World by charts

When I return from travel in poor regions in the world, I am sometimes asked, half jokingly, whether I have tried dog meat.

Westerners themselves are no strangers to the idea, although Grand Ma’s recipe has been lost. Perhaps unfortunately, one might say, due to cultural prejudice. Luckily, entrails and snails recipes survived.

Quoting from Constantino Bresciani-Turroni, an eye-witness of the German hyper-inflation,

The statistics of meat consumption reveal some curious details which throw an interesting light on social conditions in Germany in 1922 and 1923. While the consumption of the better quality meats (bullocks, calves, pigs, and sheep) declined, the consumption of horse-flesh and still more, of dogs increased: obvious proof, as Wirtschaft und Statistik wrote, of the increasing poverty of the German people. From the last quarter of 1921 to the last quarter of 1922 the number of pigs killed fell from 1,416,051 to 1,131,148, while the number of horses increased from 30,967 to 47,652. During 1923 the fall in the consumption of pork continued, and at the same time the conditions of some classes became so bad that they were eventually obliged to reduce their consumption of horse-flesh. But consumption of dog-flesh increased. Statistics show that 1,090 dogs were slaughtered in the third quarter of 1921; 3,678 in the third quarter of 1922, and 6,430 in the third quarter of 1923.

Unfortunately, we stopped tracking these products. All we have on file is the Bank of Japan (BoJ) consumer price index for some odd item called “Salted and dried horse mackerel”.

Links:

Google books entry

Books:

The Economics Of Inflation – A Study Of Currency Depreciation In Post War Germany

Series of interest:

Horse mackerel and pork from the BoJ

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