[QUOTE=zagloba]
I’ve run across plenty of anecdotal evidence that the diet of a lactating female can have a dramatic effect on the flavor of milk, e.g., onions making cow’s milk taste bad, human mothers noticing a reluctance of their baby to nurse if they’ve eaten certain foods, etc. I’d say urine smelling funny after eating asparagus is further evidence that diet puts chemicals into the bloodstream that could affect flavor. Fat seems a likely place for such compounds to accumulate.
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Well put.
Cooks preparing “wild” meats (e.g., deer or bear), but who don’t want them to taste too wild have always used lard, or better yet, strips or “laces” of unrendered pork fat which they thread through the meat (ensures that the pork fat flavor permeates the meat). This gives the meat a sort of combination flavor - a little bit wild, a little bit domesticated.
Diet is what provides the building blocks of body tissue. It is therefore logical that the chemical makeup of the diet will affect the chemical makeup of the tissues built from it. This explains the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef or lamb/mutton. It also explains why milk-fed veal (i.e., kosher) tastes so much better (just quoting; I don’t eat veal, never have - AAMOF, eat lotsa fish & dairy, and very little meat, period) than commercially produced veal, where the calves are fed a ghastly commercial concoction that is nutritionally deficient in some important ways.
For those who eat bear, I’m sure it makes an enormous difference in what season the bear is killed, given that bears are not merely omnivorous, but have diets that vary widely depending on what’s available. I’d suspect that meat from a bear living near a salmon river would taste rather fishy toward the end of the salmon run, but if the bear were killed at the end of the season for raspberries or blackberries, the meat might have a very delicate flavor. OTOH, I don’t think that bear is legitimate game in either of those seasons (but ICBW). A bear that ate from garbage cans probably wouldn’t taste very good. :dubious:
The chickens we had when I was growing up were like Amish chickens today. They ate cracked corn, in addition to whatever else they found tasty in their yard. That, of course, was mostly bugs and worms. Studying anthro, I learned that insects are high in both protein and fat; that’s why some subsistence cultures have eaten them. Worms, I suppose, are mostly protein, making them less desirable, i.e., lower concentration of calories. One thing that’s absolutely certain is that “Amish” chicken has a more decided and appealing flavor (and a vastly more appetizing smell) than the other stuff, from those poor birds that live in cages. IOW, we benefit more from treating them well. Or at least that’s the lesson I draw. 
