Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)

My personal theory based on nothing more than the vibe of the thing is that it comes from the Malay/Indonesian word ‘kecap’ (which is pronounced almost identically to “ketchup”), the word for sweet soy sauce. This is soy sauce that is thickened and sweetened with palm sugar, and I could see European cooks attempting to replicate it based on the vague descriptions given by sailors, and ending up with ketchup.

茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho

Not exactly a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese calls tomatoes "cà chua": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A0_chua .

possibly Hokkien 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”) via Malay kecap ~ kicap “any dark clear sauce from soy, fish etc”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup#Etymology

It helps that Latin has the word pomus for fruit.

I wonder what they call maize in Egypt then?

According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?

Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.

Thank you! In Hebrew we literally call the potato תפוח אדמה which is "ground apple". Now I know where the idea comes from.

I find it fascinating that the Persian word for "foreign"/"Western", farangi, actually means "Frankish", which gives some idea of the "compressed geography" people experience regarding faraway places. It was also used to name a race on Star Trek.

Meanwhile English speakers joke about disagreements over the pronunciation of tomato

Sorry, when I said in nature, I meant undomesticated sheep.

Domesticated sheep that get lost for a while don't magically learn how to shed their coat, yes.

I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.

My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.

I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.

My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.

I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.

I'd say that in Greece the dominant meats are pork and chicken. That's the main meat in all the grill houses and the meat in gyros and souvlaki. Lamb is beloved but eaten more rarely, particularly in religious feasts, especially Easter Sunday where the tradition is to put a lamb on a spit and eat everything off it down to the bones (except the entrails that are made in a special soup to end Lent, or various sweet meat skewers like kokoretsi, gardoumba, splinandero, etc). It's also more expensive than pork and chicken so it tends to be left for special dinners at home.

But, honestly, nothing beats a nice pilafi with lamb, with garlic wedges and slowly cooked until the meat falls off the bone.

Yeah but India heavily uses dairy products to make up for the taste and protein deficiency. Vegetables are goddamn delicious but in a different way. I’ll eat vegetables all day but they are not nutritious enough and “satisfying” enough to complete the meal.

By the way, I’m sorry if this is all coming off pretty sharp, but I have what I think is a legitimate hate of veganism. I think it’s on par with the “health at every size” nonsense that people are trying to do where they are trying to normalize obesity. At least with them with GLP-1 they have found they don’t need to carry on with their delusion anymore, but vegans are still going strong.

The vast majority of Africans aren't hunter-gatherers living in mud huts. They have actual cities with highways and skyscrapers and everything.