flesh: [OE] The etymological notion underlying flesh, and its near relative flitch ‘side of bacon’ [OE], is of ‘slitting open and cutting up an animal’s carcase for food’. It, together with its continental cousins, German fleisch and Dutch vleesch ‘flesh’ and Swedish fläsk ‘bacon’, comes ultimately from Indo-European *pel- ‘split’. Consequently, the earliest recorded sense of the Old English word flǣsc is ‘meat’; the broader ‘soft animal tissue’, not necessarily considered as food, seems to have developed in the late Old English period. => flitch
