Source: Global Times
Oil painting "Robbery of Europa"
Editor's Note: The Year of the Ox is approaching. This animal, which was domesticated about 8,000 years ago, accompanied by human beings through different social forms, penetrated into multiple levels of human society, economy, politics and so on, leaving different imprints in various countries and having a rich image.
[Global Times special correspondent Wang Viqi] This year is China's Year of the Ox. In Chinese culture, cattle possess qualities of hard work, simplicity, integrity, and loyalty; in Western culture, cattle symbolize wealth and strength more, and even play an important role in the process of "creating and changing" history.
In mythology "conceived" Nordics
In ancient Greek mythology, cattle represented the power to call the wind and rain, supreme power, and powerful reproductive ability. There are many stories about cattle, the most famous of which is the origin of Europe: Zeus, the king of the gods, transformed into a snow-white and strong bull and kidnapped Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king Argonor, and took her to a strange continent. Here, Europa and Zeus had 3 children, and the land was finally named after "Europa", which is today's Europe. Zeus sent his avatar as a bull into the sky, becoming a shining Taurus in the night sky.
In Norse creation myths, cattle act more like mothers, providing a steady stream of nutrients for humans. The ancient Norse people believed that the universe was originally in a darkness, without earth and sea, and from the icebergs of the north were born the ancestors of the giants, Ymir and the cow Odembra. The cow licked the salt on the iceberg with its thick tongue, releasing the ancestor of the gods, Boolee, from the iceberg. The milk of the cow nourished the original Giants and the Gods, and later the two races fought for milk, and the Gods eventually won and became the masters of the world. They built land from the body of the dead giant Ymir, whose hair turned into plants on land, bones into rolling mountains, and teeth into steep cliffs. The gods placed the cows on a plateau in the middle of the earth, and the milk formed a large river flowing in all directions.
Medieval Europe: Eating beef makes people brave and good at war
Before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, cattle were an important tool of production, and beef was not the main ingredient for Europeans at that time. Until the Middle Ages, European aristocrats and knights believed that "eating what to make up for", such as eating beef, could make people brave and good at war, so bloody semi-cooked steaks began to become popular in the upper class. Later, with the development of aquaculture and meat trade, beef became one of the relatively cheap foods before the large-scale cultivation of potatoes. By the 19th century, Austrians, who excelled in cooking, had even pioneered the "beef culture" known in Europe.
In addition to beef, milk is also an indispensable drink on the table of Europeans. During the last ice age, adults could not drink milk directly because they could not produce lactose-breaking enzymes like babies. However, in the Neolithic Age, herders were the first to master the method of making cheese, yogurt and other foods through milk fermentation, so that the lactose content in them was reduced to a level acceptable to adults. About 5,000 years ago, humans living in the European region directly evolved lactose tolerance genes. More than 90% of Nordics today are lactose tolerant, but relatively few asians and South Americans have this ability.
"Dairy Parade" exhibition works
Modern business society: "Cow" elements can be found everywhere
In Germany, the most popular cow is a purple cow. It is not a real cow, but a pattern on the packaging of the Top Three German chocolate brands in Europe, "Myoka". The Myoka brand has the exclusive right to use the purple chocolate packaging certified by the German Federal Court. In the 1970s, for the first time, cows with purple spots appeared in Myoka's advertising, a subversive marketing strategy that not only won the International Art Direction Association's Gold Award for Design and Advertising Art, but also made the novel image of "Purple Cow" quickly recognized and accepted by the public. Today, the purple cow is almost a household name in Germany, and it is even the first "cow" that many German children living in the city have seen. In the 1990s, during a painting event in Bavaria with 40,000 elementary school students, 1 in three children painted cows purple on colored cards.
The "Dairy Parade" is an international public space art project born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1988, originally established to promote Swiss dairy culture and showcase the talents of local artists. Based on real cows, the event uses fiberglass to create realistic white models of standing, grazing and lying horizontally, and the patron invites artists to create on the cows in a hand-drawn manner. Over the years, with the continuous expansion of the scale and influence of the event, the "Dairy Parade" has been invited to be held in dozens of cities around the world, and the number of visitors has exceeded 100 million. Thousands of artists from around the world have participated in the project, creating thousands of cow artworks. The artworks were auctioned locally and the funds raised were used for charity.