Some suspect that horse meat is already slipped into the hamburgers of some cheap diners and frozen patties.
Horses. One of the most celebrated and stupidest animals in the world. Good for plowing fields, making glue and turning into meat products. A horse will look pretty and graceful and I strongly suspect that their very ‘feminine’ ass has something to do with their favor, but ride one on a path, let it hear a noise and it will shy, dump you on whatever made the noise and run like hell. A thirsty horse will drink itself into bloat. A horse gets spooked at almost anything and after disposing of you, will let you chase it around the country side, pausing to browse until you get to close, then galloping off again. Your favorite horse will dump your butt, have you stuck in the stirrup and drag you 3 or 4 miles before it realized that the noise it jumped at was a cricket and stop.
They bite and think its funny.
Give them a chance and they’ll run right off of a cliff – with you in the saddle so you can see first hand how stupid they are. They know you feed them, care for them, curry them, salve their injuries but you have to tie them up at night because they’ll wander off over the horizon if you let them.
In old times, horse meat was readily consumed, but beef is more flavorful. Horse meat is often left for pet foods.
So maybe I’m missing something. All the reasons listed about not eating horses seem reasonable. So why is it acceptable in some cultures to eat horses, but not in others?
To summarize, there seem to be 2 explanations:
a) Horses were too valuable economically to eat. Then cheap beef came around, and we were culturally conditioned to eat beef and not horses and now no one wants horses even if it’s cheaper than beef (as may have been the case in the 70’s.)
b) In areas where eating horsemeat was common, because beef never got cheap (or for whatever other reason), they were never culturally weaned from horsemeat so now they continue to munch it happily.
What other reasons besides cheap beef have gotten cultures away from the horse habit? I’m actually assuming that at some point in Britain, the U.S., and any other non horse indulging parts of the world, it used to be ok to eat horses, but just isn’t done any more.
(BTW, as far as the economic argument goes, it sure doesn’t hurt to eat your dead nag, who is never going to plow another field again and could feed the extended family for days.)
Are there any (small) geographical areas with say 2 major native cultures, where one eats horses and the other doesn’t?
Well that was longer than I intended. I hope this made sense and wasn’t terribly redundant.
Well, one answer to the question of economics is that some people might be willing to pay more to eat horse than beef or pork. In Japan, basashi, or raw horse meat (finely chopped, sometimes with a little bit of onion) is, if not a delicacy, at least a novelty that can be eaten in some restaurants for about double the price of regular beef (about $12 for a small serving).
And for the record, it tastes pretty good. As did the horse sausage and horse steaks I ate in France.
Re the post about shark, kangaroo and ostrich meat. All are readily available in Australia for human consumption. Sahrk is sold in fish and chip shops as “flake”, and is a prime ingredient in fish fingers and osimilar processed fish products.
Kangaroo is noted as being very similar to beef in flavour (maybe slightly gamey) and is very low in fat content. I reckon it tastes great.
I can’t speak for ostrich, but I have eaten emu (native Australian bird similar to an ostrich) and it is similarly lean and flavoursome.
The Link channel recenty had a news story about the horse meat industry in the USA. IIRC, there are 3 horse slaughter houses in Texas and most of the meat is sent to europe. The Link channel is liberal and the show was very anti-horse meat. Personally I don’t have an opnion.
Shark is sold like mad in the US. Not only can you order shark steaks in restaurants, but most scallops you get are actually shark meat. If you notice your scallops are quite large (about an inch in diameter), they’re probably shark. If they’re little, they’re probably real scallops.
As a side note, people have a longer history of eating horses than of rising and keeping them. There are a lot o prehistoric fins of horse kills, especially of horses stampeded over cliffs in mass killings. These predate any evidence of horses being ridden. Cattle seem to have been domesticated as milk producers and dracft animals long before horses. One of the advantages cows have over horses, by the way, is that they can be milked easily and produce large quantities of milk. Apparently it is VERY difficult to milk horses, and you don’t get a lot for your efforts. (There were specialists among the horse-riding tribes who performed this task, according to Harris.) Lastly, you can;t simply adapt the rig for yoking oxen to yoking horses for the task of pulling carts – the strap that goes across the throat in the case of oxen ends up pressing on the windpipe and the jugular on horses, suffocating them and restricting the flow of blood (according to James Burke in “Connections”). It was relatively late when the Horsecollar was invented to solve this problem, allowing larger and faster horses to contribute to work on the farm. After these things has been invented (along with the surprisingly late introduction of the stirrup) horses were too valuable to cut up for food. Even so, horseeat eating has gone on, even if in a much reduced way, right up to the present.
What a surprise that the Japanese will eat raw horse!! (Not!) I’ve watched their Iron Chef program a couple of times and figure if it walks, slithers, crawls, scampers, flies or hops, they’ll eat it. (No wonder it was so hard to starve them out on some islands in WW2. They ate the island and liked it!)
I was in an ethnic shop one afternoon and just browsing some of the shelves. I picked up a can and although I couldn’t read the writing there was some small english print on the back that said it was horsemeat.
I was as repulsed as I would have been if it had said “dog meat”. It must be purely cultural on my part.
In North America we generally don’t eat the cute and cuddly animals or those we consider intelligent.
Emu is becoming more popular here… the meat is very lean and I hear that it is quite tasty. From a producers point of view the Emu is a prolific breeder and two Emu can create a flock in about a year. Their skin can also be used to make quality leather.
Actually, the meat being passed off as scallops is flounder.! It is taken from the ridge along the backbone of the larger catch.
Horses, monkeys, parrots, snakes, squirrals. rabbits. armadillos, cats, dogs, rats, humans and anything else
that has ever existed on this earth has been a part of the food recipe book for a Saturday afternoon bar-b-que since the existance of campfires.!
If you’re not sure what you’re eating…put a little salt, pepper, natural herbs or even ketchup on it and have a glass of strong alcoholic beverage with it. enjoy.!
Just make sure whatever you’re eating, buys the next round.!
See William Poundston’e book “Big Secrets” for more on the use f founder an other “trash fish” as faux scallops. It also tells you how to tell the difference, and surveys several frozen “scallops” to see which contain fake scallops.
One of the sillier propositions that has crossed the ballot in California in recent years was proposition 6 in 1998, banning the sale of horsemeat or horses for human consumption.
Banned horse meat in Ca? I don’t know why, if some fancy chef whips it up, charges $50 a plate, serves it half raw in a wine sauce, they’ll not only eat it, but brag about it to their friends.
Scallops used to be faked by catching sting rays and using a punch to cut circular chunks of meat out of the wings. I took a friend to a pretty fancy restaurant one time off of a coupon in one of those booklets the Chamber of Commerce sell to raise cash. You know, $20 bucks for the book and you get free meals or discounts. Well, she ordered scallops and I had something else, but as soon as she tasted them, she knew they were fake. She said they were too fibrous to be real. She sent them back and had something else.
Hello, can I just say that so many of these responses make loads of sense - oh, hell, I just realised that there is a phrase about horse sense - but I have had a much more confusing day/night than I expected, so please, let me thank you all, but at present I don’t think I can really take in all that has been said, or reply properly.
I suppose I mean I’d need to take time to do my revision first, as in look carefully at all suggestions in order to do justice to your wise thoughts. And the funny ones! I am sorry, really, but I’ve sort of not slept enough, and had to spend evening on the telephone with relatives and friends. So this is just a longwinded apology note, I suppose. Look, I AM sorry, but I don’t have enough brain cells going, so I am off to sleep soon, or to eat my cat perhaps. Heh! Heh!
enjoy.!