Saddle up and enjoy the horsemeat

Why are we so repulsed by the idea of eating horsemeat? It should not be feared, writes Jack Shafer

DISGUST, the gag reflex, and flights to the vomitorium have greeted the news that horse flesh had breached the beef wall to contaminate burgers and frozen beef meals (lasagne, spaghetti bolognese, shepherd’s pie, meatballs) all over Europe. Some of the “beef” products contained 100% horsemeat, and early forensic tests hinted that the contamination might go back as far as August last year.

Both the Irish Government and the EU called for “horsemeat summits” to investigate the food scandal, with British officials surmising that a criminal conspiracy would be found responsible for adulterating beef products with cheaper horse.

However, for all the horsemeat hysteria, no risk to consumer health was posed by the products, as the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported. The injuries from eating horsemeat were not physical, they were psychological, and where they were not psychological they were anthropological, or else simply non-existent. According to the Ireland health authority, every beef-and-horse burger it analysed tested negative for phenylbutazone, a common horse medicine banned from the food chain.

Horsemeat — as those who have sampled its pleasures will attest — should not be feared. Looked at rationally, it’s merely the other, other red meat, as our French cousins are forever reminding us.

It’s a domesticated and hooved grass and grain eater with a tail, big eyes, and a tannable hide, just like the cattle that most of us consume. That’s not to suggest that the folks who were sold horse burgers when they paid for beef burgers have no right to gripe. They were defrauded and deserve refunds, a few pennies’ worth of damages and the satisfaction of seeing the defrauders (if the contamination was deliberate) sent to jail. But that’s about it.

Explaining the outrage and media storm over the horsemeat scandal will send many journalists to their lexicons to retrieve the word “taboo” to decode the current panic. But I don’t think “taboo” adequately describes the aversion of some people and some cultures to a food so similar to one they eat several times a day — and which most of them, as the current scandal illustrates, can’t tell from the real thing when smothered in sauce or grilled for a sandwich.

“Food Taboos: Their Origins and Purposes,” a 2009 article in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, notes that most human cultures avoid harvestable or easily slaughtered edible items all the time. The Ache people of the Paraguayan jungle limit themselves to only 50 of the several hundred animal species in their habitat, and only 40 of the available plants, fruits, and insects. As Meyer-Rochow writes: “98% of the calories in the diet of the Ache are supplied by only 17 different food sources.”

Avoidance of a potential food can turn into a taboo, especially when enforced by a group’s religious, spiritual, or cultural rules. Observant Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, as well as Catholics guided by Lent, will eschew certain foods in accordance with their dietary laws and beliefs.

Some of these laws can be linked to the protection of human health, resource management, and group cohesion, as Meyer-Rochow notes.

The suppression of horse eating in the West can be blamed on Pope Gregory III who, in 723, called the practice “a “filthy and abominable custom” and associated it with pagan practices. Back then, horse eaters could be punished with a penance of four years on bread and water.

What defies simple cultural explanation is why so many modern French, Central Europeans, Latin American, Chinese, or Japanese citizens enjoy nothing better than a nice cut of horsemeat now and again, while others — those in Ireland, the UK, the US, and English-speaking Canada — generally oppose its consumption.

It’s not enough to say that we relate to our horses the way we relate to our pets (or “animal companions”, as some call them) from the canine and feline families. I doubt that many adults who don’t ride horses enjoy any such emotional attachment to them.

Our avoidance seems to be rooted in custom, just outside of cultural or religious explanation, the way our nose-blowing and spitting norms differ from those of the Chinese. Because we don’t generally eat horsemeat, the thought of eating horsemeat repulses us.

If you live outside an agricultural market where horses are slaughtered and processed, expect more horsemeat repulsion.

Food regulators in Ireland, Britain, and elsewhere discovered horsemeat in the beef food chain not because they have French noses but because they now have at their disposal the incredibly powerful, cheap and speedy technology known as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) that can help detect minute bits of alien DNA.

As recently as two decades ago commercial PCR didn’t exist, and identifying horse inside a purported beef sample likely would have been a long and arduous process. If food fraudsters were horsing around back then — and who is to say they weren’t? — you could have easily eaten some filly without knowing it.

I predict that PCR will herald a disturbing food reckoning. You have no idea how appalled you’re going to be when you finally discover the forbidden foods you’ve been eating.

Put your bib on and saddle up.