British beef, pork and lamb lost most of their fat in decades
After saturated fat became a health worry in the 1980s, British farmers and butchers reshaped their meat. Through breeding for leanness and new cutting methods, fat in UK beef, pork and lamb dropped from around a fifth or a quarter of the meat to between 4 and 8 percent.
Meat, in the everyday sense, is animal tissue eaten as food, mostly skeletal muscle with its fat and connective tissue, though it can include organs such as liver and kidney. The word descends from Old English mete, which meant food of any kind. Some people use it narrowly for mammal flesh, leaving out fish, poultry and insects. Chemically it is mostly water, protein and fat, and left unpreserved it spoils within hours or days as bacteria and fungi get to work.
Fossil evidence suggests meat made up a large share of the earliest human diets, with hunter-gatherers organising hunts for bison and deer. From roughly 11,000 years ago the Neolithic Revolution brought domesticated chickens, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and cattle, and with them deliberate breeding for better meat.
The modern industry took shape after the Second World War, when governments guaranteed prices to boost output. Production rose, but so did spending on feed and veterinary drugs, along with disease and pollution. In 1966 the United States, Britain and other industrial countries began factory farming cattle and pigs, and intensive systems spread worldwide, rising from 30 percent of global meat production in 1990 to 40 percent by 2005. Demand for pre-packed cuts has favoured larger cattle breeds, and farms now raise animals like zebra, camel, crocodile and ostrich.
Breeding science keeps accelerating. Progeny testing speeds up selection, and genome mapping lets researchers isolate useful genes. Some traits are tricky because they hide in recessive genes, such as the double-muscling condition that enlarges muscles and raises an animal's value. A bacterium engineered to help cattle digest grass is already in use, and sheep, pigs and cattle have been cloned experimentally. Eating red and processed meat is linked to higher risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and meat production contributes to global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.
Source: Meat
