Eating horse meat was very common in central Europe before the big wars.
In WWI and WWII even more so, horses were declared essential for the war in axis countries, and eating them became illegal.
In Italy horse meat picked right up again after WWII, but in Austria and Germany people forgot about the reasons it seems and it stayed unacceptable/frowned upon.
You can find (excellent) horse meat products in western Austria, but the market is tiny, the reaction you get is typically "Eeehwww!".
It is an excellent, very iron rich, lean meat. But since my wife loves horses, I haven't eaten any for many years.
Eating horse meat in the United Kingdom was seemingly quite common in the United Kingdom prior to 2013 but nobody knew about it[0], when common products were found to contain horse meat and the public reaction turned into a huge story / scandal and most people in the UK would have the same ewww reaction.
It wasn’t just a huge scandal for the “ewww” factor but mostly due to the fact that the horse was not part of the traceable supply chain and thus could have come from anywhere, could have contained any number of contaminants/hormones/banned substances, the horses could have been mistreated in violation of ethical standards, etc.
In Cologne the classical Sauerbraten ( the most famous meat dish in the region) is from horse meat. I live in a house in Karlsruhe and the last business on the ground floor was a horse butcher. Germany, however, has become the land of mass produced meat, which can be done with pigs much easier. Horse meat is an expensive niche product.
In Sweden horsemeat used to be sold commonly in supermarkets everywhere as thinly sliced sandwich charcuterie. Interestingly it’s called “hamburger-meat”.
The last 10 or so years I’ve noticed it’s gradually disappeared from Stockholm stores.
At least in Venice we still eat, for example, frayed dry horse meat ("sfilacci di cavallo"), which is more difficult to find in Rome, where I now live.
Last Christmas I bought by mistake a horse sopressa[0] thinking it was pork and bought it down to Rome. My in-laws were surprised to say the least :)
I don't eat horse meat myself but my girlfriend loves it and it's really hard to find it in Rome.
Traditional cuisine here is mostly about ovine meat, lamb mostly ("abbacchio")
There's a typical roman food "coppiete" that was traditionally made with dried horse meat (similar to beef jerky) but nowadays the pork meat version is much more popular.
Don't know why exactly.
Strangely enough horse meat is a favorite for many of my roman friends, even though it's not easy to get it.
Not only in the south, in Emilia Romagna it is common enough, as an example, and though not common, it can be found in Tuscany and Umbria with a minimum of effort.
There are many more ewww type meats that we culturally accept, like crustaceans. I mean, they're sea insects basically. I enjoy a good prawn yet I'm repulsed by the idea of eating a scorpion. I am aware it's just a cultural artifact and not DNA driven disgust.
On the other hand herbivores and ruminants are the type of meat humans find the most delicious, and horse is one of them. Carnivores or omnivores I seem to understand they don't taste as good, and here's my justification for never considering cats, dogs, bears, etc., as possible food unless my life depends on it.
‘Family’ doesn’t really have a defined meaning in modern taxonomy. Horses and cows are part of the same clade, ‘ungulata’ - hooved mammals. It’s not a Linnaean taxonomic ally ‘ranked’ clade though, like an ‘order’ or a ‘genus’ - but those terms aren’t really that formally valid, so using ‘family’ informally to mean ‘clade with some reasonable level of shared characteristics’ seems fair.
But to also be fair, if you want to classify horses and cows as edible based on their shared common ancestry, you’re also arguing for eating giraffes, tapirs, rhinos, hippos, whales and dolphins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_(biology) "Family (Latin: familia, plural familiae) is one of the eight major hierarchical taxonomic ranks in Linnaean taxonomy. It is classified between order and genus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equidae "Equidae (sometimes known as the horse family) is the taxonomic family of horses and related animals, including the extant horses, donkeys, and zebras, and many other species known only from fossils."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovidae "The Bovidae comprise the biological family of cloven-hoofed, ruminant mammals that includes cattle, bison, buffalo, antelopes, and goat-antelopes. A member of this family is called a bovid."
> But to also be fair, if you want to classify horses and cows as edible based on their shared common ancestry, you’re also arguing for eating giraffes, tapirs, rhinos, hippos, whales and dolphins.
The argument is about whether horses and cattle are in the same family, not that a species' taxonomic classification can be an indication that they ought to be eaten.
My point is that Linnaeus's 'family' is not rigorously defined and generally not a very precise term anyway. If you're not sure what level of clade a pair of related creatures share, referring to them as being 'in the same family', informally, is fine.
And Ungulata is a clade. "Ungulates (/ˈʌŋɡjəleɪts, -ləts/ UNG-gyə-layts, - ləts) are members of the diverse clade Ungulata which primarily consists of large mammals with hooves."
As a clade, it includes several clades that are historically classified as 'orders' and several that are 'families'. It would be inaccurate to say 'horses and cows are members of the same Linnaean order'; but equally, in Linnaean terms, it would be insufficiently precise to say they share the same Linnaean 'grandorder', because that's also true of, say, a grizzly bear, or a badger.
Basically, if you're going to be taxonomically pedantic, I think it's better to be pedantic about the Actual taxonomy (i.e. the real common ancestry of an organism) than it is to be pedantic about the metataxonomy (i.e., the classification of clades as 'order' or 'family' or 'genus')
I know what you mean, because of those 3 species, dogs are the only ones to be commonly kept as pets. But what is it that puts horses, dogs, and cows in the same/different categories?
This is actually a really good point. Dogs will eat really disgusting food, perusing the trash or eating poop at times.. I wouldn’t eat a raccoon for the same reason. Horses and cattle eat grass, they’re vegan
It is quite common here in Switzerland. Cafeterias serve it as well as regular restaurants but, admittedly, it is not as common as beef, pork, chicken or lamb. Surprisingly, it is illegal in Texas and other parts of the US though it may not be enforced. Texas even bans transportation of horse meat through the state.
> Texas even bans transportation of horse meat through the state.
Horse meat is banned in the whole US in the most American way possible: by the roundabout way of the government not providing horse meat inspectors.
Technically, you can eat meat in some places if you prepare it yourself, but since there are no inspectors there would be no way to sell it.
In the same way, it's not federally illegal to drink before 21, but congress will cut highway funds to any state which allows 20 year olds to drink.
BTW, I read in a book about The Godfather that Coppola remarked how ridiculous it is that people were upset that he used a real horse head and blood in the movie, but not with the fact that it came from a slaughterhouse which would have used it to make dog food.
>Surprisingly, it is illegal in Texas and other parts of the US though it may not be enforced.
This is second-hand, but I was told by a horse trainer in Kentucky that one reason is pharmaceutical: the drugs used on most horses in the US as a matter of course make them problematic for eating.
Horses are integral to the history and culture of Iceland to the point of having an exclusive breed of horses with their own unique gait yet you can still eat horse here.
Only from a different cultural context, there isn’t an objective idea about what’s correct here. The idea that horses should be privileged because they are historically important is itself interesting. Particularly in terms of how historically they were widely eaten. I also think there is a bit of retconning going on where our views of the animals now are assumed of our ancestors. For example I’m British and horses are generally not eaten but this it’d be ahistorical for me to claim that this was true even in the relatively recent past.
Also the idea that cowboys are uniquely horse based when vast swathes of the world was also using horses ubiquitously at the same time!
It's an integral part of my country's history (much more so than that of Texas IMHO). Same in our neighbor Mongolia. Horse meat isn't illegal here, and never was. I ate it a couple of times and nobody raised an eyebrow.
Are peaches used for anything else other than eating? The culture is based on eating peaches and they grow by the millions. It would be surprising if they made eating peaches illegal.
I suspect it is contemptous to eat an horse in Texas precisely because it provides a livelihood and killing one to eat is probably not a wise idea. Culturally, it is entirely understandable just like cows in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_in_religion_and_mytholo...
I am not here to argue whether it is ok to eat a horse or not. I am debating about whether it is surprising or not. It is not surprising at all IMO.
In Chile there's charqui, dried salted horsemeat. It's very flaky, and the mouth-feel of ripping chunks of the super-salty dry meat is very satisfying. It's quite different than american beef jerky, which is tougher, much darker and "juicier", and often has flavor added. The enjoyment of Chilean charqui is similar to anchovies: if you haven't acquired the delicious taste (it smells a bit like fish-food flakes), you will find it repulsive.
Like most farm animals, horses don't normally die of old age and are instead either slaughtered or put to sleep by a veterinarian. If you think about it, cremating or burying a big animal like that is costly. So, a lot of horses end up being processed in a meat factory instead. The resulting meat is used for all sorts of things all over the world.
Horse slaughter is actually banned in the US. However, a lot of horses there are simply exported across the border to Canada or Mexico where they are slaughtered anyway. Why pay to have the animal disposed off when you can get some money for the meat?
It's certainly not very green to waste that energy and nutrients by just throwing away that much usable meat that took a lot of energy and nutrients, c02 to grow.
Long ago I tried horse meat salami in France. It wasn’t terrible, but I prefer pork, or rather that’s what I was/am used to. Americans are surprised to hear when I talk about eating rabbit (again in France when I was a kid.) Those cute furry animals are delicious :)
Rabbit is eaten in the states, but it's kind of like venison: it's just not something you'll usually find in any store or restaurant, unless those places are specifically going out of their way to cater to either hunters or an "old world European" aesthetic. I can regularly get rabbit at either cheap redneck holes in the sticks or expensive German restaurants in the city.
People outside of the cities, and ethnic enclaves within cities, eat a lot of different types of meat. I've had goat, bear, possum, and even alligator. I've known people to eat squirrel, but I personally never considered it worth the effort.
There are also lots of different parts of the animal that you'll only find regionally. Various organ meats. Cow and pig intestines. Pigs feet. Pig snout. Pig cheek flesh. Bull testicles (called "Rocky Mountain Oysters" where I was from, though we were nowhere near the Rocky Mountains). Sections of beef brain (excellent battered and deep fried).
> Sections of beef brain (excellent battered and deep fried).
I'll take your word for it but I'm not tempted. After BSE and the outbreak of variant CJD which resulted, I wouldn't consider it worth the risk. I've wondered what brain tastes like, though. It's used in a few of Apicius's recipes. I substituted corned beef from BSE free Argentina when I cooked those.
I was forced to try it a few times as a kid and I can assure you it was disgusting, with a soft spongy texture and an unnatural taste that no amount of spices could hide.
Whole Halal goats and lamb are also sold in the frozen section at any Costco that has a large Muslim population around. Granted you then have to figure out how to cook the entire goat. I’m guessing they probably skewer it and roast it outdoors for parties?
My country relatives would build a giant barbecue grill (probably starting from an old propane tank or something similar) and throw the whole goat on. They were not Muslim; just rednecks.
Icelander here. Horse foal meat is some of the more expensive meat you can have at the finer restaurants in the country. At every butcher shops you can find foal meat, and most if not all supermarkets carry horse meat in some way (frozen, salted, smoked or as a sausage etc).
The finer foal cuts are really some of the best meat I have ever tasted. Highly recommend.
-- most intense lamb I've ever tried was in Iceland - had lamb many many times in Scotland and it was gamey - but the lamb in Iceland was next level - in fact it was so intense that I tried it at another restaurant the next day just to see if it was the place I'd eaten - nope - just as strong - I wondered why - if you happened to know --
All the sheep in Iceland are let out in the spring and spend their entire time living wild before being rounded up in autumn (which is a really big event). So they spend a lot more time eating quality food and mountain herbs. Makes all the difference. Lamb here really is amazing.
Male mutton tends to have a stronger taste, especially when older, where it can get too strong. It might depend on the age at which the lamb was slaughtered, as there is more meat as they grow older. (My parents raise a few sheep).
I think foal meat is a little bit too sweet for my taste, however i absolutely like horse-meat, we (Switzerland) even have specialized butchers (pferdemetzgerei) for horse-meat. Best meat next to (well prepared) camel.
We eat horsemeat in Italy as well, though not very commonly. I did a few times, eh, nothing to write home about. Also donkey meat ragu once, that was pretty good.
AFAIK rabbit meat is not viewed very well across the pond either, like in the US. Correct me if I'm wrong.
> rabbit meat is not viewed very well across the pond either, like in the US
It's not very common but I'm not shocked if I hear someone say they ate it, as I would be hearing someone ate horse.
Rabbit will occasionally be sold at normal grocers but generally in short supply. I remember it being more common when I was a kid and I associate it with older people.
Same with lamb, which is also increasingly rare stateside. I remember my mom's delicacy was lamb chops.
Goat is usually readily available where Caribbean or Indian populations are high. My local grocer usually has goat.
Rabbits fed the same kind of market that chickens do, but chickens have been engineered to produce absolutely massive amounts of meat for cheap, and rabbits haven't kept up.
we have lot of kebabs and « chicken whatever » fats foods in france because of utterly cheap so called meat comming from egg industry (usually poland or germany)I had to learn my wife what proper meet is about and get a discussion with the butcher. Now she gets high quality at cheap price…
Rabbit isn't tabboo like horse or dog, but it's not common due to fear of disease from eating out of season (there is a myth that eating rabbit in certain seasons is dangerous).
I don't know about across the pond, but there's definitely a taboo about it in the UK. I had a discussion about it with a gentleman who cooks for a pub and he was going out of his way to say that it's perfectly fine to eat rabbit and there's nothing wrong with it. We were seated at a Spanish restaurant in a town in the South of England, with a plate of kidneys, I believe, in front of us, and the conversation turned to meats that the British dont' commonly eat.
When I lived in Montreal I was surprised to find horse meat in a handful of regular supermarkets. It was cheaper than beef and it was pretty lean, 20 year-old student me appreciated both of those things. I found it pretty gamey and more flavorful than beef.
I did a bit of research and found out that Montreal had some of the largest horse slaughterhouses in the world. Apparently there are plenty of places in the world like Texas or Saudi Arabia with a lot of horses, and laws against slaughtering them for meat.
However if you're breeding a lot of horses you're going to end up with non-performing animals or too many horses for the space you have. So what can they do? They ship the live (healthy and not sick) animals to Montreal. They're slaughtered there and then shipped to places where they eat said meat.
Unfortunately they wouldn't let me get a tour, which was probably for the better anyway.
If I were single I'd try it. My wife would not be happy if I ate horse (she's an equestrian).
One thing the article didn't mention is whether the horses are raised for meat or if they are simply old horses that are no longer useful. I'd imagine a young horse would be more tender. Also, I wonder if the butchers sell meat from a stallion or if it has a different flavor.
Everyone in my family rides horses and eats horse meat; we don't see any problem with that -- at least we didn't. I haven't had horse for a long time, but when I was a child we had tartare de cheval every Saturday for lunch (and we went to ride horses the following day).
In French riding horses is "monter à cheval" but many people (who usually don't ride) improperly say "faire du cheval". The appropriate answer when someone asks "est-ce que tu fais du cheval?" is: "je monte à cheval; ce sont les bouchers qui font du cheval". (I ride horses; only butchers "do" horses).
Similar quirk that irks me in English is 'horseback riding': it's just 'riding' - or 'riding on horseback', 'horse riding' - the whole thing's coming!
'horseback riding' to me sounds like it's supposed to be a humourous phrase along the lines of 'driving a desk' (a sort of blue-collar self-deprecation for having moved up from driving whatever vehicle) - like you're still in training and haven't been given a live horse yet or something.
Indeed, calling it just "riding" is one of many odd horsepeople shibboleths. This is actually my other huge nerd topic.
Other ones include that nobody calls them stables, it's "the barn," there is a difference between a rider, an owner, horsewoman, horseman (horseman is a reverently reserved term of respect, and horsewoman is also a term of respect, both take a few decades of riding to earn, when a horsewoman is a horseman, it's like saying Maestro, it's deference). English and Western riding are a level of detail equivalent to red and white wine, they sort of describe more what you don't do more than what you in fact do. A trail ride is called going out for a hack, or going hacking, and a horse that is safe on a trail is called a good hack. Disciplines are very siloed and the equivalent difference would be someone interested in rally car racing vs. street racing, where they both like cars, but wouldn't have much to talk about other than some technical rivalry. It's almost to the level of the difference between SWE and devops, you're both "good at computers," but that's about all they have in common.
Wrt motorcycles, we also say motorcyclist or biker, not rider. Funny that the differences between motorcyclists and bikers are alot like that of English and Western riding, as they're motivated by different things.
Also, I've eaten a horse steak. I don't crave it, but it's neutral. Part of our human stewardship of nature involves killing, culling and eating other animals, just as bugs will devour my body once I go. The squeamishness around eating horse meat seems more like a fear of ones own mortality after being confronted with the body of a being one empathizes with. It's a free preference and choice, and I would only say that fear is expressed by people who would judge others for eating the meat, but not by someone who just doesn't eat it.
source: rides motorycle to the barn to go on a hack to unwind after hacking all day as a desk jockey and using hack writer skills to comment on hacker news.
I'm not a horseperson, I'd still say 'riding'. Didn't know about 'barns' though, not in that context anyway: I used to/would like to think I still play ice hockey; some call the rinks (or rather the buildings housing them) 'barns' too.
You can usually work it out from the context of the person you know. If you have friends who invite you out ambiguously because they're into both motorcycles and horses, lucky you!
They're horses raised for meat. When a horse is registered the owner needs to declare if it will be raised for meat consumption or not, that has implications about the type of medicines that the horse can take.
When I was a kid at school (France, late 70's), eating horse meat was something heard of. Not the kind of may you could eat everyday but you would see some at the butcher's (au least in the western suburbs of Paris). I never had some at the school canteen (I think).
Fast forward 40 years, same city. There is no horse meat anywhere. Eating some is unheard of. I just asked my teenage children: they never heard of it (and we're surprised that it was something you eat).
Of course this is just one data point, but I guess this is the general state today for middle class people in that region.
diets have become much less varied: back home people eat chicken hearts and stomacks, they are mostly muscle and actually taste nice.
All i see for sale in UK is liver which tastes very different to 'normal' meat, not a fan
Also it's now difficult to find rabbit and goose - they used to be normal, if not everyday, food
Well, at least here (Italy) in the '60's or '70's horse meat was actually "prescribed" by doctors to anemic or too skinny kids as it "makes blood" (that and liver).
I was never "forced" to it (I was far from skinny as a kid) but I remember that when a certain (actually skinny) cousin would come to my grandmother's invariably horse meat or liver would be prepared.
Yes, this is very true - that's why I mentioned my region expecting that lov=cal traditions may be diverse.
Out of curiosity - is rosbif Alsacien something that you would usually buy?(putting aside the price - I am just looking for statistical preferences in taste and provenance)
That horse meat "scandal" also hit Netherland, which surprised me. Well, selling horse meat as beef is obviously misleading, but a lot of people seemed to be upset about the very notion of eating horse meat, which is the part that surprised me. I still remember that when I was a kid, my parents would often buy smoked horse meat. It seems to be less common these days. I guess some people aren't familiar with it and therefore see it as weird or unnatural?
Then again, my wife is horrified by the idea of rabbit meat.
> I guess some people aren't familiar with it and therefore see it as weird or unnatural?
I think this is part of it, but there seems to be an amplifying effect where the social context - people being upset about mislabelled food leads to people feeling stronger about their otherwise small objection.
It's almost like because of the social pressure people know they are angry but not too sure why, and they end up ascribing all that angry to whatever reason they can think of.
Had they been introduced to the idea of eating horse meat at a jovial bistro in the Swiss countryside they would be primed to enjoy it.
> A bit like goat curry, all you really taste is the spices.
Agree that cheval, flavor-wise, isn't remarkable; it's good, it's a baseline. But goat? If you think all you experience is the seasoning, your sense of taste might be diminished.
I suspect that it depends on the age of the goat and the amount of fat (if goat is similar to mutton). Older and more fat => more 'distinguished' taste.
Couple of years ago I’ve tried a horse steak. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it tasted just like game or a lean beef steak. I doubt that most people would be able to tell the difference. It was also more expensive and harder to get than beef.
When I lived in NL, I took a trip to Maastricht which is a beautiful place right in the South and tried a popular local dish - Zoervleis[0] which is traditionally horse meat. It was delicious. It always amuses me that when I tell this story, it's often met with disgust - even by meat-eaters! "But, how could you eat horse! They're so nice!". Yeah... you eat beef, have you ever met a cow up close? They're also lovely creatures! I see this as double-standards - similar to how most meat-eaters also seem so disgusted by the idea of eating dogs in certain parts of Asia.
> It always amuses me that when I tell this story, it's often met with disgust - even by meat-eaters! "But, how could you eat horse! They're so nice!". Yeah... you eat beef, have you ever met a cow up close? They're also lovely creatures! I see this as double-standards - similar to how most meat-eaters also seem so disgusted by the idea of eating dogs in certain parts of Asia.
Doesn't this more indicate that many people deep-down think that eating animals is wrong and have these thoughts overridden by cultural preferences and tribalism, and that instead of resolving the above double-standard by embracing eating every kind of animal they could resolve it by not eating eat any? Where do you draw the line? You can find places and times in history where people ate dolphin, whales, cat, gorilla, and elephants too I think.
> Doesn't this more indicate that many people deep-down know that eating animals is wrong
I am severely limiting my meat intake, both from environmental as well as animal welfare pov. But what you express is an entirely cultural opinion. Humans are by nature omnivore animals. They always ate meat. But we do it now on industrial scale, eating way too much. There's very few hunter-gatherers in their traditional habitat driving a spear to the wild animal's neck left.
> I am severely limiting my meat intake, both from environmental as well as animal welfare pov. But what you express is an entirely cultural opinion.
I think claims about environmental damage and animal welfare are objective, not opinion.
> Humans are by nature omnivore animals. They always ate meat. But we do it now on industrial scale, eating way too much.
This is just naturalistic fallacy. We do lots of things in our modern lifestyles the last 100 years we never used to and stopped doing things we used to commonly do before that. Humans don't require meat to thrive any more plus climate change is a new problem we have to adapt to.
More likely that we've been disconnected from the realities of the food chain; in general people didn't eat horses because they're more valuable as work animals vs meat.
Farmers et al who deal with animals day in and day out don't seem to have much problem also eating them.
No, it indicates that people are completely unaware and disconnected from their food. Most people would also be disgusted by having to pluck a chicken, slaughter their meat themselves, or even just make a sausage. Hell, I've seen people disgusted at harvesting vegetables from the garden, eating berries off the bush, or fermenting anything (Oh no, dirt and bugs and bacteria!).
Really deep down, i.e. at the level of hunger and what looks tasty to your body, eating animals is very right. They are a fantastic source of nutrition.
However, we also like to domesticate animals, as companions and helpers. Hence the conflict.
We eat way too much meat, but strict vegetarianism and especially veganism does not scale to the whole population of the planet - animals are simply too efficient at converting what we can grow everywhere but can't eat (grass mostly) to what we can eat. Simply, an exclusively plant based diet would require the elimination (by starvation?) of who knows, 90% of the world population?
Of course, strict vegetarianism and especially veganism is not much more than social signalling for a particular and narrow demographic - the cultural preferences and tribalism you allude to.
> animals are simply too efficient at converting what we can grow everywhere but can't eat
... Simply, an exclusively plant based diet would require the elimination (by starvation?) of who knows, 90% of the world population?
"Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, with most of this used to raise livestock for dairy and meat. Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
...
In the charts here we see the energy and protein efficiency of different animal products. This tells us what percentage of the calories or grams of protein that we feed livestock are later available to consume as meat and dairy. As an example: beef has an energy efficiency of about 2%. This means that for every 100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back. In general we see that cows are the least efficient, followed by lamb, pigs then poultry."
> We eat way too much meat, but strict vegetarianism and especially veganism does not scale to the whole population of the planet - animals are simply too efficient at converting what we can grow everywhere but can't eat (grass mostly) to what we can eat. Simply, an exclusively plant based diet would require the elimination (by starvation?) of who knows, 90% of the world population?
Which is not true at all, most meat is cow beef, pig and poultry fed with grains. Grains that we have to grow, and take land and water away from growing other things that could feed us directly.
This would only be true if everyone ate grass-fed beef - which would be premium and 10x more expensive- and a lot more goat and similar that can be fed low quality grass.
Most of what we eat are grasses. Rice, wheat, corn, etc.
Grazing cattle on marginal land is extremely labor intensive. So most cattle calories come from potential or actual farmland. Either as highly productive pasture or crops optimized to feed cattle. Especially as grazing clause significant damage to marginal land resulting in desertification or other issues if not carefully managed.
The psychology of eating animals is definitely a great example of how people compartmentalize and simply avoid thinking about the details too much in order to evade cognitive dissonance. Which is also why so many respond with hostility when prompted to do so. (Disclaimer: I'm an omnivore.)
In most cases, if you grow up eating something, it's normal. If you don't, it's unusual. Sometimes people think things are disgusting when they really mean they're not used to them. I think that explains about 95% of it.
I think there’s an important distinction to be made between being disgusted by the thought of eating escargots and being morally judgemental of the thought of eating horses. That said, it is not a far-fetched idea that moral disgust has its roots in the more visceral feeling of physical disgust, as evinced by the alimentary restrictions imposed by some religions.
tbh i dont get why people arent ok eating horse or dog. i've had both and they're fine, like why is this a problem? i will be the first to call out veganism but i also have literally been lectured by meat eaters about how me eating those 2 is wrong and then they have eaten a burger or steak in the same day.
Animals that are both higher intelligence in our perception and closer to us day to day will fall into the category of disgust, imo. For instance, I've had dogs my whole life. They're pretty deep creatures with emotions, intelligence, and personalities all their own. If you tell me that you ate what I have a personal connection to, what I consider my family - It's hard not to look at you in disgust. Similar to the disgust that people feel when they hear someone ate human flesh. The case with horses is similar.
Cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and fish on the other hand are not similar at all. They often have short memories, and live pretty simple lives. Thus, it's a bit easier to look at them as purposes for lunch. I'd be curious if Hindus feel relative disgust over seeing folks eat cow, I think that might bolster this theory a bit.
That said, although I feel disgust over that stuff I don't really say anything. If offered, I'd probably smirk and say, "That's not for me". Other cultures are allowed to, in my mind, enjoy things that might disgust me and vice versa.
Edit:
I'm also curious that if one day when all meat is lab grown if we'd ever feel those feelings of disgust. If the loss of what we view as potential personal connection is removed, it's entirely possible we wouldn't feel disgust at all.
Cows have much larger brains than dogs and are quite intelligent, and so are pigs. The "dogs are special" argument is a familiarity thing or perhaps a statement that dogs evolved to more effectively manipulate human emotions.
Cows may have larger brains, but they also have much bigger bodies. They aren't anywhere near as intelligent as dogs.
Now, with pigs, you have a point. They're indeed very smart.
I justify eating pigs by reasoning that pigs will happily eat humans if they get a chance (a few pig farmers lose their lives that way every year, plus there's the occasional serial killer...). Turnabout is fair play.
As I said, it probably has to do more with our aggregate personal connection to animals in a given culture, because that will influence how we perceive their intelligence.
If you've read the studies I did, they're not very good. For instance, the test that asserted a pig is smarter than a dog was where they were tasked with moving a joystick designed for a monkey that controlled a cursor that they wanted moved into a blue region on a screen. I'll let you make your own judgements about how sound the testing with respect to the assertion is. My dog certainly has eyes that can be tuned to manipulate me, but she also has a sizeable vocabulary, a lot of tonal intuition, and this little heat seeker in her nose that quite literally syncs her heart rate with mine. There's a good amount of theory that says this adds up to empathy.
> Animals that are both higher intelligence in our perception and closer to us day to day will fall into the category of disgust, imo.
Think in general this holds to animals seen as pets. Like in the West with adorable little guinea pigs, which in the Andes Mountain regions are a food source. And it makes sense too if you live high in the mountains that get snowed in in the winter, to have a bunch of them living in your home.
Dog is clearly a special case. It's the most common pet in the USA; many people consider their dog part of their family.
Dogs are known for forming such strong connections to their humans. On the spectrum between farmed-for-food and totally-off-limits, it's not hard to guess where we would put dogs.
It's just like indians and cows. Cows have a special place in their culture, therefore they don't eat beef.
I’m not a vegan but I had a few cows growing up that basically became like pets. They would come up to me just to spend time and receive physical affection, they knew my voice, etc. I’m not sure if this reason for not eating dogs stands up to scrutiny for me.
I think a lot of it comes from ancient tribal customs. Many pastoral/nomadic groups, like the Aryans, would only eat horses as a last resort. The horse was so important to the tribe's survival. Incidentally, the same taboo was probably applied to eating cows, as that animal was extremely important for Indo-Aryans' survival. Over time the original meaning of the taboo is lost, it just continues to get enforced by each subsequent generation.
having grown up around farm animals I never really felt either dissonance or the need to compartmentalize.
You can have a relationship with animals and raise them but they are also food. You can ride horses and eat them, to me that isn't contradictory because killing for sustenance isn't an evil act, and if the animals are raised well and kept in good conditions and live happy lives there's no issue.
I think the psychological issues are mostly about anthropomorphizing animals and not having personal experience with the food chain, killing animals for sustenance or quite frankly death which most people now have a completely pathological relationship to.
Yes, I realize that historically in agrarian societies, common folk in particular have had a very different relationship with animals than most modern Westerners, and some people still do. I did not mean to imply that compartmentalization is something inherent or unavoidable, just that clearly in the modern Western society this sort of mental model is more or less prevalent. You’re probably right that it’s connected with our relationship with death.
Also NL. I feel that the opinions have shifted last couple of decades. Anectdotal maybe, when I was younger eating horse meat wasn't something one thought about much. My mother used to go into town especially for buying horse steak, because "they are way better than cow beef steak". Recently I asked her if she still buys it. "Horse meat? No!". She forgot about how we always ate it.
When I was young I lived in the province Drenthe. We visited our grandparents every weekend. My grandfather would often have horse meat for dinner.
At the time I quite enjoyed it. I was young and didn’t think much of it.
Once I got a bit older my father mentioned once that he thought horse meat smelled like pee. At that point I stopped eating horse meat. However I am not even sure if there was some truth in what my father said at the time … seems unlikely.
One can get horse meat in Japan too. (I think they mostly import it from France these days.) I had a nice cheval carpaccio there once, at the insistence of my Japanese hosts. It tasted good, but I have no desire to eat it again.
I don't intend to ever try dog. From what I've heard the meat of carnivores tastes unpleasant, but that might be folklore.
Dog tastes nothing like chicken it's a much darker meat. I had it in China and it wasn't exactly unpleasant but definitely what we in the USA would describe as gamey. Basically pungent and heavy on flavor. The preparation I had was in Sichuan so they added tons of red chilies as well so it was very spicy. I wouldn't eat it again, once was enough.
the primary problem with dogs is that you don't know where they come from. there is no guarantee that dogs are raised in a healthy way specifically to be eaten, like sheep or chicken, but there is a high risk that the dogs are caught on the street, and have been feeding on whatever trash they found. and you don't know what kind of diseases they had either. basically, i would treat dogs like rats, unless the restaurant can certify that their dogs actually came from a farm for that purpose.
In many areas they actually torture and abuse the dogs while butchering them also because they think the adrenaline makes the meat less tough. If I knew back then what I know now I would probably have declined when it was offered.
If I'm not mistaken, the preparation of the dish (meat boiled in vinegar for several hours, then sweetened up with gingerbread and reduced apple juice) was traditionally intended to tenderise the tough meat of old farm horses that had been used for ploughing the land. Almost all restaurants prepare the dish with beef nowadays.
Many old dishes are like this - slow cooking, for example, really comes into its own when you're slow cooking a egg-laying chicken that is 3-5 years old vs the "grown for meat" ones these days that are barely 8 weeks.
I'm reminded of an old Joy of Cooking recipe for raccoon: Boil it in baking soda overnight, then throw away the water and braise it for another few hours iirc
The conservation status of lion is threatened. I feel the same way about eating lion that I do about southern bluefin tuna; it's not sustainable, don't do it.
I'd eat mountain lion or dog, but not lion or grey wolf.
nb: wild carnivores are almost always infected with parasites like trichinosis. If you do eat them, cook it well done.
My (Swiss) kids enjoy eating chicken. I love eating duck, but I have to be VERY discreet about it, lest I want to be looked at like I'm a serial killer. Having referred to my food as "Donald" on one occasion probably didn't help…
Not the OP, but I'm in the US and.. it's complicated. I would say, in general, meats like lamb and, especially, veal have fallen out of favor due to the perceived poor conditions and youth of the animals. Rabbit isn't common in the US (it's not generally available in stores) but the "cuteness" factor plays a role here as well. This has changed since the 80's when lamb and veal were more popularly consumed. I'm guessing PETA's work has moved the needle in this area.
Living in Minnesota, however, wild game is more widely consumed so things like duck, geese, pheasant, etc. aren't seen as odd or offensive.
Horse is considered taboo for consumption in the US.
I would say, in general, Americans can be turned off a meat source if it is perceived to have produced from poor conditions or is "cute". This, however, does not apply to beef, chicken, or pork. (Though you can squeeze a few more bucks out of people by calling something "free range").
My SO who lived for a time in the UK refuses to eat lamb in the US because "it's terrible." Apparently lamb in the UK is the gold standard for quality.
To go with your SO, meat is generally of a higher quality in Europe than the US due to the far more stringent regulations regarding production. It's also why Europeans tend to be far more relaxed than Americans regarding how meat is cooked.
My US friends give me grief when I tell them I've eaten at McDonalds in Italy. "You went to Italy and ate at McDonalds???"
Yes. Yes I have. A few times. Nobody believes me when I tell them McDonalds burgers are much better in Europe than in the US. Plus they sometimes have an excellent espresso bar right there in the restaurant.
My experience with squeamishness around meats varies depending on the crowd. People I know who I would consider to be a sample of the Canadian general population tend to stick to the meat trinity.
Folks who are from multicultural groups are definitely more experimental with other kinds of meats.
Rabbit, Duck, and Lamb are all pretty common meats to eat in the US. Usually in finer dining, but I've never seen anyone raise an eyebrow at these. Horse, on the other hand...
Duck tends to be pretty expensive in upscale restaurants, but is generally available at a much more reasonable price in any good (but not necessarily fancy) Chinese restaurant.
Rabbit is readily available in the rural US if you hunt and skin it yourself. I could eat forever just on the population in my yard. But alas...tularemia is a thing.
I actually contracted tularemia while rafting and camping along the Colorado river in Utah. The campsites attracted alot of critters, especially desert jackrabbits. I got bit by a flea or horsefly that was infected from the rabbit and about 3 days later I had a 105 fever and literally couldn't get out of bed for 3 days. Sickest I have ever been in my entire life.
I would argue horses are different than dogs. Dogs a are bred to attach to and love humans. Horses.... tolerate us. They'll fall in line if you demonstrate you're the leader, but they don't bond like dogs do.
To remind people in case they didn't know (because there was a huge backlash against Romanians at the time and newspapers never correct themselves after investigations) the meat was labeled as "horse meat" when it left Romania. It was a Dutch company which relabeled it as "beef".
I’m in the Netherlands and there is a horse butcher (paardenslagerij) around the corner of my house. Has been there since the seventies.
The sausage is quite good, but much fatter than I’d expected. It’s also quite expensive which can make sense because scarcity, but not make sense since the demand must be fairly low.
Based on total anecdata, I see mostly pensioners going here. And me.
> It’s also quite expensive which can make sense because scarcity, but not make sense since the demand must be fairly low.
If demand is highly inelastic - as would be expected for something like culinary preferences - then price actually has to increase when demand is low: if you can sell to 3 people at 20$ or 5 people at 10$, you're losing money by decreasing your price.
> If demand is highly inelastic - as would be expected for something like culinary preferences
Demand curves, regardless of elasticity, are always downward sloping: Higher prices lead to fewer units demanded.
Your statement implies control over prices: Firms with market power do not operate along the inelastic portion of a demand curve. This is a logical implication of profit maximization.
Before one can understand that, one must internalize the fact that as a seller, you cannot choose the price and the quantity sold independently. If you pick a price, you can sell the quantity demanded at that price. If it is too high, can't sell any. If you pick quantity, you can only sell all at a price people are willing to pay.
Assume a firm has market power (can pick price) and is operating along the inelastic portion of the demand curve.
If it charges a higher price, it loses some sales, but total revenue increases (that's what demand being inelastic means -- quantity sold falls, but percentagewise not as much as you increased the price, therefore, revenue, price x quantity increases). In addition, because cost is increasing in quantity (offering more for sale costs you more) and now you are producing less, costs go down. Therefore, profit, which is revenue minus cost, must increase. Therefore, if you were operating along the inelastic portion of the demand curve, you could not have been maximizing profits.
Therefore, firms with market power (can pick price) can only operate along the elastic portion of the demand curve.
If you are claiming demand for horse meat is a vertical straight line (which is not a thing outside of being a limiting case in econ 101), then lower demand means demand curves closer to x axis origin, i.e., price is determined simply by the supply curve. With a given supply curve (which are always positively sloped due to the fact that cost is increasing in output), lower demand means lower equilibrium price,
> then price actually has to increase when demand is low.
Demand falling cannot cause higher prices (keeping everything else constant).
Those sweet economists. (I’ve got my MSc in Economics ;) First off: Giffen and Veblen goods? Second off: while I’m all for the theoretical models and would even defend that institutional evolution would lead to markets representing theoretical IO markets … a local horse butcher in a Dutch town is not a profit maximizing entity. He’s got sticky and human relations on his supply side, sticky and human relations on his demand side and a finite time horizon in which the butcher takes pride in the job and firm. Ever hear seniors complain about prices rising in small stores? Store owners take that into account. Marginal local stores bordering on bankruptcy tell you that. He picks prices because all things considering that price makes sense to him.
Yes, I believe that every (small) shop or store leaves money on the table all the time. The best I can give you is somewhat optimizing some of the time with long perturbations.
A function of social relationships on all sides, Excel [1], one-shot pricing, bounded rationality and myopia, endowment effects etc.
If you look at the economic performance of firms within sectors you’ll see massive diversity in value added. That’s pretty much proof that business leave money on the table. Other example is the way inflation winds it’s way through pricing. It’s rocky and uneven.
Anyone whose ever seen a business in operation will agree it’s satisficing not optimizing.
[1] Excel explains why large companies retain lots of efficiencies. Nature of the firm debate points to all kinds of relative efficiencies, which I happily applaud.
Demand for things like horse meat is limited. Even if a butcher gave it out for free, they wouldn't be able to "sell" as much horse meat as chicken meat, at least not for human consumption.
So, when you realize you're already selling the maximum possible amount of your good, you're only option to increase profit is to increase your prices.
If your market reduces even further (say, 10% of the people buying your horse meat die of old age), you will often have to increase price even more to try to keep the profit you were making. Especially with goods like meat, where the supply side is also inelastic (you can't produce half a horse, you butcher a whole horse or you don't butcher it at all).
For niche culinary products, this type of extremely limited market can actually exist. I'd bet if you were allowed to sell mouse meat, you would quickly get to know every single person in London who wants to eat mouse meat.
Of course, I'm not claiming that demand will not be reduced by price. You can't charge a million dollars per kilo of horse meat. But you also can't expect to increase sales volume for certain niche goods past a point, regardless of price.
Edit: this is also often visible in the price of seasonal specialties. For example, in my country, lamb is only commonly eaten for Easter. So, demand for lamb spikes around Easter every year. But, lamb prices actually drop around Easter (at least for consumers) - the rest of the year, lamb is only sold at high prices for the few people who consider it a delicacy. But around Easter, as demand increases for cultural reasons, competing on price starts making sense and price drops just as demand rises.
> So, demand for lamb spikes around Easter every year. But, lamb prices actually drop around Easter (at least for consumers)
So, you don't think everyone involved in the chain of getting that lamb to you, anticipating the shift in the demand curve that occurs very predictably, don't ensure that they have the highest possible supply during that time?
You forgot the "keeping everything else constant" and changes in quantity demanded in response to just the price of the good versus changes in the shape and location of the market demand and supply curves.
Of course supply is adapted to anticipate this well known change in demand. But the driver for all of these is a culinary tradition causing a spike in demand*, it's not the other way around.
Either way, my only point is that since markets have special characteristics that make them unintuitive from a basic supply-demand analysis. Too many people assume the most basic models of basic economics are enough, and ignore things like supply and demand elasticity, and the fact that supply or demand may be constrained by non-economic factors.
I also tend to think the laws of supply and demand are useful as a descriptive model, but lack predictive power for many goods, since the factors above can't be estimated in blind - you have to actually see what people happen to do, and then come up with a model for elasticity to make the supply-demand curves fit the actual observations, you can't do it the other way around.
*To be fair, it may well be that the original tradition was caused by a natural change in supply, with sheep giving birth at the beginning of spring, so having edible lamb by mid spring when Easter (and the pre-Christian celebrations it replaced) haken; but even then, that was not an economic change, it was a biological reality.
I’m not here to judge anyone for eating meat, despite being vegetarian, but I agree with the other comments here, if you eat cows or pigs or sheep or chickens then why not cockatoos or horses or dogs (or feral cats, which are consumed in some parts of Australia)?
I don’t eat any of these creatures, but nevertheless, I just don’t get why certain animals seem to be culturally off limits for those who do eat meat. Is it just because cows, pigs and sheep are not animals you get to pat very often?
I think it's because some animals are raised for their meat, and some not, and they're different animals in different parts of the world. Similarly, some animals are hunted or foraged for food and others aren't.
I think that kind of ...crystallises? into eating taboos. So for example, where I'm from, in Greece, it's traditional (particularly in the islands of Crete and Corfu) for people to go out and gather snails after the rain to cook them and eat them. Famously, the French also eat snails. But offer snails to an Englishman? Yeeeew! Snails!
And let's not forget that entire millions of people don't eat specific kinds of meat because it's forbidden by their religions: faithful jewish and muslim folks don't eat pig meat, Hindus don't eat cow meat (unless the cow must be put down because it broke a leg, if I understand correctly) and so on.
And then there's matters of personal preference. In Greece, organ meats are considered a delicacy, but I have at least two friends who will not touch them and will probably puke if they smell them cooking.
When I was a kid we'd walk down to the shore during low tide and throw big rocks on the beach below the tide line. When water squirted up out of the sand, we'd dig there to find a type of small clam that sprays water. Then we'd literally steam and eat them. You are supposed to soak them in water to let them filter out the sand for a day, but generally we just dealt with a little grit for the immediate satisfaction.
I used to eat meat (I don’t anymore but the reasons are irrelevant), and have eaten dog (once) and a bunch of other “atypical for the US” animals (usually just once or twice). But even then, when I was thinking that most of the cultural limits around eating particular animals were arbitrary, I still worried that I wasn’t just eating some dog, maybe I was eating someone’s dog. In practice, the probability was extremely low (and it was still possible even for cows, though even less likely) but the seeming category overlap in the case of dogs added psychological friction.
We only eat the ugly animals. Obligatory Denis LEary:
"And what are you? ... I'm an otter ... And what do you do? ... I swim around and do cute little human things with my hands. ... You're free to go. And what are you? ... I'm a cow. ... No you're not! You're a baseball mitt! Get in the back of the truck!!!"
About the names of these products, horse meat is traditionally called "hamburgerkött" in Swedish. It literally translates to "hamburger meat" (related to the city of Hamburg, and not the dish hamburger).
It is said (we learnt in school) that in sweden, to increase the spread of Christianity, the clerics made horsemeat religiously prohibited. If true, I think this contributed to why eating horse is essentially unthinkable in Sweden...
For a species that has given so much and has been pivotal in the development of humanity, it's time we repaid the debt and granted them freedom in perpetuity.
So now horses have outlived their usefulness, they can be generously granted freedom? What’s it take until we stop enslaving and torturing the other species that have given so much to us..?
My partner being vegetarian I inadvertently reduced my consumption of meat to only rare ocassions for plenty of other options and I am doing fairly well. I have nothing against meats or meat eaters as I was one myself, but I have the realization that meat eating was excessive with meat or other meat products eaten on a daily basis, I really think that is not very healthy.
So are my kune-kune pigs. A lot cuter, cuddlier and friendlier than the average horse as well. Doesn't make them less edible, though given their age the meat likely won't be all that.
In WWI and WWII even more so, horses were declared essential for the war in axis countries, and eating them became illegal.
In Italy horse meat picked right up again after WWII, but in Austria and Germany people forgot about the reasons it seems and it stayed unacceptable/frowned upon.
You can find (excellent) horse meat products in western Austria, but the market is tiny, the reaction you get is typically "Eeehwww!".
It is an excellent, very iron rich, lean meat. But since my wife loves horses, I haven't eaten any for many years.