The human history has been, first of all, to continually search for answers to his food needs, at a time when food was the essential reason for survival, the first daily and unavoidable necessity. How can we not think of the vivid images of cattle kept in the French caves of Lascaux, whose meat was already at that time probably the main source of livelihood for the European primitive man?

At some point in history, however, the pure need for food transforms into the pleasure of farming, an element constituting a particular social affiliation; a radical transformation of its original function to the exact opposite, represented by the research of hedonism and cultural belonging. This dual polarity, or rather the change in the function of meat, unfolds a complex history, closely linked to power relations and social inequalities that went with it. The history of this food is closely interconnected to mankind’s history, which constitutes one of the basic elements, in each case either the cause or the effect of human affairs.

When trying to identify some of the stages that we consider particularly significant, the first that seems appropriate to recall is the fall of the Roman Empire: the centuries III-VI AD, the dissolution of this millennial cultural horizon has indeed given way to the establishment of new political and administrative realities, the turbulent mixing of peoples and cultures, the depopulation of the countryside and the breaking up of the patterns of production and food distribution, present at the time.

In this moment in history we are witnessing the depletion of the food model based on the cultivation of the fields, determining the general conditions of food scarcity and, with them, an unquestionable period of hunger. In this period of history in fact the testimony of war, famine and pestilence are widely documented by historians of the period and with them especially the general demographic decline of the European population.

The European man of the III-VI century, from consumer of products obtained from the cultivation of the fields, the typical model of the Roman period, differentiated himself, by significantly using products from the forests, which in those centuries grew heavily at the expense of agricultural land, often not able to be used due to the demographic imbalances of that difficult period.

The need to develop a new model of consumption that combined the traditional model of the cultivated ager with the exploitation of uncultivated areas typical of the barbaric matrix (the so-called saltus, a term used by the Romans, not without a pejorative connotation to the peoples beyond the Alps), determined the process of more food supply systems which together formed the foundations of a food model in which we Europeans still recognise ourselves today.

For meat, we can say that the controlled production model typical of the Romans and based primarily on the rearing of small ruminants in confined spaces, is combined with the spontaneous model of Germanic and Celtic matrix, based on the exploitation of virgin nature and uncultivated spaces, ideal for example for hunting, or the natural breeding of wild pigs.

In this historical phase, in which various food supply systems in different and distant historical and cultural origin are integrated and the cultivation of the fields becomes more difficult because of demographic imbalances, meat becomes once again a mainstream food, the food value “par excellence”.

If the Latin doctor Cornelius Celsus considered bread to be the absolute best food, the icon based on the cultivation model of the fields, his colleague Antimo of the sixth century did not hesitate to consider meat as the “king of food”, showing a particular sensitivity to pork; so dear to the powerful of the time, the court of Theodoric in Ravenna. In other words, Antimo was already influenced by food supply models based on the exploitation of uncultivated areas, particularly important in that historical period. Again ager versus saltus.

In later centuries, characterised in Europe by the consolidation of Christian thought and, with it, the symbolism of oil, wine and bread as a food symbols of purity and rectitude, meat however does not lose its core value. In the Europe of the post barbarian invasions, in fact, there seems to finally have been determined an unprecedented and definitive integration between the culture of bread and that of meat, so that both end up enjoying the statute (no less ideological than material) of primary and indispensable food.

In the Christian era, the polarity between the Roman and barbaric model overlaps with that of the “monastic” and “aristocratic” model: between them they play for the leading role of cultural hegemony. A comparison with many different sides and meanings, where social ethical values clash with those of religious morality, the reasons for fasting with those of power and strength.

How can we not consider Charlemagne to be the archetype of this cultural tension? The first emperor who contributed to the modern picture of Europe left us a historical trace, constantly torn between images of war and an abundance of food, that hinged on the consumption of meat and the Christian ethic of moderation. The first monarch who made meat consumption an element of his powerful iconography, without denying the values of frugality and moderation in food consumption of the Christian religion that he had embraced, and that animated his political actions.

From the start of the eighth-ninth century, thanks to this successful integration between the agricultural food model and that based on the exploitation of forests, the demographic curve starts to rise again, and with it, deforestation, land reclamation and the colonisation of uncultivated areas to build new agricultural settlements.

Again, a new intensive agriculture at the expense of forestry was the inevitable reaction to the growing demand for food, especially proteins, and, with it, a question of civilization and progress: from then on, the concepts of natural and wild-related with regards to the food industry are relegated to the margins of production and its dominant ideological values.

It is the beginning of a big boom, which probably continues to this day. But agrarian expansion brings with it new tensions and social inequalities, conflicts born from the search for fertile lands, duties, claims and property rights, as well as natural disasters, as frequent then as today. Here the countryside-cities model is born, with all the implications related to the distribution and the storage of food on a large scale.

It is a model that ensures stability and the balance of noble protein sources and culminates in the thirteenth century, especially after its progress in agricultural production techniques and more favourable weather climates.

This nutritional well-being, the abundance represented by the new wide availability of meat, reaches such a level that even the Pope Innocent III feels the need for an indictment against the sin of gluttony and the new delicacies that the insane passion of men has managed to invent. “Wine, beer, or the good things that come to us from the trees, the earth, the sea, the sky are no longer enough: you want spices and perfumes”.

It is in this century, in fact, that gastronomy is born and its written codification of food recipes, due precisely to the abundance of flavours and gastronomic delights that the cultivation techniques and the expansion of the spice and food markets allowed.

Over the centuries of food abundance, meat consumption represents a status symbol, particularly in the fourteenth century, during which there was a reduction in cereal crops in favour of pasture and forage crops. It is in this period that farms specialised in livestock breeding are born, with its focus on the short and long-range meat trade. It is the so-called carnivorous period of Europe, like the lucky definition that Braudel has accustomed us to call it. A period of happy and individual life, which will last until the sixteenth century.

The repeated pleas of the ecclesiastical community to eat less, at least in certain periods of the year, more than being a deterrent, indirectly confirms the centrality in the role of meat in the food system of the time.

In modern times, with the emergence of the middle classes and the industrial revolution, meat reaches larger sections of the population. In the wider horizon of a new food democracy, the concept of quality and industry standards were born; with the progress of scientific knowledge, the nutritional properties of meat and its relationship with our health were better associated.

In the past century, efficiency and technology, in a context of even greater food availability, the new model of thinness as the ideal beauty of a powerful body, with perfect productivity, speed and efficiency is finally imposed; even in this new context, the unstoppable rise in consumption of meat continues, without losing the symbolic value of a conquered dignity to social classes who once were hungry.

And today? Meat is always at the centre of this story of hunger and abundance. Forgotten the famine of the past, we live with abundance and its problems. In this polarisation between two extremes that have always chased each other in history, today the real challenge is that of moderation and balance. The rediscovery of the original value of the meat as a good and necessary nourishment and, with it, the word “diet”: a term invented by the ancient Greeks to designate the daily food regimen (but more generally the rule of life): knowledge necessary for a conscious, varied and balanced food consumption, that each individual has to build on their personal needs, attitudes and knowledge of himself.

Unlike today, where this word expresses, more superficially, the simple restriction or deprivation of particular foods, often following fashions or models imposed by consumer society. This is the role of meat in the modern diet, a precious and irreplaceable food that finds its rightful place in the Mediterranean Diet, as intended by the wise fathers of our civilisation and not that of some propagators of today, who are more interested in market dynamics rather than our true cultural identity.

Massimo Montanari and Giovanni Sorlini for The Sustainable Meat Project