Exactly, but the outrage (such as there is one) is not about the specific outcome that we have been eating scabby horse, it’s about the unknown outcomes that the loss of control must have permitted.
Also, labeling issues. Food corps have a history of being resistant to useful labeling, such as all their lobbying against having to declare whether their food product is GMO or not. Sometimes food corps want to add things to your food on purpose, without having to tell you. If your beef isn’t entirely beef, what else are they (purposely) not telling you?
Do you have a cite for this? I’m wondering because, as I said in the other thread, Romania has very recently finished their very first motorway. At first there was indeed no law against taking a pony and trap onto the motorway (AFAIK, or people just did it any way). This wasn’t much of a problem until recently, because the motorway wasn’t finished, but now you want to drive at a decent speed on that stretch. So a law against horses on the motorway makes sense. You also sometimes see signs on specific roads indicating no horse and cart/no tractor; I think that’s just because it’s a bad road.
But I have some doubts that this has left enough surplus horses to supply Ikea with meat balls. I don’t think people would get rid of their horses en masse: you’re just not allowed to take them onto the motorway anymore. There are still plenty of uses for a horse, especially in Romania. Surely not all European meat has been contaminated with dodgy Romanian horse just because they can’t go on the motorway anymore? It’s got to be bigger than that, considering the amounts.
I’m pretty sure Europe gets North American horse. Right now we export horses to Mexico and Canada for slaughter and from there it makes its way to Europe. I don’t know all the details about that. Obama signed a bill authorizing the inspection of horse meat so horse processing plants can reopen. There are some restaurants that want to serve horse, and there is some demand in certain immigrant communities. We Americans might have to get used to seeing it more often.
It seemed the Humane Society’s plan backfired. They didn’t want horses slaughtered so they got a rider taking away money for inspections of horse meat. No inspections, no horse processing. Horses were then shipped to Mexico & Canada and I guess the horses were treated inhumanely enough by our standards it’s better to allow horse slaughter in the US again. Something like that.
No cite - only what I’ve heard repeated in the news etc (which strongly concurs with the above)
LOL, I am the most anti-PETA person in the world.
My point was that if you are going to be a vegan, or join PETA, you should at least apply the argument consistently instead of picking and choosing which animal you care about.
But I’m not. I think they’re all good eatin’s.
I understand the arguments about the contaminated and unsupervised food supply much more than I understand the “ick factor” argument.
Devil’s Advocate here: If our food supply can mix horses in with the cows, how do you know there is no dolphin mixed in your tuna?
DUN DUN DUUUUUNNNN!
On the Straight Dope, perhaps. In the world at large, a huge portion of this has to do with the ick factor. Exhibit A:
…and no one’s freaking out about it. There have been a couple of news reports about it, and there’s industry and food safety concerns and calls for changing labeling procedures, but there’s no widespread outcry and no one’s pulling fish off the shelf until it can be properly labeled.
And Exhibit B:
And people widely lost their shit when they found out that their beef was contaminated with…more beef.
This is 10% concern over food safety, and 90% emotional food taboo outrage. In the US, emotional *recreational *outrage, since the horsemeat hasn’t been found here.
I know, right?! I’m a (non-proselytizing) vegetarian and I’m way more pissed off and concerned about the mislabeling of fish than most people I know, even though I’m not eating it. People go apeshit over their kids eating “pink slime”-containing burgers in school cafeterias but aren’t saying boo over maybe having given them (or eaten while pregnant) higher-mercury fish to eat.
Thing is, that’s an American example you are quoting, but this isn’t an American issue. The question is are the Europeans freaking out because its horse meat, or for the safety reasons?
The safety. Nobody I’ve spoken to is freaking out because we ate a different species from the one we expected. It’s done anyway.
The supermarkets are freaking out a bit because it looks bad.
The media wants everyone to be freaking out, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they cherrypick some VoxPops from a few people who perhaps are freaking out.
How did you double post *twelve *hours apart!?
I want anything labeled “beef” to be beef.
I don’t want to eat meat from a horse not raised for slaughter.
I don’t want to eat meat from a cow or pig not raised for slaughter.
I don’t want to eat meat from Enos Slaughter either.