> Australia and New Zealand have Western traditional aesthetics, Lamb and mutton are common here. What changed here ?
In my personal experience, mutton is not common in contemporary Australia. My local supermarkets (Woolworths and Coles) stock lamb, but I don’t remember either of them ever selling mutton. Maybe some specialty butchers might stock it, I don’t know, there isn’t much culture of eating it among the younger generations. That said, I imagine if I went back in a time machine to the 1950s or earlier, it would be much easier to find mutton in Australia.
Only time - that I can recall - ever eating “mutton” was in India - and I’ve been told that a lot of Indian “mutton” isn’t actually mutton, it is goat. You can buy goat meat here, most supermarkets don’t, but I’ve seen it in specialty butchers
I grew up in Australia with mutton making up 90% of my meat intake, as we slaughtered our own merino wethers (so not the breeds of lamb raised for eating).
The local butchers would also have a decent stock of different cuts, particularly things like neck chops for stews. Numbers of sheep around are lower now, so that may have limited things a little.
I also think hogget is equally as or more common than lamb in city butchers. Some of those chops are huge and have a nice tang.
OMG, every time we visit Grandma we hear the stories about the difference between Lamb and Mutton and that that, actually, everything we buy these days in Mutton and they stopped labeling it mutton because Lamb is more expensive. And nothing is as good at it used to be.
Agreed, I remember growing up in country WA and we would have mutton as it was a cheaper option afaik, but it’s almost impossible to get these days - all lamb.
UK too, TFA accurately scoped it to America, GP's just generalising it further (incorrectly) or perhaps means 'American' not 'Western'.
And on the Asia point, I'm pretty sure in India at least 'mutton' can refer to goat or 'lamb' of any age, typically goat, it's not making a rigid (regulated) distinction based on the age of the animal.
Same in Germany (well, lamb (regulated as max age 1 year), I haven’t actually seen mutton anywhere. Even the middle eastern butcher only sells lamb), though we mostly tend to import it from NZ for some reason.
NZ has insane economies of scale and other efficiencies that mean it makes the cheapest lamb in the world. NZ lamb is usually cheaper than Welsh even in UK supermarkets.
