Did people once often eat spoiled meat?

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I've googled this topic and have not been able to find straight answers on it, but did people around 100 years ago often eat spoiled meat? I read that before refrigeration, that the only means of keeping meat fresh was like pickling or salting it, but I know that only did so much. And once when I mistakenly left an open can of tuna out undrained still sitting the brine, there were still maggots on it (was disgusting). That shows that salt only does so much to keep meat fresh. Therefore it seems that people before refrigerators often ate meat that was not fresh. And my grandmother who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s told me that her mother would just brush the maggots off the meat and still boil it and eat it. I do know that as a result, people had to be really careful about cooking it thoroughly or else they'd get very sick. And I know that people often got sick a lot more back then than they do today. So even when meat was cooked, it was still rotten. How much of this is true? I'm just curious on this. What are some of your all opinions and knowledge on this?

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Comments ( 14 )
  • donteatstuffoffthesidewalk
    5 years ago

    the difference tween what yall will & wont eat is 72 hours with nothin to eat

    also this is why curry were invented

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  • CozmoWank
    5 years ago

    Go look up aging beef on Wikipedia.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      5 years ago

      I just looked it up, it says when aging beef, it's stored in refrigeraters at cold temperatures. It doesn't mention how people kept meat from spoiling before refrigerators. I know some people got ice boxes back then but only a percentage of the population could afford them. And what about before even ice boxes came about? I guess that they had to always chance it and boil it real good, but it still would've had a pretty bad odor, and boiling hasn't always been able to kill all bacteria.

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  • Ummitsstillme
    5 years ago

    100 years wasn't that long ago as far as food preservation goes. Many advanced cultures preserved foods with either salt, or the encouragement of good bacterial growth. Some really seemingly nasty results still exist. Watch the television show Bizarre food.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      5 years ago

      100 years ago had a big difference, no refrigeration. Food was not going to keep fresh to the same extent without refrigeration no matter how good people's salting and curing techniques were. And the salting and curing alone changed the flavor in food. However, for what I know, when meat was fresh 100 years ago, it actually tasted even better than fresh meat today due to the more natural means preparing slaughtered meat back then. People didn't add the fillers and such like they do today, and they were better in how they fed the animals before slaughter back in the days before mass production, which in turn gave the meat an even better taste. Again, this is just what I've read so I'm not 100% on the actual truth of it.

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  • [Old Memory]
    5 years ago

    Sounds true. I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve eaten off meat before and I was fine. It’s only once it goes rancid that you shouldn’t eat it. Just a slight smell isn’t going to hurt you.

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  • Handyman
    5 years ago

    Jerky is still very popular, and some are made much better than others. In moist conditions smoking did the trick, but afterwards it had to be kept rather dry.

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  • howaminotmyself
    5 years ago

    People ate less meat, consistently. If you had it, you ate it all. Then you may go a week before the next successful hunt.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      5 years ago

      I also read somewhere that the rich expensive restaurants in New York back in the first couple decades of the 1900s, that they slaughtered their animals daily either out back or somewhere very nearby, because the restaurateurs took seriously and were very careful about serving only the freshest meat to their rich customers. Cheaper restaurants were more risky since they could afford fewer means in keeping their food fresh. This is what I read and I wasn't around back then, so I don't know how accurate any of this really is. No one to really ask because just about 100% of the population from the 1910s are gone, a significant percentage of them long gone. Even a 100 year old today was just born in 1918, so their earliest memories would be sometime in the 1920s, maybe watching a few flapper girls dancing. We'd have to find one of those rare 110 year olds to be able to talk to someone who was really around in the 1910s.

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      • howaminotmyself
        5 years ago

        The reality is that our food culture has changed dramatically. Most conventional food today would not look like food to someone from 100 years ago. Personally, I find that appalling. In rural China, 20 years ago, you could still find restaurants with live animals. It really should not be so bizarre to think about. There are food deserts in this country where you find large populations of people with no access to fresh food. Everything packaged and processed. It is no wonder there is an epidemic of diabetes and other food related illness. We do no respect food. And there is no need to have a living witness to tell you what eating was like in the early 20th century. It is well documented even if the masses have forgotten that food is life and all food comes from something that was once living. The more recent it was alive, the better. That should be common sense.

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        • Anonymous Post Author
          5 years ago

          From what I remember reading, fresh meat 100 years ago actually tasted better than fresh meat today due to the more natural means of raising and feeding the animals before slaughter back then, and they didn't add all those fillers and whatever to meat, food overall was less processed and more natural. Only the wealthier people who could afford the best restaurants, or rural folk who hunted their own food daily got to eat really fresh meat more often. Other than that, people had to rely on the salting and curing techniques, which preserved a certain amount but not all the freshness of the meat, but it did keep it from actually going rotten. The salting and curing itself changed the flavor of the meat too.

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  • Averageasfuck
    5 years ago

    Actually what you posted was very interesting

    I don't have an answer for you just wanted to say that what you posted was interesting

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  • Boojum
    5 years ago

    I've only got minimal knowledge, but I assume our ancestors were just as susceptible to poisoning by E. coli and salmonella as we are, if not more so, since their general level of health was lower than that of modern healthy, well-nourished Westerners. They definitely couldn't have been more resistant to botulism poisoning, since the cause of that is a toxin produced by the microorganism.

    Thorough cooking would have killed off E. coli and salmonella, but cooking might perhaps have been generally more haphazard than it is now with modern kitchen appliances.

    Your inadvertent experiment with tuna is interesting (and disgusting), but the salt content of that water was much lower than what's used in a preserving. One of the rules of thumb for how much salt to add to water for a brining solution was to keep adding salt until an egg floated. Alternatively, you would keep adding salt until no more would dissolve.

    Putting food into water that salty would kill any microorganisms on the surface pretty quickly, but the main preservation effect is due to moisture in the food being drawn out and the food becoming too dehydrated for any microorganisms present to survive and reproduce; the meat is too dry to spoil. That's why sides of bacon and traditionally prepared hams used to simply hang in the air in butchers or delis. (You still see this in Italy, with complete legs of Parma ham hanging on racks in the deli sections of supermarkets.)

    I'm sure that, just as now, people a century and more ago would only have eaten food that was actually rotten in the most dire of circumstances. Humans have evolved a deep, instinctive dislike of rotten food, because those who didn't have this reaction tended to die off before reproducing.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      5 years ago

      It is true that drying meat in the sun also stopped spoilage back then, but that was only able to be done in dry climates such as the desert southwest (which is where beef jerky was invented). In many other parts of America back before refrigeration, the air was often too humid, so there were fewer options for meat preservation, besides salting, and you are right I believe about much more salt being used for preservation than the brine in tuna.

      Meat spoilage was still far more common back in pre refrigeration days. I'm sure that people didn't enjoy eating rotten food back then, but like a lot of things, many people a century ago looked at fresh food as a luxury and a treat rather than the expected norm like today. The same goes for many things that people today take for granted that were much more difficult to get long ago.

      People could survive on rotten food 100-150 years ago as long as they cooked it thoroughly, since boiling killed most bacteria, but unfortunately not the rancid stench. I'm sure it wasn't enjoyable but when faced between that or starving to death, their options were limited. Since boiling killed off E coli and salmonella but not the toxins produced by spoilage, I guess people had to take the chance and did get sick sometimes. But, humans 100+ years ago had more of a tolerance to unfresh food than we do today due to their bodies being more used to it. It's generally the same idea to why Americans will get sick drinking the water in Mexico but local natives there don't, they've built up an immunity and tolerance to it. If we went back in time to 1910 and ate the food from then, we'd get noticeably sicker than they did from it.

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