Why is this a big deal?

[m4rk0]

http://www.news24.com/World/News/Horses-could-soon-be-on-the-menu-in-US-20111130

I have lived here for 8 years now and never realized that most people here consider it unthinkable to eat horse meat.
In most European countries, Smoked Horse Sausage and Horse steak is very common. well at least in Holland it is.
it turns out it is also in some of the most popular fast foods.

if you ever went to Amsterdam as a tourist and ate fast food out of a vending machine (wall), you probably ate horse meat!

 

[ptirman]

Viande de cheval - I love it. My mother is French though and my brother lives in Switzerland. I probably have a different take on it. Also love sweetbreads - crispy thymus.

 

[AutoBat]

Guess how glue & jello are made!

 

[Nightclub Dwight]

I only eat horse when I can't get monkey.  Young panda is pretty good too.

In all seriousness, meat is meat.  I don't have a problem with it.  That being said, I only eat meat that has been raised by farmers I know.  I mostly want to avoid factory farmed food whenever possible.

 

[Ddbltrbl]

Come to Japan. You can have it raw here! 

It's a delicacy don't cha know!
Then again, you can get poisonous puffer fish raw too!  :icon_scratch: :-\

 

[Updown]

Being a Butcher by trade .....
Meat is Meat  :doh: from any animal.
Seafood is Seafood
Poultry is Poultry
&
Vegetables are what most animals crap all over  :laughing7: 

Enjoy your dinner  :icon_biggrin:

 

[Ddbltrbl]

&
Vegetables are what most animals crap all over  :laughing7: 

Enjoy your dinner  :icon_biggrin:

:icon_thumright:

 

[SustainerPlayer]

I am an animal lover.

I eat meat.

I think horses are the devils helpers here on earth. They are too evil to be just animals.

I will not eat evil.  :icon_jokercolor:

Nah - I really don't like the taste of horse.

 

[bagman67]

I think the problem is that there's a romantic notion of the horse in the USA that casts the critters in the role of boon companion/faithful helper/blah blah blah.  Look at movies and books like "Black Beauty," the casting of a racehorse (Seabiscuit) in golden heroic tones, etc., etc.


Result:  in the US, eating horses is somehow morally repugnant - while eating cows (or chickens, or cute little lambs, or crate-fattened veal) is perfectly okay.


If you are going to eat meat, then you have made your moral choice.  We've determined what you are, now we're just haggling over the price, so to speak.



If you're going to eat meat, line-drawing exercises about which species is morally acceptable  to eat is intellectually dishonest.  Drawing those lines on the basis of what tastes good or is nutritious or is economical I can support - but like the man said, "If the good Lord didn't want us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of delicious meat?"


Carnivorously yours,


Bagman

 

[Steve_Karl]

I am an animal lover.

I eat meat.

I think horses are the devils helpers here on earth. They are too evil to be just animals.

I will not eat evil.  :icon_jokercolor:

Nah - I really don't like the taste of horse.

You reminded me of an old stooges film where some one said

"I like salt, zombies don't like salt, I ain't no zombie!"

 

[anorakDan]

One of my roomies has a line that fits here so well, I think.

"If it were possible to make (in this instance, horse) taste good, the Colonel would sell it by the bucket by now."

Besides, that proposal is about butchering horse meat and selling it overseas, not in America.

 

[tfarny]

Horse is tasty meat! Can't wait to dig in to some Sea Biscuit steak and rib roast.

 

[swarfrat]

I can't say I find it appealing, but I definitely agree with the sentiments about the legal status. Get up, kill and eat!

I don't eat organ meat (out of preference, but everyone should avoid brains  because of TSE's) I prefer not to eat too high up the food chain. But just because its cute and furry should not make it a crime.

BTW - it reminds me of an old joke about meat rationing in Britain during WWII. The joke goes, the law allows you to label meat as long as it contains at least 50% of the labelled meat, and mixing more desirable meats with lesser meats was common. Inspectors had received complains about this one butcher selling rabbit. He claims its rabbit, but it sure taste like horse to me. The inspector goes to investigate the complaints.

"It's rabbit", says the butcher. One rabbit, one horse. 50% / 50%.

 

[MikeW]

"It's rabbit", says the butcher. One rabbit, one horse. 50% / 50%.

Hilarious!

After living down in Baton Rouge for a few years, I've shed any notion of what is edible and what isn't. Or, more apropos for this thread, what should be edible and what shouldn't.

The cajuns find something moving, kill it, skin it, and then find something not moving to spice it with. Gator, turtle, rabbit, lamb, sheep, cow, horse, you name it and you can find a cajun recipe for cooking it. Gumbo, Jamabalaya, Etoufe', and the list goes on.

Last time I was in Germany, I was taken by some of the guys I was working with to a local place where they had a really nice red sausage. It all seemed amusing that I was really enjoying them to the Germans. Later I found out why: they hadn't told me the sausages were made from horse meat. I just shrugged and asked who was up for seconds?

 

[stubhead]

I was working as a chef well into the period where "exotic" meat was something adventurous foodies craved... and in Texas I ate rattlesnakes and buffalos and gators and in Miami I ate and cooked all sort of other stuff. There was a company out of Africa selling all sorts of supposedly-legal, supposedly-genuine stuff - elephant meat, monkeys, one restaurant I worked at sold lion-burgers every time the Miami Dolphins played Detroit and tiger-burgers every time they played the Bengals.... as I say, "supposedly." Whatever that cat meat was, it was so dry you had to mix in ground pork to even cook it.

From what I know about meat these days, I don't eat large ocean fishies anymore - they just keep concentrating toxins as long as they live, and there's worse shit out there than mercury. I stopped eating ground beef after I finally got irrevocably grossed out by the pink slime process.
http://www.eatlikenoone.com/what-is-pink-slime-beef-how-to-avoid-it.htm
You can taste it, if you take the time to compare some to meat that you know to be 100% meat. I live in a huge chicken-growing and processing area, and know people who've worked in the plants. The stuff's not really safe anymore, what with feeding chickens old beef brains, feeding beef the chicken-slime and all; any and every thing to save the processors a few fractions of a penny on the pound, it adds up.

And there are plenty of laws on the books to "protect the consumer" and "the foodchain" and all, but starting in the 1980's, those zany and madcap masters of de-regulation simply stopped funding the FDA, OSHA, USDA... no inspectors = no oversite, and when they do accidentally catch something, usually after an outbreak of e. coli, the fines are a laughably-tiny percentage of business profits. I don't know what I'd dare feed a child, everything's turning to shit before you even get a chance to eat it and do so yourself. :icon_scratch:

We just had a Walmart here convert over to a "super-store" and I went there yesterday for the first time. It's about a city block in size, and when you first walk in, you pass through aisle after aisle of, like, anti-food. Everything's convenient, microwave-ready, portion-controlled - but there's no food. Weird.

 

[Eric Banjitar]

Anybody concerned about what they eat, and you all should be, should read a book by Micheal Pollan called " The Omnivore's Dilemma". Scary and true and hopeful for a productive future.  A great read.

 

[tfarny]

I was working as a chef well into the period where "exotic" meat was something adventurous foodies craved... and in Texas I ate rattlesnakes and buffalos and gators and in Miami I ate and cooked all sort of other stuff. There was a company out of Africa selling all sorts of supposedly-legal, supposedly-genuine stuff - elephant meat, monkeys, one restaurant I worked at sold lion-burgers every time the Miami Dolphins played Detroit and tiger-burgers every time they played the Bengals.... as I say, "supposedly." Whatever that cat meat was, it was so dry you had to mix in ground pork to even cook it.

From what I know about meat these days, I don't eat large ocean fishies anymore - they just keep concentrating toxins as long as they live, and there's worse shite out there than mercury. I stopped eating ground beef after I finally got irrevocably grossed out by the pink slime process.
http://www.eatlikenoone.com/what-is-pink-slime-beef-how-to-avoid-it.htm
You can taste it, if you take the time to compare some to meat that you know to be 100% meat. I live in a huge chicken-growing and processing area, and know people who've worked in the plants. The stuff's not really safe anymore, what with feeding chickens old beef brains, feeding beef the chicken-slime and all; any and every thing to save the processors a few fractions of a penny on the pound, it adds up.

And there are plenty of laws on the books to "protect the consumer" and "the foodchain" and all, but starting in the 1980's, those zany and madcap masters of de-regulation simply stopped funding the FDA, OSHA, USDA... no inspectors = no oversite, and when they do accidentally catch something, usually after an outbreak of e. coli, the fines are a laughably-tiny percentage of business profits. I don't know what I'd dare feed a child, everything's turning to shite before you even get a chance to eat it and do so yourself. :icon_scratch:

We just had a Walmart here convert over to a "super-store" and I went there yesterday for the first time. It's about a city block in size, and when you first walk in, you pass through aisle after aisle of, like, anti-food. Everything's convenient, microwave-ready, portion-controlled - but there's no food. Weird.

About 2 years ago I stopped eating anything with an ingredient list, as well as bread (allergic, who knew?!) and sugar. I lost 40 lb without trying in about 8 months, and then started hitting up the weight room. Now I deadlift 285 for 5 reps and do 10 no-cheating full chinups, and my jeans are what they were in colllege - and I eat bacon and eggs., etc. all the time. People would be stunned at how much their health is compromised by even eating so-called "health food". If it claims to be healthy on the package, then too much marketing has already gone into it to be actually healthy.

 

[Nando Vallart]

Is it really tasty?? I wanna eat it, then Love meat!!!

 

[Patrick from Davis]

River fish are worse than ocean fish.  The ocean is big, therefore dilute.  However, if you get a river fish, from a valley not the pure driven snow, it is most likely polluted with all kinds of goodies.  I worked on the fish of the Sacramento River for a couple of years.  Eek.  Farmed fish, while blander, don't have PBDE's or Hg like the river ones do.  I suppose it is a big game of pick your poison.
Patrick

 

[stubhead]

I live on the inside (west) edge of the Chesapeake Bay, and there are terrible problems with fertilizer runoff turning the water too alkaline. Alkaline = red tide (that's more a category), suffocating fish and  oysters and crabs and all sorts of bad things - there was even some airborne stuff a few years back, watermen who were breathing a lot of spray and getting wet cleaning their boats were getting weird & crippling lung-fungal diseases. They grow the soybeans and corn to feed the chicken, then fertilize the farms with the chicken plop. And anywhere you go, the food producers are huge campaign contributors at local levels, around here it's Tyson & especially Perdue Chicken and central to west it's ConAgra and others. So you get this ridiculous, hallucinatory legislation like MANDATING the growth of corn for ethanol, even though it burns more energy to produce it than you get out of it. "Con"Agra is right.

And the corporate food lobbyists actually write the legislation and hand it to their paid poodle politicians to pass in Congress and they can wave it around at a press conference and brag about "cleaning up the Bay!" and they've never even read the damn thing, there's all sort of "credit" tradeoffs where the producers can pay some other industry to not dump tons of chicken poop in the bay - then the guys who buy the "credits" GET TO to dump tons of chicken poop in the bay.

There are a few issues I get can riled about*, and at a local level you can get a lick in now and then. After 16 years in a town of 11,000 just by default I know most of the county commissioners, city council and such. We've got a few hundred Mexicans and Central Americans who've been bused  in from the border states by the chicken processors- the people are fine with me, when I lived in Texas I liked 'em better than the white people but as you can imagine there's an "element" here  - but they're basically living in prison camps, they eat at the company cafeteria and they're "allowed" one shopping trip a month... it's, like, fricking UNREAL, 19th century stuff.

The chicken plants are profoundly nasty places, and  if you cut yourself trying to tear through chicken parts fast enough to not get your pay "penalized", you will get Camplybactor and septicemia cause the chickens are all covered in chickenshit, and when you miss work because your arm is blown up like a football, you will get fired without a note from the doctor - health insurance? Ri-i-ight... And again, you can pass all the laws in the world but as long as the agencies are defunded, there's no inspectors - we have plants that haven't had inspections in five years, and even if they do fail, the inspector can write them up, but there's no STAFF to follow up!

The processors of course have the whole "subcontractor" stuff in place already, the cleaning crew work for one business and the maintenance crew for another, and the cutters for yet another. So if (WHEN!) something major blows up  - ever hear of SARS? 11% fatality rate; Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease? 100% fatality rate - one subcontractor blames another, they can just bankrupt a few of the sub-companies immediately before the "liability" issue even gets any head of steam, then sell the plant back to themselves under a new corporation. The system is so frigging broken it's hard to fathom, there is simply no level of greed-driven behavior anymore that is considered "WRONG", "IMMORAL", "SOCIOPATHIC"....

And they're really, really smart, they learn from every succeeding disaster and epidemic and shape the PR accordingly. If you speak out against killing the ocean with chickenshit, yes, you are coming out as "anti-farming" - because they've already defined all the aspects of the "debate", in the same way the Fox news anchors will feast upon the "tree-hugging Woodstock acid casualty" model whenever someone mentions that the planet is closing in on some irreversible threshold crashes. They own the model. At 54, I do plan to die of something else, but... do you ever feel like apologizing to the kids who are gonna be left hold this dying sack of shit? Because their lives will be forever limited, maybe even defined, by shortages and toxins. Of course, there really isn't even such a thing as "overpopulation" because the system is self-correcting - but those corrections are gonna be real, real ugly to live through (or, NOT live through).

BTW - HAVE A SOOOPER-DOOPER DAY! :hello2: :hello2: :hello2:

*(not this, though)