No, that’s just an ad-hoc rationalization. Before refrigeration, people didn’t just leave fresh meat lying around. Either it was consumed immediately after cooking it, or it was smoked, cured or dried right away after butchering (people used much more salt than they do nowadays for e.g. modern hams to make sure the meat lasted a long time). The climate doesn’t really matter - in temperate climates fresh meat goes bad rapidly as well.
Just going to point out that cold storage predates modern refrigeration by literal millenia, hell there was a Greek island that mastered it well enough to consistently manufacture ice cream. I think the term I’ve heard is lagen basically a stone basement with evaporation boxes that can be used to keep tempatures around 50°F. The problem was consistency and how much labor it took to actually build the things, also they’d sometimes just kinda break if the environment shifted too much or were only usable during certain seasons.
No, that’s just an ad-hoc rationalization. Before refrigeration, people didn’t just leave fresh meat lying around. Either it was consumed immediately after cooking it, or it was smoked, cured or dried right away after butchering (people used much more salt than they do nowadays for e.g. modern hams to make sure the meat lasted a long time). The climate doesn’t really matter - in temperate climates fresh meat goes bad rapidly as well.
Just going to point out that cold storage predates modern refrigeration by literal millenia, hell there was a Greek island that mastered it well enough to consistently manufacture ice cream. I think the term I’ve heard is lagen basically a stone basement with evaporation boxes that can be used to keep tempatures around 50°F. The problem was consistency and how much labor it took to actually build the things, also they’d sometimes just kinda break if the environment shifted too much or were only usable during certain seasons.