Meat

About Meat

In modern English usage, meat most often refers to animal tissue used as food, mostly skeletal muscle and associated fat, but it may also refer to organs, including livers, skin, brains, bone marrow, kidneys, in some countries lungs, and a variety of other internal organs as well as blood. The word meat is also used by the meat packing and butchering industry in a more restrictive sense—the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, etc.) raised and butchered for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, poultry, and eggs. Eggs and seafood are rarely referred to as meat even though they consist of animal tissue. Animals that consume only, or mostly animals are called carnivores.

Through most of human history, individual families of humans hunted, raised, and slaughtered animals for their meat, and later, as civilizations developed, priests and temple assistants performed the functions of slaughtering and butchering animals for food in animal sacrifice. Today, in most industrialized nations, a meat packing industry slaughters, processes, and distributes meat for human consumption.

The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general. Mad in Danish, mat in Swedish and Norwegian, and matur in Icelandic which also means 'food'.