Meat Science

Meat is animal flesh that is eaten as food. Humans have hunted, farmed, and scavenged animals for meat since prehistoric times. The establishment of settlements in the Neolithic Revolution allowed the domestication of animals such as chickens, sheep, rabbits, pigs, and cattle. This eventually led to their use in meat production on an industrial scale in slaughterhouses.

Meat is mainly composed of water, protein, and fat. It is edible raw but is normally eaten after it has been cooked and seasoned or processed in a variety of ways. Unprocessed meat will spoil or rot within hours or days as a result of infection with, and decomposition by, bacteria and fungi.

Meat is important to the food industry, economies, and cultures around the world. There are nonetheless people who choose to not eat meat (vegetarians) or any animal products (vegans), for reasons such as taste preferences, ethics, environmental concerns, health concerns or religious dietary rules.

Terminology

The word ''meat'' comes from the Old English word , which referred to food in general. The term is related to in Danish, in Swedish and Norwegian, and in Icelandic and Faroese, which also mean 'food'. The word also exists in Old Frisian (and to a lesser extent, modern West Frisian) to denote important food, differentiating it from (sweets) and (animal feed).

Most often, ''meat'' refers to skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as offal. ''Meat'' is sometimes also used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals.

In the context of food, ''meat'' can also refer to "the edible part of something as distinguished from its covering (such as a husk or shell)", for example, ''coconut meat''.

In English, there are also specialized terms for the meat of particular animals. These terms originated with the Norman conquest of England in 1066: while the animals retained their English names, their meat as brought to the tables of the invaders was referred to them with the Norman French words for the respective animal. In time, these appellations came to be used by the entire population.

History

Hunting and farming

Paleontological evidence suggests that meat constituted a substantial proportion of the diet of the earliest humans. Early hunter-gatherers depended on the organized hunting of large animals such as bison and deer.

The domestication of animals, of which we have evidence dating back to the end of the last glacial period (c. 10,000 BCE), allowed the systematic production of meat and the breeding of animals with a view to improving meat production. Animals that are now principal sources of meat were domesticated in conjunction with the development of early civilizations:

* Sheep, originating from western Asia, were domesticated with the help of dogs prior to the establishment of settled agriculture, likely as early as the 8th millennium BCE. Several breeds of sheep were established in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt by 3500–3000 BCE. Today, more than 200 sheep-breeds exist.
* Cattle were domesticated in Mesopotamia after settled agriculture was established about 5000 BCE, and several breeds were established by 2500 BCE. Modern domesticated cattle fall into the groups '' Bos taurus'' (European cattle) and '' Bos taurus indicus'' (zebu), both descended from the now-extinct aurochs