Doesn’t the flesh decay?
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The meat decays because someone else is eating it. Microbes, specifically. This wouldn’t be a problem for us if it weren’t for the fact that these microbes can infect us, causing disease, and the waste chemicals they produce as they chow down are toxic to us, causing food poisoning.
The solution that several ancient and more modern people came up with (whether they knew it at the time or not) was to make the meat as inhospitable to microbes as possible. Curing deprives them of water, canning deprives them of access, smoking poisons them. There’s also another preservative technique called the forever soup. You make a soup and keep it over flame. You ladle some out whenever someone wants to eat and you add more ingredients whenever they’re found. And you keep the flame going. Forever. There are forever soups right now that are older than you and me. But nothing in the pot decays because it’s far too hot for microbes to survive.
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