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Comment by f_allwein | Hacker News Reader

> only the wealthiest citizens could afford to eat large amounts of meat on a regular basis

Same thing in modern day Germany. My dad told me that until the 1950s, most families in Bavaria could not afford meat, or only had it a few times a year. This must have changed when people became wealthier (and meat cheaper) from the 1960s. Still, it’s astounding that Bavarian food is mainly associated with heavy meat dishes like roast pork or knuckles today. Seems like many vegetarian dishes have been forgotten in recent decades.

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That was a large portion of the western world until the late 20th century.

It was common for people to commonly eat offal (hearts, kidneys, livers etc.) in New Zealand until the around 80s because it was more affordable than meat. As a student, I rediscovered the traditional offal recipes and saved a lot of money by eating hearts and livers instead of steaks.

I think that a lot of "traditional" foods are the foods that were saved for special occasions, they were something that specifically needed remembering in cultural memory of the society. Lambs fry (liver) and bacon used to be a very common food in New Zealand, it was standard household fare. However, you'd struggle to find a millennial who's even eaten it, let alone knows how to cook it. It was never something for special occasions.

My pet hypothesis is that as people got wealthier, the special-occasions meals became more affordable more often. Since these are the foods people preferred, instead of the cheap stuff that they thought of as the food of poverty, these are the foods to which cultural significance got attached.

Few people look back fondly on the foods they ate daily because it was the only stuff available.

It's probably not so much that they've been forgotten (in Bavaria) but that many people not from Bavaria don't associate the vegetarian recipes with Bavaria, but other regions - here are a few traditional Bavarian dishes:

Dampfnudel, Käsespätzle, Germknödel, Bread soup, Reiberdatschi, Schuxen, Pancake soup

(All from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_cuisine)

Also: Obatzda.

It's the same in the neighboring bundesland Baden-Württemberg. Lots of spätzle, lentils and cabbage, and growing vegetables in your own garden is well-regarded.

I could see the pork knuckles actually supporting that fact since I associate them with being what people eat when they cannot afford "conventional" cuts of meat. (I realize this is probably somewhat a cultural bias on my part as well. For example, I recently learned that Chinese style pig's feet are delicious).

I know in Cincinnati (which has a very strong German influence) one of the signature foods is goetta which is a sausage stuffed with steel cut oats. I wonder if some other German dishes that we think of as indicating heavy meat consumption could actually have been ways of stretching out the available meat.

Same for the large majority of people in Europe up to the 1940s.

People would often "eat" meat only on Sundays by cooking a chunk in a soup. Then the elder in the family would eat the meat and everybody else would just taste it in the soup.

Actually this is the reason New Zealand was a strong sporting nation in the early 20th century. Meat and butter were cheap enough that normal people were able to eat them regularly.

On the other hand, according to Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico [1]:

[The Germani] do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples#Collision_wit...

Indeed, eating beans instead of meat was a mark of civilization for the Romans because legumes are an agricultural product, whereas meat is hunted and only savages go hunting. This extended to the legions, they ran on legumes and wheat. There are reports of mutinies, when the legume ration ran out in the field.

I don't really understand why meat became so much cheaper, is it purely intensive farming of animals? Or was there other factors?

Intensive farming, technology (machines, antibiotics), breeding of extreme animals, cheap food and water and land for animals, subsidies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcA3P6abmjY&t=817

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctdaxvewng

Intensive farming is a big part of it. Chicken meat used to be fairly expensive until after WWII, when the Americans invented factory farming. Mechanisation is the other side of the equation.

We require less workers per hectare for agriculture and horticulture, it's been going down steadily since the industrial revolution. At the same time, intensive farming techniques have been developed. Chicken used to be a fairly expensive meat until after WWII when the Americans invented factory farming.

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