Post your funny pictures here!!! part Deux

[PopeyesPappy]

Yes Baruch, historically most food is seasonal, and dried grains can be stored over the winter. That doesn't change the fact that people have been preserving meat for a long time. Possibly before we were farming. The earliest hard evidence for drying fish is from 12,000 years ago, but people living in hot coastal climates were probably doing it a long time before that.

We know the Sumerians were preserving meats through salting and smoking thousands of years ago. The Romans traded heavily in salted meats. The army ran on bread and salted pork. Much of the later was imported from Gaul. They also dried fruits, preserved them in honey and wine, and pickled things.

There was also a middle class even in the early middle age Europe. Tradesmen and merchants. Not everyone lived on the edge of starvation all the time. While the diet of most was primarily bread, They also consumed some meats, and there was more pork than chicken. 

[Baruch]

Talking past each other?  The past, even in my grandmother's childhood, was not running down to the Safeway and picking up some food, coming home, and putting some of it in the refrigerator.  The availability of refrigeration in the home, was revolutionary.  Of course, initially, in big cities, this was an icebox.  The fact that prehistoric man maybe knew how to make jerky, doesn't change the reality of daily probability of starvation.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The fact that prehistoric man maybe knew how to make jerky, doesn't change the reality of daily probability of starvation.

Are you sure you wanted to use "probability"? I mean, the cavemen probably didn't face starvation when they had a dead mammoth for carving up. In winter that would keep them for a month at least if they could keep the scavengers away.

[GSOgymrat]

[PopeyesPappy]

Talking past each other?  The past, even in my grandmother's childhood, was not running down to the Safeway and picking up some food, coming home, and putting some of it in the refrigerator.  The availability of refrigeration in the home, was revolutionary.  Of course, initially, in big cities, this was an icebox.  The fact that prehistoric man maybe knew how to make jerky, doesn't change the reality of daily probability of starvation.

Possibly. Yes refrigeration undoubtedly revolutionized food storage. But you said prior to the 20th century and refrigeration the only foodstuffs we could store long term was grain. I'm just trying to point out that isn't true. We have been preserving meat for a long time. We were doing that to mitigate the daily possibility of starvation.

During the age of exploration the primary diet aboard the ships that were often at sea for months at a time wasn't bread. It was salted meat.

[PopeyesPappy]

Are you sure you wanted to use "probability"? I mean, the cavemen probably didn't face starvation when they had a dead mammoth for carving up. In winter that would keep them for a month at least if they could keep the scavengers away.

The evidence we have for mass kills of large mammals by relatively small groups of humans is pretty good but by no means conclusive evidence the humans had a method of preserving some of the meat so it would last even longer than that.

[Baruch]

Are you sure you wanted to use "probability"? I mean, the cavemen probably didn't face starvation when they had a dead mammoth for carving up. In winter that would keep them for a month at least if they could keep the scavengers away.

I saw a film in HS anthropology, of a Pygmy tribe hunting and eating an elephant.  They moved quickly.  Unlike Vikings, they didn't have a convenient glacier to keep the meat cold.  It is an F*ing jungle out there!  Mass kills of buffalo by early Native Americans happened, but you know by time machine that they were able to convert all that to jerkey and pemmican?  The hides were useful of course, after the women had chewed the fat (literally).

Originally Homo Erectus it is figured, learned to eat meat, by competing with the scavengers, because they were starving.  Fortunately they had seen "Lion King" and knew to let the lions and hyenas have first dibs .. vultures not so much.  This was very hard, since they were originally vegetarians, and eating meat was inefficient (given their teeth types) and gave indigestion.  Until fire came into use, to cook meat, it was an inefficient food source.  Homo Erectus who could manage to eat carrion outlived those who could not ... just as lactose intolerant people were outcompeted by the cow people once cows got milked.  Up until modern times, game meat was allowed to spoil for a couple days, to tenderize and "improve the flavor".  But not for weeks or months.

Regular food preservation started with Napoleon (army rations in champaign bottles) and with Wellington (army rations in tin cans).  MREs that could be sterilized by boiling.  Of course that included meat, but originally only for armies on campaign.  Took several decades before civilians got canned food (by Civil War).

[Baruch]

Possibly. Yes refrigeration undoubtedly revolutionized food storage. But you said prior to the 20th century and refrigeration the only foodstuffs we could store long term was grain. I'm just trying to point out that isn't true. We have been preserving meat for a long time. We were doing that to mitigate the daily possibility of starvation.

During the age of exploration the primary diet aboard the ships that were often at sea for months at a time wasn't bread. It was salted meat.

How soon, did most people on this planet, stop living like the early 19th century (no ice box)?  Oh, there are still people living like that ;-)  If eating was easy, there would not be starving people in Africa.  And yes, sailors got salted meat, and scurvy (arrrh).  But not if you weren't a sailor at sea.  Sailors in port ate whatever was cooked up in the local brothel.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The evidence we have for mass kills of large mammals by relatively small groups of humans is pretty good but by no means conclusive evidence the humans had a method of preserving some of the meat so it would last even longer than that.

What part of "frozen" didn't work for you?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[PopeyesPappy]

What part of "frozen" didn't work for you?

I don't have a problem with frozen as long as we are talking about Alberta, Montana, and Wyoming. Freezing probably wasn't much of an option 12,000 years ago at places like the Bonfire Kettle jump site in southwest Texas though.

[Baruch]

War against generalization!  Unless you are speaking of a particular cave man at a particular time and place ... you are over-generalizing!  Bwahah.

[Blackleaf]

[Hydra009]

[Shiranu]

Mittens.