They're Made Out of Meat Labels
Back in the caveman days, meat labels were pretty straightforward and didn't have anything to do with paper, though sight was an issue. So was smell. If you could see it, you could pretty much tell what it was and, depending on the number of flies and larvae, how long since it died, Smell was also a dead-giveaway (so to speak). Claiming it as food was up to whether you minded a little extra protein in your diet, or you minded holding your nose while you cooked.
There was nothing glamorous about acquiring food back then, you see. You took what you could chase down, and if you couldn't chase something down, you took from another hungry critter, or you took whatever happened to be lying around. So what if your meat was a little green? A good fire could take care of that in a jiffy! And those wolves and lions? They never eat everything. If you were at the head of the clean-up line when they finished, you could still get some good cuts of meat and a lot of soup bones. Yum! Vultures had nothing on our caveman ancestors.
As for cavewomen, they had better taste. They were the ones who dug up or collected the wholesome vegetables and picked the berries that made up most of our ancestral diets.
Drying, smoking, salting, and other meat preservation techniques improved the human recipe book, and probably extended our lifespans as well, since there was less food poisoning to fight off. Meat labels weren't much yet, though. Usually you could still tell what something was by looking and using the sniff test, though forward-thinking dieticians were working toward meat labels by say, putting the bison jerky in a different colored bag that the smoked fish, and the buzzard strips in yet another. Color-coding is a great memory enhancer.
Starting a couple of centuries ago, people figured out how to can, wrap, and otherwise prepare meat for sale, especially in cities, where most people only kept a few cows and pigs at best. The first food labels started appearing that time, with meat labels basically paper-and-glue markers that told you what was in the can. Of course, you had to take their word on that. In time, as the government caught on to the fact that some of the "chipped beef" they were buying tasted an awful lot like floor-scrapings, they started forcing meat packers to tell the truth and include all the meat sources for the stuff in their tins. After that, all the leftovers started going into sausages, especially frankfurters and bologna. That's why the ingredient lists on the meat labels for those products are longer than your hand.
After 1913, meat packers started introducing products intended to be refrigerated and frozen, since the first commercial and home freezers and fridges appeared right about then. Freezer labels and refrigerator labels of all kinds showed up, actually. It took a while for label makers to formulate the right materials for these new freezer stickers and such, since they had to deal with really cold temperatures, ice, and moisture and still stay stuck on the right products. These days, the right meat labels (the ones we make at Freezer-Labels.com) can handle temperatures down to -60 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as all forms of moisture, without detaching or turning to mush.
Modern freezer stickers and refrigerator food labels also tend to include showy logos, government mandated nutritional listings, origins of the meat (especially sustainability info for seafood labels), and even markers indicating whether or not the meat products meet the dietary laws for popular religions. Kosher Jewish meats cannot share refrigerators with dairy products, cannot contain pork, shellfish, and a few other types of meat, and the animals from which they come must be slaughtered a certain way. Often, a rabbi oversees the processing and blesses the meat. Halal Islamic foods must be prepared in similar but different ways. Halal and Kosher foods typically have a mark indicating that they are acceptable in a prominent place on the meat label.
Add it all up, and you've got the modern, rather crowded meat label. Most other freezer labels are similar, although popsicle labels, ice cream labels, pizza labels, frozen fruit labels and frozen vegetable labels usually contain fewer words and more room for pictures. After all, an apple is an apple, though popsicles might contain all kinds of tasty chemicals and vitamins that scientists hide by using their scientific names, so the kids won't know. (Ascorbic acid = Vitamin C. Aha!).
Need a bunch of meat labels? Contact us and we'll make them for you for a great price with quick turnaround. Meat labels are among our bread-and-butter products, and no one beats ours for quality and speed.