Lamb Gains on Ham in Popularity at Easter Dinner

choi

Kim Severson, Lamb, Gaining on Ham; The choice for Easter dinner may be changing, thanks to higher-quality meat and more adventurous Americans. New York Times, Apr 12, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/ ... -ham-lamb.html?_r=0

Quote:

"My mother grew up on a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. When the weather turned cold, they slaughtered a few pigs and hung the hams in the curing room. In the spring, after a long Lenten diet of self-denial, they pulled out a ham and it became Easter dinner.

"some scholars link Easter ham to an ancient Babylonian myth about a god named Tammuz who was killed by a pig.

"Jews, Christians and Muslims organized their own rituals around cooking it [lamb; the past tense is used because talks about before modern times when Americans prefer other meats]. But in modern America, lamb has never been as plentiful or popular as beef or pork. The average American eats just under a pound of it a year * * * By comparison, we eat about 50 pounds of pork a year per capita, and even more beef and chicken.  In Australia, which loves its sheep and supplies about half of our lamb, people eat 21 pounds of lamb each.

"pigs and cattle have long been the preferred meat animals for the Northern Europeans whose culture came to dominate America. Still, lamb (from a sheep that is about a year old or younger) and mutton (which comes from mature sheep) used to be more common when wool was in higher demand. In the 1940s, there were 56 million sheep in the United States. Now there are about six million.

"The war [World War II] also helped kill America's appetite for meat from sheep: Canned mutton was included in military rations, Ms [Megan] Wortman[, who has been the executive director of the American Lamb Board for 15 years,] said, and soldiers came home vowing never to eat it again.

My comment: There is no need to read the rest, which is inconsequential.