<P> Ireland produced a significant amount of the corned beef in the Atlantic trade from local cattle and salt imported from the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France . Coastal cities, such as Dublin, Belfast, and Cork, created vast beef curing and packing industries, with Cork producing half of Ireland's annual beef exports in 1668 . Although the production and trade of corned beef as a commodity was a source of great wealth for the colonial nations of Britain and France (which were participating in the Atlantic slave trade), in the colonies themselves, the product was looked upon with disdain due to its association with poverty and slavery . </P> <P> Increasing corned beef production to satisfy the rising populations of the industrialised areas of Great Britain and Atlantic trade worsened the effects of the Irish Famine and the Great Potato Famine: </P> <P> The Celtic grazing lands of...Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries . The British colonized...the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home...The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of...Ireland . Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil . Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival . </P> <P> Despite being a major producer of beef, most of the people of Ireland during this period consumed little of the meat produced, in either fresh or salted form, due to its prohibitive cost . This was because most of the farms and its produce were owned by wealthy Anglo - Irish who were absentee landlords and that most of the population were from families of poor tenant farmers, and that most of the corned beef was exported . </P>

Where does corn beef come from what animal