Gawker: You Should Eat Horse

[Renew Deal]

This horse meat scandal is sweeping Western Europe and quivering even the stiffest of upper lips in Britain. Some people are concerned that the horse meat in their microwaveable pasta dinners may be tainted with an equine anti-inflammatory called phenylbutazone, which in huge doses can cause health risks. But let's get real: Most people are just grossed out at the thought of eating horse meat instead of cow meat. That's stupid.



A disclosure: I don't eat meat, so I don't really—as they say—have a horse in this race. But I ate a bit of horse once in the days when I used to be an omnivore. I was in France, where citizens consumed about 20,000 tons of viande chevaline in 2008, and the piece of horse I ate atop a handful of crusty bread tasted how most people describe it: a bit sweet, a bit gamey, not too unlike beef. It would be especially hard to tell the difference if it were covered in the sugary tomato sauce and gluey cheese generally found in frozen dinners. I can all but guarantee that if Papa John's or any other pizza chain people love to frequent while drinking beer and watching football were to replace its ground-beef topping with ground horse, the lion's share of eaters wouldn't notice. Nobody in the UK was complaining about the horse meat in their food until DNA tests, not taste tests, showed there was horse meat in their food.

There are two very valid reasons to be upset at the thought of someone switching your beef with horse. The first is that consumers have a right to purchase food whose labels don't lie to them. Secondly, not all horse meat is created equal. While some horses killed for food, particularly those in Europe, are safe for human consumption, many of the more than 100,000 American horses shipped outside our borders to be eaten annually are former racing animals whose flesh is laced with steroids and other chemicals as harmful as phenylbutazone. European food-safety officials started turning away American horse meat last year for fear it was too full of dangerous drugs, but this horse-as-beef scandal now calls into question how effective those officials actually are.

But with unadulterated meat, health should not be a concern. If the horse meat you eat is only laden with the same kinds of antibiotics and hormones farmers pump into a vast majority of cattle, pigs, and chickens in America, it is actually downright healthful. Horse meat is quite comparable to lean cuts of beef in the way of calories and protein, but it also contains twice the iron and more than 10 times the concentration of cholesterol-lowering omega-3 fatty acids.
<snip>

http://gawker.com/5985770/you-should-eat-horse

[Safetykitten]

1. Writer of article should eat me.

[LiberalEsto]

2. Neigh!

No way.

[TheBlackAdder]

3. Wild and Unkept Horses(generally those offered for slaughter) more prone to Equine Encephalitis. eom

[darkangel218]

6. Isnt that transmisable only if you eat the horses brains?

Nobody is eating horseys brains though.

[TheBlackAdder]

8. It depends on the slaughterhouse. One infected horse could contaminate a day's product.

Many of the animals are killed with compressed air or a steel bolt into the cranial cavity.

The contents then escape onto the floor, the body and handler.

[Renew Deal]

10. Isn't the story with Mad Cow disease that if brains get in the mix, people could get sick?

Wouldn't this be the same?

[NoPasaran]

4. Wilburrrrr!

[Peter cotton]

5. All things being equal, I agree.

Why should eating a horse be any different than eating a cow or a pig?

[darkangel218]

7. It isnt any different.

I guess people are mad because they were mislead by the label. But that's nothing in the big scheme if things. They should be happy they can afford food/meat. Many other people on this planet don't.

[Brickbat]

11. "That's nothing in the big scheme if [sic] things."

That's quite a job of minimizing you're doing there. I rely heavily on food labels and would be shocked and disturbed to find this kind of mislabeling going on. If a food manufacturer/distributor doesn't care enough to check what it's selling, or knowingly and willingly sells a mislabeled product, I find that disgusting and something worthy of heavy fines.

[darkangel218]

12. You rely heavily on labels?

I grew up with very lil food, I ate meat maybe once a week if that, in communist east Europe. Obviously we have different backgrounds and different perspectives. I'll tell you though, when you're hungry labels don't matter much. So yes, in the big scheme of things ( millions starving in OUR world), this issue is extreamly insignificant.

[Brickbat]

13. You know nothing of my background.

What I hear you saying is that you have had it worse, and other people don't have food at all, so when someone says that what we have is beef and it's really not, we should be happy we have something at all.

I refuse to go through life like that, and attitudes like yours make it easy for bosses and corporations to tell us to be happy with what we get.

[darkangel218]

14. Im not taking the side of corporations. This is what you want to " get " , and its not true.

Have I had it worse than you? I don't know. But weather horse meat was used instead of beef is indeed something so lil which shouldn't make the news. People should be outraged over how much food goes to waste instead of feeding the needy. Or outraged that nobody is doing much about solving the starvation problem in Africa.

Good luck with your labels.

[Puzzledtraveller]

9. Fits perfectly in my conspiracy theory that

horse is gradually being introduced as new meat source in wester diets. However as long as they keep calling it horse it will not take off, call it Equine and people will want to try it.