Until relatively recently, eating beef was frowned on in Taiwan.

The News Lensa
Date: 2018/05/14
By: Steven Crook and Katy Hui-wen Hung

At the beginning of the 20th century, Taiwan was a society where the eating of beef was not merely frowned upon, but seen as so despicably disloyal as to invite karmic retribution. Well before the century was over, however, hamburgers and steaks were available in the smallest towns. And in 2005, beef noodles were – to use the words of the Michelin Guide – “officially canonized” as one of “Taiwan’s gastronomic treasures” when Taipei City Government launched its annual beef-noodles festival.

Among the generation of Taiwanese now passing are many who grew up on farms, and who regarded bovids as loyal co-workers. Without draft animals, 17th- and 18th-century Han pioneers would have struggled to convert Taiwan’s plains into rice paddies. Literature and folk songs from that era celebrate cattle which saved the lives of their owners by warning of impending earthquakes or other disasters.

In other stories, farmers who butchered a buffalo for food are plagued by nightmares in which the animal takes revenge. A lingering aversion to bovine meat continues to influence perhaps one in 10 non-vegetarian Taiwanese, and is a reason why local steakhouses typically offer a few pork and chicken alternatives.

According to Sun Yin-rui, whose 2001 thesis for a master’s degree at National Central University’s Graduate Institute of History was titled “History of Beef as a Food for Taiwanese,” cattle were occasionally rustled and slaughtered for their meat in the second half of the 19th century, but mainstream attitudes to the eating of beef did not begin to change until after Japan’s 1895 takeover of Taiwan.    [FULL  STORY]