Or that would be my guess.
Certainly, in desperate times people did eat horse meat, but it was seen as a last resort.
It’s perhaps somewhat like the ban on eating cows in India, where their use as dairy animal and beast of burden far outweighed their value as food animals, so a taboo regarding eating them arose.
In both cases there were probably additional factors at work, too.
My mother tells me that in the 40’s, horsemeat was a common substitute for beef. She says she cooked a lot of it for my father. So, in California, it was pretty common and definitely not taboo.
This might have had something to do with the wartime rationing of beef.
I recall having horse meat in the late 70’s in Michigan. This was brought to a camp-out by some hispanic friends.
And I also recall seeing horse meat butcher shops in Paris recently.