Cows versus beef. Pigs versus pork. Deer versus venison.
Hey everyone, Dana here!
From my experience growing up in the U.S. and now living the past 8 years in Germany
I've gotten the feeling that the relationship toward meat and animals can be a little different
in the two places.
I would really love to hear other people's experience with this down in the comments,
but for me growing up in the U.S. it was a little bit like: animals were animals and
meat was meat, and the two things were kind of separate.
As I mentioned in the intro, the English language often has two different names for the animal
and the food, and I feel like this might have played a role in the process of separating
the two things from each other.
I could never imagine saying in English, like, let's eat some pig for dinner or I am really
craving some cow tonight.
No, we say pork and beef and veal and mutton and venison.
Although poultry is the same for both, you've got chicken, duck and goose, which are both
the animals and the food.
The animal is chicken and the food is chicken.
So for those ones it is the same.
As a kid pigs and cows and sheep were the things that talked in cartoons and the stuffed
animals that I had laying, really, all around the house, not the food that I ate.
Pigs and cows and sheep were animals, pork and beef and mutton was meat.
So really, from a very young age there was that separation there between animals and meat.
But German does not seem to do that.
In German Schwein is pig and Schwein is pork.
Rind is beef and Rind is a male cow.
The same words are used for the animal and the meat from that animal.
The French language influence in England led to this linguistic split over time.
English ended up with the words beef and pork and mutton coming from that French influence
in addition to the words cow and pig and sheep.
Perhaps that has led to people -- or at least it looks like me -- growing up with this kind
of separation between the animal and the meat.
But I would say that it's not just the language that has played a role in this separation.
But also some differences in the way that things are done in the two countries.
As I mentioned in this video here, in the U.S. the eggs in the supermarket are kept
in the refrigerated section of the store, while in Germany they are usually just out
in the aisle not kept cold.
And that was pretty shocking for me when I first saw that, but not as shocking as the
first time that I brought a carton of German eggs home, opened it up and found a feather
on one of the eggs.
What is this feather doing here? I can remember asking Stefan.
It really, really caught me off guard to see a feather on the egg.
I had never seen that before because in the U.S. the eggs are washed off when they're
processed, which is why in the U.S. they need to be refrigerated.
Of course, of course in the U.S. I knew where eggs came from and I knew that feathers were
involved in the whole process but I had just never experienced confronting it like that
when getting out some eggs to make an omelette; discovering something on the egg, transferred
from the hen to the egg, a feather.
I had just never seen that in the U.S.
Now I'm not saying that this is a good thing.
I'm just saying that this seems to be a thing.
Actually it would probably be a lot better if I had a healthy relationship with the fact that
meat -- pork and beef -- is the animal.
Not thinking of those two things as separate things.
Because they're not, and we really shouldn't forget that. Yeah.
That seems like a really dangerous thing to forget that pork and beef are pigs and cows.
I definitely think that it is important for me to work to change this way of thinking in myself.
Although I'm not really sure how to go about doing that since I feel like this is a concept
that has been ingrained in my mind over many, many years.
But I do think that this is an important thing for me to keep thinking about.
So my question for you is: Do you think that language has influenced your relationship
to animals versus meat?
And what has been your experience with all of this?
Please let me know in the comments below.
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Until next time, auf Wiedersehen!
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