The Fat of the Land

by Vilhjálmur Stefánsson

"The fat is that which maintains life, and since life is God's gift and prerogative, man has no right over it" This commentary on Leviticus says also that the fat that was interlarded with the lean might be eaten (even of a sacrificial meat?). The commentator's emphasis is here on the much higher sacrificial rating of the clear suet, as distinguished from the fats that are streaked with the lean.

"Patroklos . . . cast down a great fleshing block in the firelight, and laid thereon a sheep's back, and a fat goat's, and a great hog's chine rich with fat." In contrast with Homer's account from Greece, and the Bible's from still hotter Palestine and Egypt, are the religious and profane classics of northern European peoples, preserved to us most extensively by the Scandinavian Eddas and sagas. Our reading of these from childhood in the original fails to supply us with quotations in praise of fat to match those we find so easily in the subtropical books.

The million or so years which had intervened since the ape turned into man had eliminated, by natural selection, those that were best suited for digesting vegetables, since they would have been least suited for digesting meat. Besides, the roots-andshoots diet of the ape-man in the humid forest is markedly different from that of the grain-fed farmer.

Professor Huntington's Mainsprings of Civilization

One of the main reasons for poor nutrition is that agriculture has lowered the quality of man's diet and at the same time made it possible for more people to subsist. Mechanical methods of preparing food have gone still further along this same sad path until the typical 'modernized* diet has become appallingly poor.

For that sort of cooking, and for weak teeth, the ideal piece of meat is the tenderloin. Having no flavor of its own, it will readily take on whatever flavor the cook desires to confer upon it, by a sauce or other device, and it is never hard to chew. The teeth of exclusive meat eaters are good, at least it is so with those who have been brought up on meat; they use no sauce and want their meat to have a flavor of its own. So they usually feed tenderloins to dogs.