Most English speakers are so accustomed to the fact that we split animal names from the food products made from their flesh that they don’t notice unless it’s brought to their attention.
Think:
- Cow – Beef
- Calf – Veal
- Pig – Pork
- Sheep – Mutton
- Deer – Venison
Why is that?
In her 1990 polemic, ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat’ (which I highly recommend reading if you want to understand American culture) Carol J. Adams writes; “After being butchered, fragmented body parts are often renamed to obscure the fact that these were once animals. After death, cows become roast beef, steak, hamburger; pigs become pork, bacon, sausage. [] We opt for less disquieting referent points [] by changing names from animals to meat, [] disguising their original nature.”
Or, Jonas R Kunst, fellow at Oslo University’s Institute of Psychology found that: “By alienating the animal through euphemism, these less representative terms made it much easier for consumers to eat meat. By contrast, the terms ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ — direct references to the living animal — brought the consumer closer to the reality of what one psychologist has called the ‘face on your plate.’ This intimacy lessened the desire to eat meat…”
You see this narrative online a lot also.
It’s also quite famously explored in the children’s novel (and film) Charlotte’s Web, in which by changing the narrative of the pig from parts like pork, bacon, and ham to “Some Pig”, the pig is suddenly seen as a being rather than pork.
The ongoing narrative is often that words like pork and beef are used to distance people from the concept that they are eating an animal. If you chop an animal into parts, only ever refer to it by the name of the part, and never ever refer to it as a once-living animal, you sanitize the bloody practice of the slaughterhouse and the abattoir into neatly packaged and guilt-free steaks, bacon, and chops.
The other narrative, is, of course, to blame the French.
The word beef is, after all, so very French that in 1386 (assumedly), Chaucer still spelled it Boef.
“Bet than olde boef is trendre vele” _ Geoffrey Chaucer (Cooking expert), The Merchant’s Tale
Following the Norman conquest of England, in which William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson, the elected king of England, that army of Normans, French, Flemish, and Bretons (and then their descendants) occupied England for nearly 300 years. The Battle of Hastings decided the issue on 14 October 1066 and by 1086, just 5% of land in England was owned by Englishmen.
That had an immediate and significant impact on the English language. All legal and courtly (different) language was conducted in French. The resulting creep of French into English means that half of our top 1,000 most commonly used words are French in origin.
You’ll note, of course, that all these alternative names for food items are French in origin.
The peasants raise the cows, but the elite eat the beef.
Words like chicken, which stay ‘chicken’ are examples of false exceptions, because until very recently, most chicken would have been sold as “poultry”, that is, until the word expanded to include increasingly domesticated turkeys as well.
In addition, a castrated and fattened male chicken, the type most commonly eaten by the elite until the practice was banned, is called a capon. (French)
Many birds, however, have extremely similar names in English and French. Quail and pheasant are virtually indistinguishable from the other. Both stem from Latin.
That leaves only a few untidy little names to account for like turkey (introduced to Europe 500 years after the Norman invasion) and duck (cane/canard) except that one is still sold in most grocery stores under French labels.
Or fish, which would be poisson and even fewer of us would be willing to eat it. Jokes aside, the period was one where the Catholic Church dominated nearly every aspect of life. And, it was forbidden to consume the flesh of animals that walked on land for nearly a third of the year. The solution? To eat fish, which was then seen as a necessity and a thing that most men refused to do when not fasting. Even so, you’ll notice that “luxury” fish such as salmon, flounder, and mackerel are all of French origin.
I could stop there, that sums everything up into a neat and tidy little package. Or does it?
You see, this tidy little answer leaves out a nagging question. Why did the Englishmen, the peasants, stop using the word cow to refer to the steak on their plate and instead, start referring to “beef”?
Was it because we want to create emotional distance between the bleeding steak on our plate and the calf that licks our hand for the salt? Or was it something else? The something else wins at least in this point in history.
I mean, Chaucer used boef and he was part of the English middle class (his aunt was once fined the equivalent of $200,000 and did not fall into poverty). His audience was also the court which was largely French as well as the middle and merchant classes – meaning that he would have been forced into using the French terms for food. And, of course, once again, Chaucer contributes to the normalization of English words in common usage.
Maybe.
But first we’re going to look at language dissemination and how those Englishmen would have moved away from saying cow and towards ordering beef at the butcher shop.
That starts with the grammar school. (Once again, my blog becomes an ongoing polemic against the grammar school).
The 1500s craze of sending one’s children to grammar school meant that the elite would send their sons and daughters to be educated at a school. Those schools fought for attention by publishing grammar books, largely based on first Latin and then French grammar. All of these solidified the usage of French terminology for foods and goods in writing. This trend only escalated over time, till the end of the 1600s, when wealthy merchants were copying the elite outright and sending their sons and daughters to the same schools.
That was exacerbated by the increasing usage of books of etiquette. The first, the 1477 Caxton’s Book of Courtesy advised such things as not blowing your nose into your gown and not defecating behind the curtains – but by the 1600s, Louis XIV had tamed his court with a strict set of etiquette rules, down to what the guests were allowed to call the food and how they were to hold the silverware – and the rest of the world’s nobility followed suit.
As the increasingly wealthy middle class of merchants struggled to follow them, those same grammar schools adopted etiquette, teaching young women how to talk, what to say, and even how to walk. The polite (read: French) terms for animal flesh became solidified in the feminine language and with the female as homemaker and caretaker, became solidified in language.
This isn’t the only time the grammar school has had this kind of impact either. Take the Netherlands, which had a diverse food cuisine for much of its history. (For the wealthy that is). By the 20th century, it became common to send children (girls) to the huishoudschool (Housekeeping school) which included lessons on frugality and simplicity, such as the cooking of cheap and simple meals. These boarding schools proved a great leveler for the Dutch cuisine, resulting in uniform and simple meals consisting of meat and potatoes becoming the norm across most of the country.
So, boarding schools teaching a single “correct” way to do things to everyone are bad. We can all agree on that.
Still, that metamorphosis wasn’t complete.
It’s common to see ads from the early 1900s showcasing the terms “Hog” instead of pork. You’d also already see ads for “bacon” and Brisket” or “chuck”, with no mention of the animal it came from.
In 1905, Upton Sinclair, North American’ muckraker author, wrote a novel called “The Jungle”. Intended to expose the harsh working conditions of lower-class workers and the condition known as “wage slavery”, the novel instead resulted in an outrage against the meat packing industry and led to the Meat Inspection Act with sanitation reforms. These reformists refused to eat pork for their protest, leading to the term “piggyarians or viggyarians” but, the meat they referred to was “hog”.
By 1969, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English language also still thought it appropriate to put a photo of a lamb, cut into component parts of loin, shank, leg, and ribs, under the definition of lamb.
What happened?
People started living in cities. In 1300, the population density of London was probably already about 80,000 people. That density already meant that people would largely buy meat from a butcher rather than slaughtering it themselves. Still, the average person would have tried to keep chickens on a balcony or in a garden if they could and the commons meant that most city folk still had access to a bit of land at that point.
By 1931, that population density had reached 8.1 million people, not too far off from London today. That population density and the norm of urbanization across the English-speaking world – in line with industrialization and the high labor demands of factories – meant that more people were living together with fewer resources to raise or butcher their own animals for meat. By 1910, it was estimated that there were 20,000 slaughterhouses in England and Wales. Still, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for a poor man to buy a cow and bring it to a slaughterhouse himself for butchery.
Further urbanization, grocery-store-ization and packaging means that meat is now handed out in neat little plastic-wrapped packages, far removed from the fluffy or feathery creature it used to be. Food flies further from the root word, no longer being a cow but becoming mince meat, no longer being a pig but just bacon, no longer being a chicken but instead wings. And with an increasing fetishization for the removal of bones from food products, there’s increasing distance between how meat products look and where they come from.
Perhaps there’s some truth when Carol J. Adams writes;
“Industrialized meat-eating cultures such as the United States and Great Britain exemplify the process by which live animals are removed from the idea of meat. []
We see ourselves as eating pork chops, hamburger, sirloins, and so on rather than 43 pigs, 3 lambs, 11 cows, 4 “veal” calves, 2,555 chickens and turkeys, and 861 fishes that the average American eats in a lifetime.”
Eventually, English is complicated. The separation of culinary terms for the flesh of animals from the animals themselves enables emotional distance to an extent. But how much? Most people would be well aware that when they bite into a hamburger, it was a cow that enjoyed grass and lazing about in the sun. Constructing a simple narrative around either or framing the usage of words in one way or another is also all but impossible because life isn’t black and white unless you happen to be a very excruciatingly rare form of color blind.
Or, to quote Justice Joseph T Deters, writing about the consensus of a court ruling that boneless chicken wings didn’t have to be boneless (after a man was hospitalized because a chicken bone stuck in his throat):
“A diner reading ‘boneless wings’ on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers.”
Or would he?