Old post improved

Our Urban Nature Walk yesterday (complete set of pictures here) turned up a species that I'd profiled earlier, but since the males and females look so different, it was worthwhile to add a new picture to it. cottonmanifesto added it in the comments. http://urbpan.livejournal.com/tag/winter+moth

Food on the hoof

I don't wish to reignite the horse-slaughter discussion/imbroglio, but a new lj friend provided some cultural context, as to why we Anglo-derived cultures don't eat horses, and some other cultures do.


Marvin Harris analyzes why some European cultures eat horses and others find it disgusting/uncouth/psychologically upsetting in one chapter of Good to Eat. It's an older book, but he argues his thesis interestingly.

Long, long story very short, on the Continent people got into a situation where horses were common relative to other, more efficient sorts of meat animals along around the time of the French Revolution. Since the Revolution encouraged people to lash out at Church and State, and since the horse was associated with both (the state emphasized the horse as a military animal and the Catholic church had banned horsemeat for centuries in aim of making more horses available for the Crusades) horsemeat satisfied the people's hunger for protein AND their hunger to break taboo. Continental enlightenment thinkers were like 'hey, that's tasty!' and it caught on.

In Britain, the aristocracy instead took their cavalry and went and conquered places with plenty of cattle and sheep (first Scotland and Ireland, later Argentina) that could be shipped home to the populace in exchange for leaving the horses the heck alone. Also, they liked to distinguish themselves from the French.

In America, we never ran out of meat to the extent that it made sense to eat the animals pulling our plows. Horses really don't put on flesh very well compared to cows or pigs anyway, so given a choice almost any society will eat cows and pigs first.


Thanks to teratologist

Wikipedia has a good discussion of the issue (horses as meat, not their slaughter and export), also, I enjoyed the entry on taboo foods and drink.

I'm so glad to be wrong!

On November 6th I said "...the chances that it will produce fruit that will survive to allow the plant to reproduce are slim. New England temperatures will undoubtedly plummet some time before tomatoes ripen on this plant."

Red oak on the muddy river

365 Urban Species. #324: Callery Pear

Photos by urbpan. The last tree with leaves still on it is a callery pear, which I noticed while I was driving down route 9.

Urban species #234: Callery pear Pyrus calleryana

The sugar maples have long dropped their leaves, the red maples' "October glory" has faded; even most of the oak trees have shed their foliage. But a line of street trees stubbornly hangs on, each tree bearing shiny, heart-shaped leaves, mostly green at the bottom, blazing to yellow and red toward the top. I was aware of these trees but despaired in ignorance of their identity. Then a group of us went to the Mount Auburn cemetery, where the exquisite landscaping is carefully composed and each tree bears an identification tag. We saw one of these trees, its leaves still multicolored in a sea of bare wooden skeletons, and rushed to read its tag.

The callery pear is a cultivated variety of a tree native to China. Along with its foliage, colorful and persisting into late fall, it is valued for its profuse blossoms, similar to those produced by trees in the same family: roses, cherries, and apples. It also resists most of the stresses of urban living, such as root compression and pollution. However, it is vulnerable to storm damage, and many of the individuals I've examined show scars from limbs having broken off in the wind. The most surprising thing about this pear tree is its fruit--by definition they are pears, but they are tiny round berries. They aren't brightly colored, or much favored by wildlife (though birds and squirrels will eat them), and a fruitless cultivar of the tree called "Bradford pear" is often planted. Many landscapers consider the callery pear to be overused.



Location: Aspinwall Ave, Brookline.

( Read more... )

Three ducks