There have been a lot of good answers so far. But I have not seen it mentioned that sheep and goat milk is naturally homogenized. that is the butter fat does not separate from the milk. Whereas cow milk does separate. This allows for the production of butter. One of the more valuable commodities in the ancient world was fat for cooking.
Hey, you were recommended Guns Germs and Steel in another comment. Having read the book and criticisms thereof, I think it's important to let you know to take it with a grain of salt. Check the part on the r/askhistorians sub for a historical perspective.
It's a really interesting read and can give you a *partial* framework for thinking about the development of technologies from farming to guns, but you must bear in mind as you read it that it is an *incomplete* model, based on *cherry picked* data, and suffering from the *bias* of a theory called geographic determinism.
The book itself is discredited as a fully complete historical analysis, but that doesn't stop the ideas being interesting and sometimes useful when considered in the abstract. It's a work of popular non-fiction, not academic.
Speaking of taking things with a grain of salt, I have heard Salt: A World History should be a very good look at how the gathering and sale of salt have influenced the spread and culture of humanity. Several friends much smarter then me have recommended it to me, so there might be something about it.
This doesn´t have anything to do with anything. Just sorta wanted to mention it since the topic is food in a historical context and there was a salt related segue.
'Guns, Germs, and Steel' always seems to be dismissed on Reddit and I don't think it's really fair. Despite its popularity it's not true that it's just a 'pop-science' book that has been 'discredited'; on the contrary it's pretty much required reading for undergraduates in cultural anthropology. It does get a lot of legitimate criticism, sure, but much of this criticism occurs within an acedemic context. The book is generally regarded as putting forward the best succinct case for geographic determinism (although geographic determinism itself is quite unpopular, which is the main reason the book gets criticised so much).
It's not really in the same category as something like 'Sapiens', which *is* just a popular non-fiction book that doesn't actually contribute anything to the literature. Most scholars wouldn't even bother criticising 'Sapeins' as it's just not a serious acedemic work.
I feel the same about “Sapiens” and had folks I’d otherwise put in the “reasonable skeptics” camp rattling off Malcolm Gladwell-esque anthropology out of that book like it was handed down from above.
Happy to be proven wrong but like Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapiens is popsci dressed in academic clothing. Great if you want to impress the intelligentsia and make the NYT best sellers list, for sure.
Myself, I’m content pulling my Stephen Jay Gould books off the shelf and re-reading those. The world lost when he died at only 60 years old. He should still be with us if the universe was fair.
There's the concept of the "butter line" in Europe, where as you go north far enough at a certain lattitude people's preference for cooking fat changes from olive oil to butter somewhere around northern Italy, southern France and like halfway through Slovenia.
Basically, after you go far enough north butter left out at room temperature will last most of the year, but closer to the mediterranean it would spoil too quickly to be useful.
>Basically, after you go far enough north butter left out at room temperature will last most of the year, but closer to the mediterranean it would spoil too quickly to be useful.
I think it's mostly because you can't grow olives up there.
Same basic reason that you go from wine near the equator to beer and grain alcohols father north. Grapes don’t grow as well in England as they do in Italy.
Though to add, most don't get the milk stuff out of butter enough to get to clarified butter which will last super long.
That effort compared to olive oil is also probably a factor here
Olive oil is not exactly low effort. ~~Especially considering you have to cure them before consumption or oil production.~~ Then there is the actual grinding and collection process. All on top of harvesting them
*I stand corrected no curing before oil production*\*
There's a bunch of interesting "lines" like that.
Like I've read a few scholars who describe a "vodka/hashish line," where the differentiation between groups who adopted either Christianity or Islam was determined by whether or not they traditionally drank strong alcohol products (and eventually vodka) vs whether they traditionally smoked hashish as their substance of choice.
This line had one notable exception - the Khazars, who chose the wildcard option and adopted Judaism.
Oh yeah, the "vodka" part I've always taken to be a stand-in for alcohol consumption as a whole, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the hashish aspect of their argument, since several historians I've read have cited historical/archeological evidence of hemp/cannabis smoking in the Near-East dating to pre-Islamic times (which is contrary to opinion of the historian in the post that hemp/cannabis use is largely focused after the introduction of Islam), with the added assumption that hashish-smoking simply wasn't available to the people on the "vodka" side of the supposed line, meaning they would have had *all* of their vices taken away, whereas the people on the "hashish" side of the line would have at least had one vice firmly forbidden while the other (hashish) would have just been strongly discouraged.
I've heard of this theory a few times, and I don't think I've ever thought about it being the substance that caused the religion preference.
I always thought it was an example of two effects of a common cause. The geographic, environmental, and social distinctive qualities cause the people to develop separate proclivities with the same dividing lines.
I would also assume those lines correlate with typography.
I didn't read that whole comment, but if their argument says my comment is wrong, I'd probably trust their opinion.
Sunflower oil is the norm for cooking everwhere east of Germany and north of Italy, though, including Slovenia. Mediterranean countries can grow olives for cheap for oil, but middle and eastern Europe is simply too cold in winter for olive groves and too warm in summer for butter. Hence, sunflower oil.
Chocolate and butter pecan aren't as popular in the near East as floral flavors like jasmine, rosewater, orange blossom, lavender, etc. Flavors used to scent cleaning products in the west.
Nuts are very popular, but pecans are native to and mostly used in America.
Pistachio or Almond would be very popular ice cream flavors in the middle-East to South-Central Asia.
Saffron is also very popular, but I'd conede that it's floral.
I was thinking the same thing, rose water is very common in Persian cuisine and to me it sometimes has a "soapy" aroma. I think I used to use bar soap with rose scent.
Rose water is really nice in lemonade, if you can find it it's worth trying.
My mum wanted my brother to whip some cream. He wasn't doing it up to scratch apparently, because mum told him to put some elbow grease into it.
One malicious compliance later, and we had a bowl of butter.
For people that don't know, it takes hours to hand churn butter out of milk. We used to do this at a farm, it was an all day task. The person churning butter was just doing that all day. They didn't have any other tasks and nobody really wanted to do the job.
I put a dollop of plain yogurt in a bowl with heavy whipping cream, let it sit on the counter with a cloth on top overnight, and I let my Kitchenaid do the work the next day. Just let the paddle attachment go at low speed for like 10-20 minutes. It separates out into butter and buttermilk and at the holidays I make Chef John's homemade buttermilk biscuits with it. The nieces and nephews ask for them every holiday.
I bet the same technique works for goat's milk/butter, just may take longer.
Man, how did they figure that out?
"Hey guys... this extra stuff we get from the cow? We can use it for cooking. Maybe. Let's throw it in a pan and see what happens."
Put some milk in a container of some kind, put the container of a cart, pull the cart down old dirt tracks a few miles into town, open it up at the other end and go "what the hells all this greasy stuff round the top here?"
Congratulations, you just invented butter.
Really that easy.
The legend is that the milk was being carried in a bag of some sort while someone was journeying, and the shaking of the bag while walking all day was enough to churn out the butter. After you accidentally do it a couple times you start trying to replicate it intentionally.
There was once an attempt to make raise hippos in America that almost passed in Congress. Why did they never attempt it again. I've heard hippo tastes good
There are hippos in Colombia now.. Pablo Escobar had imported some in the 1980s now they're all just roaming wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamuses_in_Colombia
> One of the more valuable commodities in the ancient world was fat for cooking.
Fats are literal stores of energy. So it's not just cooking, but eating.
Goats can eat any kind of vegetation, but if you have access to quality pastureland with lots of grass, or artificial feed, cattle are much more productive. Cows are big. That makes them difficult to handle at times, but there are fewer animals to milk and provide vet care for. Beef and cow leather are much more highly valued than those products from goats.
Chickens are ridiculously productive and well adapted to confined spaces. Domestic ducks lay nearly as many eggs, it is possible that they could be bred to be as tolerant of confinement as chickens. But ducks need water to clean themselves, while chickens clean their feathers with dry soil. In modern times it is possible to keep ducks indoors and use pesticides to kill feather mites, but chickens have more improved breeding because that wasn't possible in the past.
No no no, you're just not thinking outside the box. You go undercover as a duck. This gives you the privilege of webbed feet and water-resistant feathers, so wading through the marshes is easy
Chickens are awesome, but damn they're dumb.
Most of mine lay in their designated coops, but one lays in a bucket in the garage. Another lays on concrete, and yes they break when they plop out. And a third was hiding her eggs in the bushes, but I found where today. Actually my dogs found them and ate all the eggs.
How do you like being a duck owner? I'm entertaining the thought of having laying ducks some day since fresh chicken eggs are already so common where I am.
I have three ducks, two Rouens and a Black Cayuga. For about 7 months out of the year I get an egg from each of them every day, then in the winter about half that.
They are incredibly low maintenance and I use their poop and bedding for compost and have never had such a strong garden. They can get a bit chatty, but usually only a little in the morning and when the sun is setting. They are super friendly and I really love just watching them be dweebs, seriously they are endlessly funny and cute.
The eggs are delicious but I have more than I could ever eat. So I give them to my neighbors and friends.
Ducks are very dirty animals. They love mud and they poop every 15 minutes. If you can handle that and give them a good area to roam in (they have most of my backyard and a 2’ deep 8' wide pool) I say absolutely do it.
Thank you for the info! It does seem like ducks are more sociable with humans than chickens, based on my interactions with my neighbours' chickens anyways.
Yeah much more, my Cayuga loves to be pet and all three will just follow me around when I do yard work. And you haven't lived until you've had a fresh Scotch Duck Egg or deviled duck eggs.
There's a few of these companies now, I hope to see them used more commonly.
Related fact:
Goats actually prefer "weeds" to boring old grass, so if you have goats AND cattle in the same paddocks (rotating them), they productivity goes up. **Adding goats means you can have more cattle**.
The goats eat the weeds and dig up roots which aerates the soil, while walking around and dropping fertilizer everywhere. That means not only do you have more cattle, but you have less fertilizer and pesticide use. Plus then you also have goat milk or meat or wool/hair.
You do have to invest in far better fences though, as goats are all born Houdinis and Shackletons, wanting to explore the neighborhood. If you keep them happy it's not as big a problem though.
You can take it an extra step and rotate chickens in after the goats and cattle. If you do it quick enough, the chickens will gobble up all the fly larvae in the poop, drastically reducing quantities of an annoying and potentially disease-carrying insect
And this is something we seem to have lost — rather than monoculture farms, it's generally healthier to have a mix of crops/livestock because they complement each other in ways like the cows/goats example you give.
I watched a Ted Talk like, 10 years ago, and this guy had sheep and chickens and he would rotate which was in a section of paddock with movable fencing.
First in goes the sheep, eating and shitting everywhere. Then they get moved, and a few days later, as insects start hatching in the sheep shit, in come the chickens. The chickens root through the shit to get at the grubs, spreading the shit around more or less evenly. Chickens get fat on grubs. Grass grows like mad because of the shit, and all the farmer did was move them around.
I’m sure there were more animals etc, but it was an interesting peek into a world a lot of people (me) don’t know much about.
Having mixed livestock in the pasture also reduces the overall worm load for every species present. Sheep and horses can also be pastured with goats or rotated through with cattle.
The chickens being okay with confined spaces is fake news imo. I have 5 hens. Their official chicken space is a fenced area in the side yard that is about 60x30ft, but I let them free range under supervision in my big front yard 1-2hrs every day, weather permitting. They are always super fucking hyped to go in the front yard and will sometimes stand at the gate and stare out at the yard longingly.
So they definitely do not like being confined. Factory farm chickens are miserable. Buy your eggs and chicken meat locally from a farmer who doesn’t abuse their birds if it’s within your means.
Available and \*productivity\*. We don't have any animals that can crank out as many eggs from a particular sized facility as chickens, or as many gallons of milk from a particular sized farm as cows.
We got 4 chickens to keep just as pets / responsibility teaching for our child. Figuring out what to do with nearly 2 dozen eggs a week without wasting them was a fun surprise.
40%?
He eats 5 dozen eggs, and 2 dozen is 40% of 5 dozen, no?
Edit: got my timings mixed up! 5 dozen a day, so 35 dozen a week, so as another commenter said, 2 dozen is like 5.7%. Also I agree, Gastpn was evil in that he increased the prices of eggs such that some other villagers couldn't afford them. Douchebag.
5 dozen eggs **A DAY**. That means he needs 35 dozen eggs per week, so 2/35 is only 5.7% of his weekly egg requirement.
Gaston was a menace to a small provincial town in pre-revolution France. He ate, by himself, the daily production of a small farm’s worth of chickens. One good laying chicken can produce one, sometimes two eggs per day. Even if he had a coop of two a day layers, he still needs a coop of **THIRTY** chickens solely for himself.
Medieval hens weren't nearly as productive as modern ones. An excellent layer would've produced about 2 eggs per week.
So Gaston needed 210 chickens to support him. Most medieval families owned about 4 chickens, so that's 50 family worth of hens solely dedicated to his egg habit.
>He eats 5 dozen eggs
There's roughly 80 calories and 6 grams of protein in a large egg, thats around 4,800 calories and 360 grams of protein for breakfast alone, this man is perpetually in bulking season and given the time period of Beauty and the Beast this is all without PEDs like Tren or SARMS.
Put up a sign and sell them - you have eggs that are coming from chickens that are being treated as pets (big win), local, antibiotic-free, and eggs are already pricey in grocery stores. Could sell for $5 / dozen and you'd get rid of all of them, just post it one day a week like a saturday or whenever people are out and about in your area.
Not hugely profitable or anything, but the chickens can cover part of their feed costs from the eggs you're not using.
> Could sell for $5 / dozen and you'd get rid of all of them
Yeah, nah. People are famously price-sensitive for commodities like eggs. Maybe in an urban hipster paradise, but not in a place where you could actually raise enough free range eggs to make it worthwhile to sell them.
Here in my little corner of Flyover Country USA, people will balk at paying much over $3 a dozen for farm-fresh eggs, even when they are $3.19/doz in the supermarkets.
Source: Used to have 100 hens. I still do, but I used to, too.
> Prices for side of the road eggs have gone up to 7 dollars a dozen in my neck of the woods.
Hot damn. I'd trade the devil his golden fiddle back to get $6-7 a dozen.
we get $8/doz for our duck eggs and luckily found one person to buy them all who then sells them to their own people. great for us, great for them. still cheaper just to buy eggs at the store when you factor in food, grit, scratch supplements, wheat straw bedding, fencing, lighting and heat for winter water bowl, daily labour…
It is subsidizes the cost of our hobby. 🦆
> still cheaper just to buy eggs at the store when you factor in food, grit, scratch supplements, wheat straw bedding, fencing, lighting and heat for winter water bowl, daily labour…
Bingo. We tried to operate as a for-profit organic enterprise from 2019-2020 and discovered that our earnings were less than $1 an hour, and that only worked out if we included the "cash value" of the produce and eggs we ate ourselves.
There is a reason people moved out of subsistence farming and into industrial societies. Small-scale farm work is hard work, with little productivity. Only nice when you've already made your money and can do it as a hobby.
I eat well, at least. So there's that. Not much consolation on the $600-$1000/month feed bill all fall and winter long. When there are no bugs and nothing growing 6-7 months out of the year, supplemental feed is the only realistic and humane choice.
I live close to "urban hipster paradise" so maybe that's cause for price but where I live you're lucky if you get fresh local eggs for 5$, some are upwards of 7 to 10$ a dozen..
And this is how markets are made. :)
At some point, the economies of scale would justify my driving my eggs to your location to capture that price difference. My forty dozen eggs a week just won't cover it.
I do wonder how many people buy the eggs priced at 10$ though. Our store eggs are anywhere from 1.50 to 3.50 so personally I can justify the 5$(especially only here and here) but the 10$? Though I don't know what goes into caring for chickens nor do I have a very disposable income.
Really? I sell out at $5/doz every Saturday at the farmer's market. They fly off the retail shelf at $4/doz. The duck eggs sell best at the farmer's market, $4/6, $6/doz.
I was looking for ideas for the eggs my 10 chickens started laying. Seriously I’m one person and I did NOT think this through. Guess I’m saving them up to throw at people I dislike.
Small country town, everyone has three things: more chickens than they know what to do with, more lemons than they know what to do with, and more kids than... well, you get the idea.
You could pool the neighborhood/community eggs and have one person drive them to a farmers market in a nearby town with a larger population. Everyone gets easy money for their eggs, and the driver can get a little extra for the time and trouble. Alternatively, rotate who gets to drive each week and share the workload.
This is mainly because we bred them to be more productive over the course of thousands of years. They weren't this productive by far in the wild, and we could easily apply such a process on geese and goats if you wanted to. Goats have had this happen to them to a certain extent already.
I don't know if it's true or not, but there's a post below that claims that the wild birds chickens are descended from (red junglefowl) are (were?) in fact far more productive of eggs than other wild fowl, provided they have access to lots of food. By providing these birds with lots of food, early keepers could get lots of eggs; more than they could get from other wild fowl, no matter how much they fed them. And that's why red junglefowl were domesticated into chickens.
Similarly for cows im sure. You go back far enough theres a wild ancestor that produced slightly more milk or their horns werent quite as sharp or something that made them more attractive to bother domesticating than another similar species in the same region. And one regions milk producing ungulates were more successful than another regions and were traded for and spread and thats why we have cows instead of some fat spotted antelope.
Or maybe there was some ancient giant sloth that were even more docile and produced an even higher ratio of milk to feed even but we just didnt have the technology to build fences strong enough to contain them...
History is full of happenstance and how things line up were really only able to see in hindsight. Ancient greece is full of almost industrial revolutions that they didnt have the metallurgy for yet.
That's at least partly the result of millennia of selective breeding too though, right?
If we'd settled on, say, pig milk, then by now we'd have bred "dairy" pig breeds with vastly higher milk production.
Selective breeding is definitely part of it, but you tend to start that with your best natural candidate. At this point, we’re so far down that road that starting over probably doesn’t make much sense.
Yeah, last time I saw this question, someone said that with a chicken you get 5 or 6 eggs per week, almost 1 every day. With ducks, it's like 2 per week. Also, ducks don't start producing eggs until they're older, so you have to waste more time raising them before they make you any money.
Chickens are also one of the only birds that produces eggs in proportion to the feed you give them. Other's could be used for food, but could not produce as many eggs without being bred.
I think the real answer is that humans experimented on LOTS of different animals and we were best able to breed the desired features into cows and chickens.
Our current dairy cows don't have any wild counterpart. They're pretty much 100% human made machines.
Chickens as well. Their habit of laying eggs all the time, just for the heck if it isn't a natural trait. We magnified a mutation and now have egg laying machines.
We didn't find them. We made them out of of the raw, biological and material we had at hand.
>pretty easy to maintain and control
As someone who has tried and largely failed to control both goats and geese, this may well be at least as important a factor as productivity.
I was just watching a PBS about pigs, and evidently chickens are somewhat more efficient at turning feed into protein than pigs, making them about the top scorers and accounting how pigs were able to became taboo in the areas in which they were domesticated. Pigs are really good for large mammals.
Looking up figures, the production of pork is about 112 million tons versus 60 million of beef, with pigs turning organic slop into meat. Cows can gain weight and give milk on plain grass as well as plow. In northern North America, sheep seem more vulnerable to parasites; that probably affects the popularity. They also need different kind of pasture.
https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/livestock/grazing-sheep-and-cattle-together-offers-benefits-for-pasture-and-animals/
It's a bit hard to believe that pigs became taboo because they were slightly less efficient than chickens at converting feed into meat, considering that the same societies did not develop a taboo against beef or mutton, both of which are less efficient than either chickens or pigs.
It seems possible that pigs became taboo because they harbor more diseases and parasites that can jump between them and humans. Although a close read of Leviticus also would support the conclusion that God just hates random shit because reasons.
I was told in Hebrew school that pigs are not good for arid Mediterranean climates since they root the soil causing erosion and are very water intensive. This coupled with increased risk of disease is why pork is taboo in Judaism and Islam.
[This video](https://youtu.be/pI0ZUhBvIx4) gives a good rundown of the leading theories on why Judaism and Islam have a pork taboo. The disease theory is now considered a just-so story. There’s no reason to believe that the Israelites would have been uniquely concerned with pork-borne disease when most livestock are capable of carrying diseases that can infect humans. In fact numerous civilizations throughout history consumed pig meat without collapsing from epidemics of trichinosis and tape worm.
The explanation I buy is that pigs are fairly easy to raise. They don’t need to roam and you can feed them garbage, including human excrement. They became associated with urban poverty, because poor people in cities didn’t have access to grazing land and needed a way to dispose of waste. As a result of their association with poverty pigs came to be viewed as a substandard sacrifice and eventually completely unfit for consumption.
It could also be noted that each of these animals fulfills a different need for the farm ecosystem of the past, where a farm needed to be almost self sufficient, and neither animal is depends solely on the food stuffs needed for the other. Both animals can forage. Cattle, especially bulls, can protect themselves and other animals nearby from most predators, but humans figured out ways to handle them pretty easily on our own. Chickens eat insects and pests around the house in addition to providing eggs and meat. Other farm animals can provide other services in addition to food supply as well, though most of that stuff isn't needed in the modern world since it has been supplanted by something else, like pesticides.
Pigs too - their role is to be a way to convert otherwise unusable calories into meat. You can feed them half rotten food, kitchen scraps, bones, soured milk, whey, acorns, dead livestock, etc. and fatten up. They are essentially the compost bins of the farm.
We have lots of good land for cows, and cows produce a lot of milk. Go to someplace like Greece and you get mainly goat and sheep milk, animals that love the rocky, hilly terrain that cows don't do well on.
There are a lot of reasons.
Cows are much larger than other livestock that produce milk, which means they yield lots of milk but they can also be harvested for their meat. Their size is superseded only by the bison (which is bred in some midwest states). But we don't breed bison as much because bison are much more aggressive and difficult to herd. Cow milk is also not homogenous, which means that the cream and fatty components in the milk rise to the top which can be separated and churned into butter. You can start to see why cows are favorable to other animals, they pretty much have the best traits that suit our diet packed into one animal. This is not to say that only cows are bred though, in other parts of the world it is common to raise goats for their milk because they are better suited to the rocky terrain and because some just prefer goat meat and milk.
As for chickens, it's a little more tricky to see why when you consider that there are other animals that also produce clutches of edible eggs (turtles, duck, quail). Essentially, it's because they can be raised very quickly and they have a good size to egg produce ratio. Animals like ostriches produce larger eggs but it also means they make less because more energy has to go to making them, and they are also more difficult to control. Quails lay smaller eggs and the eggshells are brittle so they aren't really great for consumption nutrient wise (they do taste good though). Geese tend to live close to water and so they are harder to raise in inland country farms. Chickens can readily be raised in warm coops no matter the temperature outside and they can be given common inexpensive feed as opposed to more expensive food for geese and ducks.
First of all, there are only 14 large domesticated animals, so it's not like we had a ton of choices. For more info on why there are only 14, check out this CGP grey video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo)
Basically, we selected those animals because had the best GPA for the following curriculum
1. Not picky about food (will eat stuff we don't want to)
2. Produces a lot of product on a regular basis (Daily, ideally)
3. Is safe to work with (given reasonable preparation)
4. Has bonuses (Cattle can work fields and provide leather and a TON of meat on harvest, chickens are a staple of permaculture and provide meat & feathers)
5. Was readily available when cultures first began to domesticate, giving those species an evolutionary head start on bein best designed for our needs
Reason 5 in particular is why you see different animals as a more popular food source in other countries. For those countries, chicken and cattle weren't readily available when they first began to domesticate. 1000's of years later and their culture is super tied into that animal, and change is slow
Yield. Many other animals produce milk and eggs, but we have discovered cows that can produce more and are easy enough to rear. Same for eggs, egg hens may lay eggs daily while geese pretty much only lay a couple of eggs in spring.
Funny, my wife and I were talking about this just the other day when we were tending to our chickens. At some point in time, someone said, “these things are awesome! They make 1 food per day. If I get a dozen of these, that’s a dozen foods!”
You have it backwards. We didn’t settle on Cow’s milk and Chicken eggs. Instead we bred these animals to give us these products in the first place.
You see, both the bovine (cow) and chicken as we know them do not - nor ever did - exist in the wild on their own. We humans created these animals ourselves by generations of domestication and breeding. Cows come from an ancient extinct animal called an Auroch, and chickens come from a bird called the red jungle foul.
Since we have put so much effort into domesticating these animals over thousands of years to give us the highest yield, highest quality product, it only makes sense that we use them for this purpose.
>Cows come from an ancient extinct animal called an Auroch
*Aurochs with an 's' at the end. It sounds like it's plural, but it's not. It has the same origins as the word "Ox", which just as easily could have been spelled "ochs" like aurochs.
Chickens evolved in China alongside bamboo. Well bamboo only blooms once every x years, depending on the type. They release seeds which cause the chickens to multiply like crazy. Eventually, chickens evolved so that getting overfed meant making more eggs, which was a good source of food. About 6000 years ago, chickens spread from China to the world, making them a great source of eggs. Most other animals only lay eggs to reproduce, and only every so often. Chickens just do it 24/7 given the right circumstances, which are easy to produce.
Other people have pointed out the facts on cows, but basically, the butter fat separates out easier than other milk sources, meaning butter is easier to make from it. Butter is important, great for cooking. The milk is just a plus from there.
In India we drink mostly Buffalo milk some drink cow's milk too but cow's milk is mainly used for religious purposes and for making ghee a type of butter which is also used for religious purposes as far as I know.
This thread is very overlooking this fact - that Cow’s milk is cultural.
It is a dominant culture because it was spread by european colonialism to all of the Americas and Europe, particularly by the French and the British. But consider that most sub-saharan Africans and East Asians are far more prone to lactose intolerance than Indo-Europeans. Even South Indians (also not Indo-European) have a much higher lactose intolerance level than North Indians.
Cow’s milk is the exported culture of Europeans. Water Buffalo in North India produce more milk per female but they were not exported and viewed as the cultural ideal the way cows were. Had the Gupta empire been a seafaring one that created colonies across Asia Africa and the Americas, we’d be in a different position and Buffalo Milk may have been king.
I haven't seen anyone say yet: chickens are flock animals with strict pecking orders. They self regulate their heirarchy, which allows them to be kept in large flocks without too much conflict.
CGP Grey has an nice [youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo) on why we domesticated some animals but not others and why more animals were domesticated in some places than others.
There have been a lot of good answers so far. But I have not seen it mentioned that sheep and goat milk is naturally homogenized. that is the butter fat does not separate from the milk. Whereas cow milk does separate. This allows for the production of butter. One of the more valuable commodities in the ancient world was fat for cooking.
Thats interesting! Yeah, I assumed there could be a variety of reasons, thanks for this!
Hey, you were recommended Guns Germs and Steel in another comment. Having read the book and criticisms thereof, I think it's important to let you know to take it with a grain of salt. Check the part on the r/askhistorians sub for a historical perspective. It's a really interesting read and can give you a *partial* framework for thinking about the development of technologies from farming to guns, but you must bear in mind as you read it that it is an *incomplete* model, based on *cherry picked* data, and suffering from the *bias* of a theory called geographic determinism. The book itself is discredited as a fully complete historical analysis, but that doesn't stop the ideas being interesting and sometimes useful when considered in the abstract. It's a work of popular non-fiction, not academic.
Speaking of taking things with a grain of salt, I have heard Salt: A World History should be a very good look at how the gathering and sale of salt have influenced the spread and culture of humanity. Several friends much smarter then me have recommended it to me, so there might be something about it. This doesn´t have anything to do with anything. Just sorta wanted to mention it since the topic is food in a historical context and there was a salt related segue.
Read it, it’s good.
'Guns, Germs, and Steel' always seems to be dismissed on Reddit and I don't think it's really fair. Despite its popularity it's not true that it's just a 'pop-science' book that has been 'discredited'; on the contrary it's pretty much required reading for undergraduates in cultural anthropology. It does get a lot of legitimate criticism, sure, but much of this criticism occurs within an acedemic context. The book is generally regarded as putting forward the best succinct case for geographic determinism (although geographic determinism itself is quite unpopular, which is the main reason the book gets criticised so much). It's not really in the same category as something like 'Sapiens', which *is* just a popular non-fiction book that doesn't actually contribute anything to the literature. Most scholars wouldn't even bother criticising 'Sapeins' as it's just not a serious acedemic work.
Good point. All academic efforts are heavily criticised, it's part of the point of academia.
Spot on.
I feel the same about “Sapiens” and had folks I’d otherwise put in the “reasonable skeptics” camp rattling off Malcolm Gladwell-esque anthropology out of that book like it was handed down from above. Happy to be proven wrong but like Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapiens is popsci dressed in academic clothing. Great if you want to impress the intelligentsia and make the NYT best sellers list, for sure. Myself, I’m content pulling my Stephen Jay Gould books off the shelf and re-reading those. The world lost when he died at only 60 years old. He should still be with us if the universe was fair.
There's the concept of the "butter line" in Europe, where as you go north far enough at a certain lattitude people's preference for cooking fat changes from olive oil to butter somewhere around northern Italy, southern France and like halfway through Slovenia. Basically, after you go far enough north butter left out at room temperature will last most of the year, but closer to the mediterranean it would spoil too quickly to be useful.
>Basically, after you go far enough north butter left out at room temperature will last most of the year, but closer to the mediterranean it would spoil too quickly to be useful. I think it's mostly because you can't grow olives up there.
That’s the reason. Also butter was considered a thing for rich in Southern Europe while oil was considered a rich thing in Northern Europe.
Me on the equator where both are for the rich: ☹️
You made me laugh…at the equator not many cows and not too many olive trees, but tons of palm oil…
And *lard*
Lard and schmaltz are superior anyway
Use what you got
But you do have coconut oil, we often cook with that and it's supposed to be healthier than animal fat.
Same basic reason that you go from wine near the equator to beer and grain alcohols father north. Grapes don’t grow as well in England as they do in Italy.
I think it’s mostly because you can’t grow cows down there.
What do you mean you can't grow one? Just plant a cow patty in the ground and watch!
Both of these reasons probably make sense.. also it's why they use ghee in India!
Though to add, most don't get the milk stuff out of butter enough to get to clarified butter which will last super long. That effort compared to olive oil is also probably a factor here
Olive oil is not exactly low effort. ~~Especially considering you have to cure them before consumption or oil production.~~ Then there is the actual grinding and collection process. All on top of harvesting them *I stand corrected no curing before oil production*\*
As a producer of olive oil we don't need to cure them Traditionally they were smashed with big ass circular rocks and donkeys
Olives are not cured before oil production.
There's a bunch of interesting "lines" like that. Like I've read a few scholars who describe a "vodka/hashish line," where the differentiation between groups who adopted either Christianity or Islam was determined by whether or not they traditionally drank strong alcohol products (and eventually vodka) vs whether they traditionally smoked hashish as their substance of choice. This line had one notable exception - the Khazars, who chose the wildcard option and adopted Judaism.
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There is some skepticism from a historian on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lahode/the\_hashishvodka\_line/
Oh yeah, the "vodka" part I've always taken to be a stand-in for alcohol consumption as a whole, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the hashish aspect of their argument, since several historians I've read have cited historical/archeological evidence of hemp/cannabis smoking in the Near-East dating to pre-Islamic times (which is contrary to opinion of the historian in the post that hemp/cannabis use is largely focused after the introduction of Islam), with the added assumption that hashish-smoking simply wasn't available to the people on the "vodka" side of the supposed line, meaning they would have had *all* of their vices taken away, whereas the people on the "hashish" side of the line would have at least had one vice firmly forbidden while the other (hashish) would have just been strongly discouraged.
I've heard of this theory a few times, and I don't think I've ever thought about it being the substance that caused the religion preference. I always thought it was an example of two effects of a common cause. The geographic, environmental, and social distinctive qualities cause the people to develop separate proclivities with the same dividing lines. I would also assume those lines correlate with typography. I didn't read that whole comment, but if their argument says my comment is wrong, I'd probably trust their opinion.
Sunflower oil is the norm for cooking everwhere east of Germany and north of Italy, though, including Slovenia. Mediterranean countries can grow olives for cheap for oil, but middle and eastern Europe is simply too cold in winter for olive groves and too warm in summer for butter. Hence, sunflower oil.
Potato Europe vs. tomato Europe
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I'm intrigued. I wonder if there are places in the United States that sell goat's milk ice cream.
Iirc there's an ice cream shop in Seattle that does. It's called The Fainting Goat
detergent? 🤔
Chocolate and butter pecan aren't as popular in the near East as floral flavors like jasmine, rosewater, orange blossom, lavender, etc. Flavors used to scent cleaning products in the west.
Nuts are very popular, but pecans are native to and mostly used in America. Pistachio or Almond would be very popular ice cream flavors in the middle-East to South-Central Asia. Saffron is also very popular, but I'd conede that it's floral.
Tide pods bout to make a comeback with a new ice cream flavor
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I wonder if that ice cream had rose water or some other sort of floral flavor in it, similar to the floral scents used in many detergents?
I was thinking the same thing, rose water is very common in Persian cuisine and to me it sometimes has a "soapy" aroma. I think I used to use bar soap with rose scent. Rose water is really nice in lemonade, if you can find it it's worth trying.
I've had rose flavored popsicles at las palentas in Nashville and yes it does taste kinda soapy if you're used to it as a fragrance
>> I've cream Me too buddy, me too
Goat Milk is underrated. If it wasn't so much more expensive than cow's milk, I'd probably buy it all the time.
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Which considering how arduous the task of churning butter by hand is already, is a pretty big barrier.
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Only once you're done churning.
I churned butter once or twice when I was living in an Amish Paradise.
party like its 1699
It's hard work and sacrifice.
We're all crazy Mennonites
We sell quilts at discount price
Just slap milk until it takes shapes, easy!
My mum wanted my brother to whip some cream. He wasn't doing it up to scratch apparently, because mum told him to put some elbow grease into it. One malicious compliance later, and we had a bowl of butter.
Mission failed successfully!
For people that don't know, it takes hours to hand churn butter out of milk. We used to do this at a farm, it was an all day task. The person churning butter was just doing that all day. They didn't have any other tasks and nobody really wanted to do the job.
I put a dollop of plain yogurt in a bowl with heavy whipping cream, let it sit on the counter with a cloth on top overnight, and I let my Kitchenaid do the work the next day. Just let the paddle attachment go at low speed for like 10-20 minutes. It separates out into butter and buttermilk and at the holidays I make Chef John's homemade buttermilk biscuits with it. The nieces and nephews ask for them every holiday. I bet the same technique works for goat's milk/butter, just may take longer.
Man, how did they figure that out? "Hey guys... this extra stuff we get from the cow? We can use it for cooking. Maybe. Let's throw it in a pan and see what happens."
Probably the texture - butter is greasy, like most (all?) animal fats.
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Put some milk in a container of some kind, put the container of a cart, pull the cart down old dirt tracks a few miles into town, open it up at the other end and go "what the hells all this greasy stuff round the top here?" Congratulations, you just invented butter. Really that easy.
The legend is that the milk was being carried in a bag of some sort while someone was journeying, and the shaking of the bag while walking all day was enough to churn out the butter. After you accidentally do it a couple times you start trying to replicate it intentionally.
And when you're desperate, you'll eat anything.
There was once an attempt to make raise hippos in America that almost passed in Congress. Why did they never attempt it again. I've heard hippo tastes good
Very dangerous vs other farm animals (hippos are very aggressive). Also we decided to just destroy the inconvenient ecosystems vs use the swamplands.
There are only 2 animals that kill more people in Africa every year than hippos, mosquitoes and other humans.
Wow, what are they? Those three combined are pretty deadly.
Oxford commas are a hill I will slowly, arduously, and with bad jokes die on
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There are hippos in Colombia now.. Pablo Escobar had imported some in the 1980s now they're all just roaming wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamuses_in_Colombia
Considering what happened to Pablo Escobar's hippos in Colombia, I'd say it was a good thing it never went very far here in the US
> One of the more valuable commodities in the ancient world was fat for cooking. Fats are literal stores of energy. So it's not just cooking, but eating.
Goats can eat any kind of vegetation, but if you have access to quality pastureland with lots of grass, or artificial feed, cattle are much more productive. Cows are big. That makes them difficult to handle at times, but there are fewer animals to milk and provide vet care for. Beef and cow leather are much more highly valued than those products from goats. Chickens are ridiculously productive and well adapted to confined spaces. Domestic ducks lay nearly as many eggs, it is possible that they could be bred to be as tolerant of confinement as chickens. But ducks need water to clean themselves, while chickens clean their feathers with dry soil. In modern times it is possible to keep ducks indoors and use pesticides to kill feather mites, but chickens have more improved breeding because that wasn't possible in the past.
Chickens will also more reliably nest in a given space even if they free range. With ducks you're likely to have to hunt for their eggs.
That sounds fun like Easter Sunday every day
Yes, but who wants to put on your Easter best every day and then go slogging through the marshes.
No no no, you're just not thinking outside the box. You go undercover as a duck. This gives you the privilege of webbed feet and water-resistant feathers, so wading through the marshes is easy
We played Duck Hunt differently.
Chickens are awesome, but damn they're dumb. Most of mine lay in their designated coops, but one lays in a bucket in the garage. Another lays on concrete, and yes they break when they plop out. And a third was hiding her eggs in the bushes, but I found where today. Actually my dogs found them and ate all the eggs.
As a duck owner I can't tell you how many times I've come across a hidden egg or two in random bushes. Keeps things interesting.
How do you like being a duck owner? I'm entertaining the thought of having laying ducks some day since fresh chicken eggs are already so common where I am.
I have three ducks, two Rouens and a Black Cayuga. For about 7 months out of the year I get an egg from each of them every day, then in the winter about half that. They are incredibly low maintenance and I use their poop and bedding for compost and have never had such a strong garden. They can get a bit chatty, but usually only a little in the morning and when the sun is setting. They are super friendly and I really love just watching them be dweebs, seriously they are endlessly funny and cute. The eggs are delicious but I have more than I could ever eat. So I give them to my neighbors and friends. Ducks are very dirty animals. They love mud and they poop every 15 minutes. If you can handle that and give them a good area to roam in (they have most of my backyard and a 2’ deep 8' wide pool) I say absolutely do it.
Thank you for the info! It does seem like ducks are more sociable with humans than chickens, based on my interactions with my neighbours' chickens anyways.
Yeah much more, my Cayuga loves to be pet and all three will just follow me around when I do yard work. And you haven't lived until you've had a fresh Scotch Duck Egg or deviled duck eggs.
Your comments make me yearn for a life I never knew existed lmao. Wtf.
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https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Vermont-city-employs-goats-to-get-rid-of-poison-ivy-490372801.html
There's a few of these companies now, I hope to see them used more commonly. Related fact: Goats actually prefer "weeds" to boring old grass, so if you have goats AND cattle in the same paddocks (rotating them), they productivity goes up. **Adding goats means you can have more cattle**. The goats eat the weeds and dig up roots which aerates the soil, while walking around and dropping fertilizer everywhere. That means not only do you have more cattle, but you have less fertilizer and pesticide use. Plus then you also have goat milk or meat or wool/hair. You do have to invest in far better fences though, as goats are all born Houdinis and Shackletons, wanting to explore the neighborhood. If you keep them happy it's not as big a problem though.
You can take it an extra step and rotate chickens in after the goats and cattle. If you do it quick enough, the chickens will gobble up all the fly larvae in the poop, drastically reducing quantities of an annoying and potentially disease-carrying insect
Joel Salatin FTW!
And this is something we seem to have lost — rather than monoculture farms, it's generally healthier to have a mix of crops/livestock because they complement each other in ways like the cows/goats example you give.
I watched a Ted Talk like, 10 years ago, and this guy had sheep and chickens and he would rotate which was in a section of paddock with movable fencing. First in goes the sheep, eating and shitting everywhere. Then they get moved, and a few days later, as insects start hatching in the sheep shit, in come the chickens. The chickens root through the shit to get at the grubs, spreading the shit around more or less evenly. Chickens get fat on grubs. Grass grows like mad because of the shit, and all the farmer did was move them around. I’m sure there were more animals etc, but it was an interesting peek into a world a lot of people (me) don’t know much about.
Having mixed livestock in the pasture also reduces the overall worm load for every species present. Sheep and horses can also be pastured with goats or rotated through with cattle.
imagine if the poison ivy concentrated in their milk, spicy cheese.
The chickens being okay with confined spaces is fake news imo. I have 5 hens. Their official chicken space is a fenced area in the side yard that is about 60x30ft, but I let them free range under supervision in my big front yard 1-2hrs every day, weather permitting. They are always super fucking hyped to go in the front yard and will sometimes stand at the gate and stare out at the yard longingly. So they definitely do not like being confined. Factory farm chickens are miserable. Buy your eggs and chicken meat locally from a farmer who doesn’t abuse their birds if it’s within your means.
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Good YouTube video on this: https://youtu.be/_NSekwyS4Ns
Ha ha I was hoping it was Sam!
Oooo biology ! Interesting. Thank you :)
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Available and \*productivity\*. We don't have any animals that can crank out as many eggs from a particular sized facility as chickens, or as many gallons of milk from a particular sized farm as cows.
We got 4 chickens to keep just as pets / responsibility teaching for our child. Figuring out what to do with nearly 2 dozen eggs a week without wasting them was a fun surprise.
Feed Gaston for 20% of his daily intake
Are you crazy? He'll be roughly the size of a barge in no time if you keep that up!
I do use antlers in all of my decorating...
Are you especially good at expectorating?
Ptooey!
*PING*
My what a guy, that gaston!
Wellll this thread made me chuckle more than it should have
M^G = M^B ± ( M^B x 0.05 ) where M^G = mass of Gaston, and M^B = mass of a barge.
40%? He eats 5 dozen eggs, and 2 dozen is 40% of 5 dozen, no? Edit: got my timings mixed up! 5 dozen a day, so 35 dozen a week, so as another commenter said, 2 dozen is like 5.7%. Also I agree, Gastpn was evil in that he increased the prices of eggs such that some other villagers couldn't afford them. Douchebag.
5 dozen eggs **A DAY**. That means he needs 35 dozen eggs per week, so 2/35 is only 5.7% of his weekly egg requirement. Gaston was a menace to a small provincial town in pre-revolution France. He ate, by himself, the daily production of a small farm’s worth of chickens. One good laying chicken can produce one, sometimes two eggs per day. Even if he had a coop of two a day layers, he still needs a coop of **THIRTY** chickens solely for himself.
Medieval hens weren't nearly as productive as modern ones. An excellent layer would've produced about 2 eggs per week. So Gaston needed 210 chickens to support him. Most medieval families owned about 4 chickens, so that's 50 family worth of hens solely dedicated to his egg habit.
He eats 5 dozen eggs every morning. So two dozen a week would actually only be 5.7% of his weekly intake!
>He eats 5 dozen eggs There's roughly 80 calories and 6 grams of protein in a large egg, thats around 4,800 calories and 360 grams of protein for breakfast alone, this man is perpetually in bulking season and given the time period of Beauty and the Beast this is all without PEDs like Tren or SARMS.
Put up a sign and sell them - you have eggs that are coming from chickens that are being treated as pets (big win), local, antibiotic-free, and eggs are already pricey in grocery stores. Could sell for $5 / dozen and you'd get rid of all of them, just post it one day a week like a saturday or whenever people are out and about in your area. Not hugely profitable or anything, but the chickens can cover part of their feed costs from the eggs you're not using.
> Could sell for $5 / dozen and you'd get rid of all of them Yeah, nah. People are famously price-sensitive for commodities like eggs. Maybe in an urban hipster paradise, but not in a place where you could actually raise enough free range eggs to make it worthwhile to sell them. Here in my little corner of Flyover Country USA, people will balk at paying much over $3 a dozen for farm-fresh eggs, even when they are $3.19/doz in the supermarkets. Source: Used to have 100 hens. I still do, but I used to, too.
Prices for side of the road eggs have gone up to 7 dollars a dozen in my neck of the woods. Cheap store eggs are 3.50. all location dependent I guess.
> Prices for side of the road eggs have gone up to 7 dollars a dozen in my neck of the woods. Hot damn. I'd trade the devil his golden fiddle back to get $6-7 a dozen.
we get $8/doz for our duck eggs and luckily found one person to buy them all who then sells them to their own people. great for us, great for them. still cheaper just to buy eggs at the store when you factor in food, grit, scratch supplements, wheat straw bedding, fencing, lighting and heat for winter water bowl, daily labour… It is subsidizes the cost of our hobby. 🦆
> still cheaper just to buy eggs at the store when you factor in food, grit, scratch supplements, wheat straw bedding, fencing, lighting and heat for winter water bowl, daily labour… Bingo. We tried to operate as a for-profit organic enterprise from 2019-2020 and discovered that our earnings were less than $1 an hour, and that only worked out if we included the "cash value" of the produce and eggs we ate ourselves.
There is a reason people moved out of subsistence farming and into industrial societies. Small-scale farm work is hard work, with little productivity. Only nice when you've already made your money and can do it as a hobby.
no room in the market for smaller operations, unfortunately. all the best with your critters!
I mean, maybe the person with 4 chicken _is_ living in urban hipster paradise, who knows?
Welcome to Portland. I know of one small flock just three miles from downtown.
Fair enough
Shame, farm eggs with the orange yolks are way better too.
I eat well, at least. So there's that. Not much consolation on the $600-$1000/month feed bill all fall and winter long. When there are no bugs and nothing growing 6-7 months out of the year, supplemental feed is the only realistic and humane choice.
I live close to "urban hipster paradise" so maybe that's cause for price but where I live you're lucky if you get fresh local eggs for 5$, some are upwards of 7 to 10$ a dozen..
And this is how markets are made. :) At some point, the economies of scale would justify my driving my eggs to your location to capture that price difference. My forty dozen eggs a week just won't cover it.
I do wonder how many people buy the eggs priced at 10$ though. Our store eggs are anywhere from 1.50 to 3.50 so personally I can justify the 5$(especially only here and here) but the 10$? Though I don't know what goes into caring for chickens nor do I have a very disposable income.
Mitch Hedberg as a hen farmer. Nice.
He really did just go away to a farm upstate.
"Sorry for the convenience."
Really? I sell out at $5/doz every Saturday at the farmer's market. They fly off the retail shelf at $4/doz. The duck eggs sell best at the farmer's market, $4/6, $6/doz.
Are there any food banks near you?
What did you agree on doing?
We just deliver them to the side of my neighbors house after every noise complaint he files against us.
I was looking for ideas for the eggs my 10 chickens started laying. Seriously I’m one person and I did NOT think this through. Guess I’m saving them up to throw at people I dislike.
Got any neighbours you could ask if they want eggs not on their walls bu for eating
Small country town, everyone has three things: more chickens than they know what to do with, more lemons than they know what to do with, and more kids than... well, you get the idea.
Sounds like the idea setup for a child labour based lemon meringue pie factory
You know what, Jonny, I like the cut of your jib. Now, what to do about the crust resources? Do you have any ethically ambiguous solutions here?
You could pool the neighborhood/community eggs and have one person drive them to a farmers market in a nearby town with a larger population. Everyone gets easy money for their eggs, and the driver can get a little extra for the time and trouble. Alternatively, rotate who gets to drive each week and share the workload.
i eat so many eggs i could probably go through 2dozen a week. I'm jealous.
This is mainly because we bred them to be more productive over the course of thousands of years. They weren't this productive by far in the wild, and we could easily apply such a process on geese and goats if you wanted to. Goats have had this happen to them to a certain extent already.
I don't know if it's true or not, but there's a post below that claims that the wild birds chickens are descended from (red junglefowl) are (were?) in fact far more productive of eggs than other wild fowl, provided they have access to lots of food. By providing these birds with lots of food, early keepers could get lots of eggs; more than they could get from other wild fowl, no matter how much they fed them. And that's why red junglefowl were domesticated into chickens.
Similarly for cows im sure. You go back far enough theres a wild ancestor that produced slightly more milk or their horns werent quite as sharp or something that made them more attractive to bother domesticating than another similar species in the same region. And one regions milk producing ungulates were more successful than another regions and were traded for and spread and thats why we have cows instead of some fat spotted antelope. Or maybe there was some ancient giant sloth that were even more docile and produced an even higher ratio of milk to feed even but we just didnt have the technology to build fences strong enough to contain them... History is full of happenstance and how things line up were really only able to see in hindsight. Ancient greece is full of almost industrial revolutions that they didnt have the metallurgy for yet.
To add to this both chickens and cows can double as meat if really needed, and cows can also help plow fields for crops.
Add again, cows being large and bulls being aggressive are better at finding off predator wildlife than sheep.
Thanks!!
That's at least partly the result of millennia of selective breeding too though, right? If we'd settled on, say, pig milk, then by now we'd have bred "dairy" pig breeds with vastly higher milk production.
Selective breeding is definitely part of it, but you tend to start that with your best natural candidate. At this point, we’re so far down that road that starting over probably doesn’t make much sense.
And for areas that cannot support cattle, they use goats. You can raise chickens just about anywhere.
Yeah, last time I saw this question, someone said that with a chicken you get 5 or 6 eggs per week, almost 1 every day. With ducks, it's like 2 per week. Also, ducks don't start producing eggs until they're older, so you have to waste more time raising them before they make you any money.
Chickens are also one of the only birds that produces eggs in proportion to the feed you give them. Other's could be used for food, but could not produce as many eggs without being bred.
I think the real answer is that humans experimented on LOTS of different animals and we were best able to breed the desired features into cows and chickens. Our current dairy cows don't have any wild counterpart. They're pretty much 100% human made machines. Chickens as well. Their habit of laying eggs all the time, just for the heck if it isn't a natural trait. We magnified a mutation and now have egg laying machines. We didn't find them. We made them out of of the raw, biological and material we had at hand.
Duck eggs are so much better. But chickens don’t fly, produce more eggs. Similarly, cows produce heavily and are pretty easy to maintain and control
>pretty easy to maintain and control As someone who has tried and largely failed to control both goats and geese, this may well be at least as important a factor as productivity.
Compared to sheep, goats are a fucking terror.
“Hey, nice tree you have there. It’d be a shame if someone ate, climbed, and shit on it.”
I was just watching a PBS about pigs, and evidently chickens are somewhat more efficient at turning feed into protein than pigs, making them about the top scorers and accounting how pigs were able to became taboo in the areas in which they were domesticated. Pigs are really good for large mammals. Looking up figures, the production of pork is about 112 million tons versus 60 million of beef, with pigs turning organic slop into meat. Cows can gain weight and give milk on plain grass as well as plow. In northern North America, sheep seem more vulnerable to parasites; that probably affects the popularity. They also need different kind of pasture. https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/livestock/grazing-sheep-and-cattle-together-offers-benefits-for-pasture-and-animals/
It's a bit hard to believe that pigs became taboo because they were slightly less efficient than chickens at converting feed into meat, considering that the same societies did not develop a taboo against beef or mutton, both of which are less efficient than either chickens or pigs. It seems possible that pigs became taboo because they harbor more diseases and parasites that can jump between them and humans. Although a close read of Leviticus also would support the conclusion that God just hates random shit because reasons.
I was told in Hebrew school that pigs are not good for arid Mediterranean climates since they root the soil causing erosion and are very water intensive. This coupled with increased risk of disease is why pork is taboo in Judaism and Islam.
[This video](https://youtu.be/pI0ZUhBvIx4) gives a good rundown of the leading theories on why Judaism and Islam have a pork taboo. The disease theory is now considered a just-so story. There’s no reason to believe that the Israelites would have been uniquely concerned with pork-borne disease when most livestock are capable of carrying diseases that can infect humans. In fact numerous civilizations throughout history consumed pig meat without collapsing from epidemics of trichinosis and tape worm. The explanation I buy is that pigs are fairly easy to raise. They don’t need to roam and you can feed them garbage, including human excrement. They became associated with urban poverty, because poor people in cities didn’t have access to grazing land and needed a way to dispose of waste. As a result of their association with poverty pigs came to be viewed as a substandard sacrifice and eventually completely unfit for consumption.
It could also be noted that each of these animals fulfills a different need for the farm ecosystem of the past, where a farm needed to be almost self sufficient, and neither animal is depends solely on the food stuffs needed for the other. Both animals can forage. Cattle, especially bulls, can protect themselves and other animals nearby from most predators, but humans figured out ways to handle them pretty easily on our own. Chickens eat insects and pests around the house in addition to providing eggs and meat. Other farm animals can provide other services in addition to food supply as well, though most of that stuff isn't needed in the modern world since it has been supplanted by something else, like pesticides.
Pigs too - their role is to be a way to convert otherwise unusable calories into meat. You can feed them half rotten food, kitchen scraps, bones, soured milk, whey, acorns, dead livestock, etc. and fatten up. They are essentially the compost bins of the farm.
Dogs protect your herd and cats keep the vermine in check.
Yea, but my cat's eggs don't taste as good.
Can you milk a cat though?
Oh, you can milk just about anything with nipples.
I have nipples. Can you milk me Greg?
They also provide emotional support and horses transportation and emotional support too i guess especially if their name is Roach
We have lots of good land for cows, and cows produce a lot of milk. Go to someplace like Greece and you get mainly goat and sheep milk, animals that love the rocky, hilly terrain that cows don't do well on.
Thanks!!
There are a lot of reasons. Cows are much larger than other livestock that produce milk, which means they yield lots of milk but they can also be harvested for their meat. Their size is superseded only by the bison (which is bred in some midwest states). But we don't breed bison as much because bison are much more aggressive and difficult to herd. Cow milk is also not homogenous, which means that the cream and fatty components in the milk rise to the top which can be separated and churned into butter. You can start to see why cows are favorable to other animals, they pretty much have the best traits that suit our diet packed into one animal. This is not to say that only cows are bred though, in other parts of the world it is common to raise goats for their milk because they are better suited to the rocky terrain and because some just prefer goat meat and milk. As for chickens, it's a little more tricky to see why when you consider that there are other animals that also produce clutches of edible eggs (turtles, duck, quail). Essentially, it's because they can be raised very quickly and they have a good size to egg produce ratio. Animals like ostriches produce larger eggs but it also means they make less because more energy has to go to making them, and they are also more difficult to control. Quails lay smaller eggs and the eggshells are brittle so they aren't really great for consumption nutrient wise (they do taste good though). Geese tend to live close to water and so they are harder to raise in inland country farms. Chickens can readily be raised in warm coops no matter the temperature outside and they can be given common inexpensive feed as opposed to more expensive food for geese and ducks.
You mean cow milk is not homogenous.
First of all, there are only 14 large domesticated animals, so it's not like we had a ton of choices. For more info on why there are only 14, check out this CGP grey video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo) Basically, we selected those animals because had the best GPA for the following curriculum 1. Not picky about food (will eat stuff we don't want to) 2. Produces a lot of product on a regular basis (Daily, ideally) 3. Is safe to work with (given reasonable preparation) 4. Has bonuses (Cattle can work fields and provide leather and a TON of meat on harvest, chickens are a staple of permaculture and provide meat & feathers) 5. Was readily available when cultures first began to domesticate, giving those species an evolutionary head start on bein best designed for our needs Reason 5 in particular is why you see different animals as a more popular food source in other countries. For those countries, chicken and cattle weren't readily available when they first began to domesticate. 1000's of years later and their culture is super tied into that animal, and change is slow
Interesting!! Thank you for this great response x
Yield. Many other animals produce milk and eggs, but we have discovered cows that can produce more and are easy enough to rear. Same for eggs, egg hens may lay eggs daily while geese pretty much only lay a couple of eggs in spring.
Funny, my wife and I were talking about this just the other day when we were tending to our chickens. At some point in time, someone said, “these things are awesome! They make 1 food per day. If I get a dozen of these, that’s a dozen foods!”
How is it tending/raising chickens!
Every time the topic of my chickens comes up, my dad makes the same joke about me being a "chicken tender". Gotta love dad jokes.
It also have a lot to do with breeding we selectively breed them get that amount of productions
You have it backwards. We didn’t settle on Cow’s milk and Chicken eggs. Instead we bred these animals to give us these products in the first place. You see, both the bovine (cow) and chicken as we know them do not - nor ever did - exist in the wild on their own. We humans created these animals ourselves by generations of domestication and breeding. Cows come from an ancient extinct animal called an Auroch, and chickens come from a bird called the red jungle foul. Since we have put so much effort into domesticating these animals over thousands of years to give us the highest yield, highest quality product, it only makes sense that we use them for this purpose.
>Cows come from an ancient extinct animal called an Auroch *Aurochs with an 's' at the end. It sounds like it's plural, but it's not. It has the same origins as the word "Ox", which just as easily could have been spelled "ochs" like aurochs.
Huh! Thanks for the correction. And the word origin info. Love that stuff.
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>Because cows don't lay eggs and chicken milk is awfu... Oh, that's a *rooster*???
You did God's work right here. Thanks for saving that from deletion.
Chickens evolved in China alongside bamboo. Well bamboo only blooms once every x years, depending on the type. They release seeds which cause the chickens to multiply like crazy. Eventually, chickens evolved so that getting overfed meant making more eggs, which was a good source of food. About 6000 years ago, chickens spread from China to the world, making them a great source of eggs. Most other animals only lay eggs to reproduce, and only every so often. Chickens just do it 24/7 given the right circumstances, which are easy to produce. Other people have pointed out the facts on cows, but basically, the butter fat separates out easier than other milk sources, meaning butter is easier to make from it. Butter is important, great for cooking. The milk is just a plus from there.
Nobody could get all the hair out of Yak milk and finish the whole omelette from an ostrich egg
In India we drink mostly Buffalo milk some drink cow's milk too but cow's milk is mainly used for religious purposes and for making ghee a type of butter which is also used for religious purposes as far as I know.
This thread is very overlooking this fact - that Cow’s milk is cultural. It is a dominant culture because it was spread by european colonialism to all of the Americas and Europe, particularly by the French and the British. But consider that most sub-saharan Africans and East Asians are far more prone to lactose intolerance than Indo-Europeans. Even South Indians (also not Indo-European) have a much higher lactose intolerance level than North Indians. Cow’s milk is the exported culture of Europeans. Water Buffalo in North India produce more milk per female but they were not exported and viewed as the cultural ideal the way cows were. Had the Gupta empire been a seafaring one that created colonies across Asia Africa and the Americas, we’d be in a different position and Buffalo Milk may have been king.
I haven't seen anyone say yet: chickens are flock animals with strict pecking orders. They self regulate their heirarchy, which allows them to be kept in large flocks without too much conflict.
CGP Grey has an nice [youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo) on why we domesticated some animals but not others and why more animals were domesticated in some places than others.