True Left

In many European countries, the land and animals on it were the property of the king, says Harriet Ritvo, a history professor at MIT and the author of four books, including The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. “The elite has been eating meat—all kinds of meat, elaborately—for a long period of time,” she says. “But the peasants were not eating meat at all.” (In the medieval folk story of Robin Hood, the bycocket-wearing boy turns to the life of an outlaw after killing one of the king’s deer.)

When colonists began arriving in the new world, their fortunes quickly changed. They found an abundance of land (stolen, of course, from indigenous people), most of it loosely controlled. Native animals provided some ready protein, but the plentiful natural fauna was also ideal for fattening imported livestock. Pigs, for example, could root around in the forests for free, before being topped off with corn and slaughtered.