Archaeological evidence suggests dog offered a meaty supplement to farmed produce as far back as 5,000 years ago.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/07/31
By: Steven Crook and Katy Hui-wen Hung
Photo credit: Steven Cook
To a large extent, Taiwan’s original inhabitants were able to live off the fat of the land. Because the island’s fecund environment and biodiversity provided a range of foods, the estimated 100,000 Austronesian people living here when the Dutch East India Company established its trading base at Tainan in 1624 did not need to engage in serious agriculture. Instead, they hunted and gathered.
At least some indigenous people consumed enough protein to grow big and tall. In his book “How Taiwan Became Chinese”, Tonio Andrade quotes early European visitors who were impressed by the health and strength of local folk in the southwest, where venison was a staple.
Chen Di (陳第), a Fujianese scholar who accompanied a Ming dynasty piracy-suppression expedition to Taiwan, saw Siraya aborigines eating every part of the deer they caught, including (to his revulsion) the intestines and contents thereof. They did not, however, eat chickens, finding them quite disgusting.
In “Dong Fan Ji” (東番記, Notes on the Eastern Barbarians), the short account Chen authored on his return to China in 1603, he recorded that the native people did not cultivate paddy fields. Instead, they grew upland-style a strain of rice that produced longer grains than the rice he was familiar with. [FULL STORY]
