Only really rich people in places like Tal, a city Emily had only ever heard of but imagined constantly, were able to live without animals. Merchants brought them milk and eggs and new clothes and they never had to shoot swurdhounds to protect the peahens. She dreamed of it constantly. --- ## AFTERWORD Since learning that [chicken meat is a relatively modern food](https://eleanorkonik.com/book-review-tamed/) %% ( [[Review of Tamed by Alice Roberts]] ) %%, I've tried to avoid defaulting to having rural characters in my stories raise chickens. There _are_ chickens in Verraine (I wrote about them in [Vapid](https://eleanorkonik.com/vapid/)), but I don't want there to _only_ be chickens. It's not just anachronistic, I think it's boring — if for no other reason than that chickens are pretty lacking in genetic diversity. Peafowl are the opposite of boring, and are [quite genetically diverse](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Genetic-Diversity-of-Blue-Peafowl-Based-on-Markers-Tao-Jinlong/d80f28809e9522b234707a968ae8ea4c74d8c317). Blue peafowls — picture a "normal" peacock, and this is what you're thinking of — are native to India and Sri Lanka, but were [first domesticated in China](https://www.digitalvertebrae.com/fall06/daryllf/about_peacocks_hist.html). They spread to Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago, and were taken to Egypt by Phoenicians — who considered them a delicacy. They're a type of pheasant, just like junglefowl, which are the ancestors of chicken. All but one species of pheasant are native to Asia; the Congo peacock, from Central Africa, is the only exception. Historically, peafowl have always been exotic food reserved for elites. In fact, it wasn't until the turkey made its way over from America that Medieval Europeans (at least the rich ones) _stopped_ regularly eating peafowl. Asians were able to get [peacock meat as a "nice dinner out"](https://wildexplained.com/can-you-eat-peacocks/) until roughly the 1960s. These days, they're still raised as exotic poultry; peahen eggs can sell for as high as $70 each. They're roughly three times the size of a chicken egg and make a good-sized omelet. Showing off by with huge, expensive meals is a tradition that goes back since the earliest days of humanity. Sure, the Romans luxuriated in rare foods like stewed peacock tongue or the wombs of postpartum pigs, but even during the earliest days of domestication, the ability to host feasts with rare foods was key to maintaining social power. In the early days of the cattle-keeping economy, people mostly ate wild game and fish. Agriculture was mostly a part-time pursuit; an insurance policy, or maybe just a tasty way to show off. It wasn't a replacement for foraging. But as more and more people living on the Eurasian steppes picked up herding, powerful members of their societies started keeping lots of ostentatious ornaments. Sheep, goats, cattle and horses were sacrificed at funerals; they were in fact only ever really eaten as part of social rituals, especially in the east. In the Volga River region c. 4900 – 3500 BCE, herder diets were about 70% fish; the rest of the meat came from hunting [onagers](https://eleanorkonik.com/onagers/) %% ( [[2020-11-30 Onagers]] ) %% & antelope. Cattle and sheep were more important in ritual sacrifices than in the regular diet; anthropologists think they were used as a sort of ritual currency, a way for the powerful to trade favors and track prestige during periodic sacred meals and funeral feasts. In fact, feast culture may have been responsible for the development agriculture. In the Bronze and Iron Ages, feasting served the role of social glue, and a way for elites to demonstrate (and increase) their status. But even before that, the improving climate at the end of the Neolithic Ice Age might have let some people start acquiring surplus food, which was — and is — a signifier of wealth. Humans honestly haven't changed much in the intervening years. To celebrate the end of the Eighty Years' War (a Dutch war of independence against Spain) and the Thirty Years' War (a dynastic civil war that took place in modern-day Germany and reduced the local population by half), the hosts of the peace congress held a lavish dinner. There were over a hundred courses, each more elegant and creative than the last. Most of the dishes were taken out the backdoor of the kitchen and served to local poor people. How the dish _looked_, and how much power and sophistication it conveyed, was more important than how it tasted. The Westphalian peace treaties were critical — the hosts had to pull out all the stops to impress their guests and _signify_ the importance of the event. Fancy foods at important meals with lots of important people from distant places is a ritual as old as humans as a social species. But all those fancy foods have to come from somewhere, and typically the suppliers of such delicacies do not live the elite lifestyles of their patrons. Emily, for her part, would much rather eat peacocks than raise them. ## Further Reading - This article about [peafowl in history and culture](https://assortedregards.com/2021/07/15/peafowl-in-history-culture/) is well-sourced and gives a nice overview of their role in religion and fable. - Most of what I know about Bronze Age herders comes from [The Horse, the Wheel, and Language](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148182/the-horse-the-wheel-and-language). It's a really accessible — and interesting! — primer on the subject, if you're interested in going down the rabbit hole.