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Comment by Semirhage | Hacker News Reader

Bacon is cured belly meat, whereas this was apparently pure fat. Fat tends to concentrate flavors, good or bad, and in this case it would have probably be very very gamey.

Edit: I think we have to see a difference between domesticated pigs, bred and raised for purpose, and their cured, seasoned, fat... and some fat hacked off a wild ibex. If you’ve ever had wild game you’ll know what I mean about gamey flavors. I can only imagine that some ice age ibex would be an acquired taste at best. Pig fat is also some of the most delicious, mild fat around, which is why it’s pigs used in that article.

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Wild hog is some of the most disgusting meat I've ever had. Gamey strong flavored like I was eating meat flavored with sour weeds. The bacon was inedible it was so bad.

Absolutely nothing like the sweet tasty pig you get from the store.

Wild boar, or wild sow? In domestic pigs intended for slaughter, the males are castrated when a few days old in order to keep their meat from developing a gamey flavor. (Ask Iowa senator Joni Ernst if you want to learn how to develop that skill.) I could imagine wild boar meat would be inedible. But aside from that, diet will also impact the flavor if the meat. A diet heavy in acorns will probably add a pronounced pungency, for instance.

It was a 100 lb wild sow, covered in ticks and just nasty looking. I was excited until I tried all the cuts and realized how different wild is from domesticated.

You mean, like this? http://www.emikodavies.com/blog/italian-table-talk-lardo-di-... What is called "Lardo" is considered gourmet in most Italian / European traditional cuisines, and I can clearly see people in 2018 easily paying hundreds of dollars for a kilo of Ibex lard. I understand curing it might optimize the taste, but I would not call dried/smoked lard horrible.

I was going to say something like this. I have encountered "lard" in Europe quite a lot, but lard in the US is a little different. Anyway, "pure" fat is definitely an acquired taste and I agree with the GP that fat does concentrate all sorts of flavors good and bad and can be quite nasty.

And we are talking of flavours, but fat can concentrate also dangerous substances like lipophilic pesticides and venoms.

Did you read the article you linked to?

>The biggest mistake non-Italian speakers make with this absolutely delicious regional delicacy is that they translate it to “lard”, which, it must be strongly pointed out, it is not. What we call “lard” in English is known as strutto in Italian, which is used commonly for conserving, pastry making or frying. Lardo, however, is cured pig’s back fat, a unique type of salumi.

So, no, what is called 'lard' is not gourmet in Italian cuisine. That's a wholly separate thing from 'lardo', the delicacy you're referring to.

I have been in Eastern European countries that call it "lard".

It is irrelevant what "Lard" is in English in this context. What "Lardo" is in Italian, which is close to (a likely more cured version of) what was found in the stomach of Otzi, is nowadays considered a delicacy, and it is probably a long shot for researchers to assume the guy ate something of horrible taste, without further substantiating their claims.

> Lardo, however, is cured pig’s back fat.

In other words a type of fat is considered a delicacy. That does not mean all fat is a delicacy, but it does mean what the guy ate could have been fairly tasty.

Also, taste has a lot to do with how hungry you are. My father had fairly refined tastes and grew up in France, but said the best meal he ever ate was an can of beans when he was really hungry in the army.

EX: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/11315994/Ten-things-n...

A normal man burns about 2,500 calories in a day. We burn between 7,000 to 9,000. That means supplementing your dehydrated food with slabs of butter. In the first few days of the expedition, it tastes revolting, but then your body just craves the fat content and you eat the butter like blocks of cheese.

I've had pure pig fat before and made it myself off pig stomach or other parts. The first couple bites are good if you deep fry it to a deep brown colour but if you eat more than a medium size, you can easily get sick and have nausea from the oiliness, the fat is also more chewy than you expect and you can choke on it if you even have a medium piece in your mouth (I choked). If I was to eat animal fat, I would only eat a little bit and not too much. We seem to get nauseous from too much oil.

You would likely feel different you weren't already getting plenty of fat in your diet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning#Observations

> I had now been several days without tasting any thing besides meat: I did not at all dislike this new regimen; but I felt as if it would only have agreed with me with hard exercise. I have heard that patients in England, when desired to confine themselves exclusively to an animal diet, even with the hope of life before their eyes, have hardly been able to endure it. Yet the Gaucho in the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry meat, such as that of the agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, “that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea:” this appears to me a curious physiological fact.

Don't get me wrong, I was almost instantaneously full from just eating a good-sized blob the size of my palm. Its a weird feeling, like you know you're missing all the other nutrients but you feel healthily full even though it was just a blob of fat and oil. Definitely also sick because of the normally fat-filled diet I probably had.

I vaguely recall reading that the stomach has receptors to get a rough idea of what nutrients food contains.

Aaah, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomach#Stomach_as_nutrition_s...

Lardo di Colonnata is delicious and I love it (spoiler: I am from Tuscany), but you just take a thin slice of it on your bread. You would never fill your stomach with it, even if you have money to throw away, because it is very salty, spicy and of course fat. I can feel nausea only thinking about eating on that alone. Even if ibex is as good as pig, I really do not envy Otzi's last meal.

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