The Mystery of Fracosta

A couple of days ago, while reading the menu of an Italian restaurant, I bumped into the word fracosta, which I'd never heard before. Fracosta was on the page of meat dishes, and I supposed that it was the part between the ribs, as fra in Italian means between, and costa means rib. Actually, things are not that simple. The meat producer Stefano Magini says in fact that fracosta is the neck of the bovine. The Carrefour website explains that it is sottocollo, that is, the part under the neck. The glorious Treccani vocabulary candidly admits that actually fracosta refers to various bovine cuts, such as entrecôte and shoulder. Garzanti vocabulary, however, says that it also means 'steak' in general.



I might go on, citing sources giving fracosta whatever meaning, but what is interesting is to try to understand why, if at a restaurant you take fracosta, you don't know what you eat. If we called meat cuts with their real names, fracosta probably wouldn't exist, or at least it would only refer to the parts between the ribs. In the other cases, we would eat 'neck', 'shoulder', and so on.



It is evident that when it comes to eating we have been tending to replace the physical parts of the animal with other, confusing names. Again in Italy, chicken legs are now called fusi, which is not a part of the body, but means 'oval form', the form of the chicken legs. In English, the animals change their names when they are on a plate. The pig becomes pork, the cow becomes beef, the deer turns into venison, etc. At the table, we detach the animal from what we eat, and hide the animal origins of meat.

 

 Actually, the table has only been the last stage of a long, historical process. In the 1930s and 1940s, slaughterhouses were institutional places in the city centres. All the city dwellers saw the animals enter these buildings and knew perfectly well what happened to them inside. Similarly, in the 1970s in Italy, Britain and many other countries, especially in the small towns, the butchers' shops were full of hanging dead animals, and the customers considered this a sort of guarantee of the quality of the meat they were buying. Today, slaughterhouses are non-places hidden on the outskirts of the cities. No-one sees the animals enter and, even, what happens there (the animal killing) is shown to us by alternative documentaries, while mainstream media totally cover up the scene. Likewise, butchers' shops are clean places in which we can hardly see an animal with the head, legs, etc. We don't want to see where meat come from.

I'm not a vegetarian, and eat meat once or twice a month. However, I can see that also we meat eaters are every day more concerned with the concept of eating an animal. It has been a gradual process, a matter of generation. My grandparents didn't consider eating meat 'a problem', as meat was an item of food like the others. Among my parents' friends, there were some people concerned with eating an animal. I have many friends who are vegetarians, and also many meat eaters cannot help thinking that eating an animal is different from eating a carrot. Many of my students are vegetarians, and almost all of them consider eating an animal a problematic issue.

In the end, fracosta and fusi are only two small clues of a bigger and very complex process that interests me and that will be a frequent topic of this blog. In the next weeks I will go back to this issue and also to those who decidedly oppose this process. But each trend, we know, has its counter processes.