Dear Laura,<br /><br />Thank you so much for these extremely valuable comments. As always, you were spot on with tone and accuracy. Mark my words, if I get this, I'm going to send you a cake.<br /><br />The IAS is in fact not China specific. They choose eight historians from across the entire discipline. My job was to make them care about this particular story. Taking your advice, I added a line that "China is currently among the world&rsquo;s largest producers of beef, mutton and dairy, and is on the way to becoming the largest consumer, with ramifications ranging from climate change to coronary disease. Much of this historic transformation is simply not known." That one sentence may end up making all the difference.<br /><br />Growing up in not-especially-urban Indiana, the local Chinese restaurant was our window to the world, and Mongolian beef was in fact my favorite dish. I am sad to say that nothing like that dish exists in actual Mongolia. Think about it - if you slaughter a cow, you need about fifty people on hand and ready to eat. A sheep&nbsp;is much more manageable. And the actual preparation would be boiled - in part because fire was considered sacred, so you couldnt allow animal fat to fall&nbsp;into it.