Anyone want a horse burger?

[MikeH]

Horses are raised for meat across mainland Europe.

[Alexander's Horse]

:desire:

[MikeH]

You have to suck someone off to postpone being turned into a burger?

[kentonio]

LONGPIG!!

[Dinner]

Horses are raised for meat across mainland Europe.

That's kind of surprising given that in the middle ages the Church had a religious prohibition on people eating horse meat. You could actually be burned at the stake for eating horse meat. Apparently since horses were vital to farming and war the church wanted to make sure horses were used for those purposes instead of as food.

How times change.

[MikeH]

They are special breeds for food, not your riding horses.

[Alexander's Horse]

the French...barbarians

[Dr Strangelove]

Let's say someone is raising horses for meat. Would horse meat be cheaper than beef? If it's a specialty item I'd think it would be more expensive.

Is it actually possible now to sell your old horse to an arbattoir for butchering?

[Alexander's Horse]

most racehorses end up at the abbattoir, slaughtered for pet food, a tiny number retire to stud

[Dr Strangelove]

To the victor go the spoils.

[regexcellent]

****ing weird euros.

[onodera]

What's so weird about eating horsemeat?

[Uncle Sparky]

LONGPIG!!

"Tell me who you eat, and I'll tell you what you are." -- Brillat-Lechter

[Dr Strangelove]

Evidently it's more common than I had imagined.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21043368

Why are the British revolted by the idea of horsemeat?
Horsemeat has been found in beefburgers on sale in UK and Irish Republic supermarkets. But why do the British have such a revulsion over the idea of eating horsemeat?

The discovery of horse DNA in burgers in major supermarkets such as Tesco and Iceland has been met with alarm among consumers.

Horse-eating, or hippophagy, spread in Europe in the 19th Century, after famines caused several governments to license horse butcheries.

The meat is still commonly consumed in France and Belgium, as well as parts of Central Asia and South America.

So why are the British so squeamish about eating horse?

Horses are seen as pets
Historically, they were useful for transport and war
There are emotional connotations

There is no real logic as to why plenty of Britons are perfectly willing to eat cows, pigs, and chickens, but see horses as taboo, according to Dr Roger Mugford, an animal psychologist who runs the Animal Behaviour Centre.

"I'm a farmer and there is an irony. Why are horses different from pigs and lambs?" he says.

Part of the reason is people frequently see horses as pets, and humans tend to put "extra qualities and values" on animals they call pets, he says.

"As soon as you give an animal a name, how can you eat it? I've got lambs, sheep, with names - they live forever. I don't name the commercial flock, which won't," he says.


At Paris, where all eccentricities are found and even encouraged, one of the latest gastronomic innovations is the use of horse-flesh.

This social phenomenon of making the horse contribute to the nourishment of the human race is not altogether new. The ancient Germans and Scandinavians had a marked liking for horse-flesh. The nomad tribes of Northern Asia make horse-flesh their favourite food.

With the high ruling prices of butcher's meat, what think you, gentlemen and housekeepers, of horse flesh as a substitute for beef and mutton?

Banquets of horse-flesh are at present the rage in Paris, Toulouse and Berlin. The veterinary schools there pronounce horse-bone soup preferable beyond measure to the old-fashioned beef-bone liquid, and much more economical.

History is also responsible for attitudes towards horses, according to Mugford.

"Horses helped out in warfare. There have been huge sacrifices alongside riders in historic battles. And there are sentimental depictions like War Horse," he says.

Their widespread use as working animals has had a lasting effect, argues food historian Ivan Day.

"We have to remember at one point, before railways, horses were the main means of transport. You don't eat your Aston Martin," he says.

Food historian Dr Annie Gray agrees the primary reasons for not eating horses were "their usefulness as beast of burden, and their association with poor or horrid conditions of living".

She suspects the practical considerations have become so embedded in culinary norms that horseflesh has garnered emotional connotations.

But all of the above reasons apply as much to France as they do to the UK. There must be more to it.

"It enables us to have yet another point of difference with the French," says Gray.

"Beef has long been symbolic of Englishness and therefore anything we can do or say to put British beef on a pedestal is usually done - ergo the thought that the French eat horse while we eat good beef becomes a chauvinistic way of asserting national identity," she says.

Horsemeat production levels in 2009
China - 168,000 tonnes
Mexico - 81,749 tonnes
Kazakhstan - 71,387 tonnes
Russia - 48,936 tonnes
Argentina - 37,712 tonnes
Mongolia - 35,582 tonnes
Source: United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation

Gray, who lived in France for three years, says for her, it is completely natural to eat horsemeat as it was sold at her local butcher.

"I am far more concerned with where the food is from. I would far rather eat ethically sourced, well-cared for horse, than battery chicken, for example," she says.

So are attitudes changing at all?

Peta says the thought of unexpectedly tucking into a horse burger has "rightly shocked the nation". But it says Britons who say "neigh" to horsemeat do so only because they find ponies "cute".


"Why is one species cherished while another is spurned? If this story has shocked people, they should consider leaving all flesh off their plates and going vegan," it says.

Rather than seeing them as "cute", others may be more inclined to think of horses as majestic, or associate them with nobility.

The killing of horses for meat is still an emotive subject as many people see them as companion animals rather than a food source, according to the RSPCA.

But the proliferation of horsemeat jokes on Twitter suggests other people are seeing the lighter side of the story.

Do you have an alternative theory as to why British people don't eat horsemeat?

[Dinner]

What's so weird about eating horsemeat?

In the old testiment and under Jewish dietary laws consuming horse is forbidden. Early Catholic Christian doctrine also adopted some of these dietary restrictions as a superficial nod to the old testament but really because the church wanted to maintain horse numbers for use in transport, farming, and for war fighting purposes. In the 18th and 19th century several continental countries legalized horse meat to help fight famine but by and large English speaking countries didn't experience such famines so the old laws were kept in place (the big exception was the famine in Ireland but the Irish had little to no political power in the UK so their concerns were ignored by the British ruling elites). Lastly, horse were often romanticized as the brave and ever loyal companions of soldiers or cowboys, loyal pets who willingly charged into enemy fire with the soldiers, and were the subject of poems and literary works like the Charge of the Light Brigade.

People would pay big money to get prized race horses and the horses were often pampered, given special food, and owners even employed a large staff just to make sure the horses were happy and kept in optimum health. Individual horses were given names and generally treated as valued pets and status symbol items. Once you put them on a pedestal like that it gets hard to turn them into the weekend BBQ.