This week saw Tesco wipe £300m worth of market value from the company after an examination into some of the Everyday Value range beefburgers were found to contain up to 29& horse meat as well as pig DNA. The contaiminated products, sold in UK and Irish supermarkets, were thought to be produced at two processing plants in Ireland. Professor Alan Reilly, the FSAI chief executive, said there was “no clear explanation” for the presence of horse DNA in beef burgers: “In Ireland it is not in our culture to eat horsemeat and therefore we do not expect to find it in a burger.”
Now, there’s your point. “We do not expect to find it in a burger.” Now, in England, it’s not our culture to eat horsemeat either and when a supermarket, like Tesco, list the ingredients including “90% beef” or whatever the figure is, that is what you expect to consume. Both the FSA and Professor Reilly made the point that there was no risk to public health. The problem is not in what meat was found, but in that it had misled consumers unknowingly. I commend Tesco’s apology and the action they have taken, but isn’t there a deeper question to be asked?
What’s wrong with horsemeat?
Wild horses were an important source of food in the Paleolithic era and are still widely consumed in South America and Central Asia today. On average, it is thought that the top 8 countries for horse meat consume 4.7 million horses a year. Ok, so there’s your first major problem. Like any animal, it is not a renewable source, except through breeding and possibly GM animals. On the whole, we are being encouraged to become more veggie-friendly, with campaigns such as Meat Free Monday actively inspiring households to swap one carnivourous meal a week for something a little more earthy.
However, in many cultures, consuming horse is rather taboo. Along with our own concerns about it, the US, Ireland and the Jewish culture all don’t eat meat. Spain, too, though strangely they export “on the hook” horses for the French and Italian markets. Why are we this way? Well, Pope Gregory III (732 AD) banned it in the name of the Roman Catholic Church – the ban is still in place in some countries today – and, possibly, we converted to using sheep and other animals more widely because they produce more meat than a horse when fed the same amount of grass. Of course, the most obvious reasons are totemistic. That is, that horses have played, and continue to do so, a role close to human life and one that is often considered a relationship. In ancient Scandinavia, the horse was a symbol of a man’s status and a working creature, important for livelihood. In the UK, horse was consumed more openly during wartime shortages (as was whale meat), though you can see where symbols such as Black Beauty and Babe have got us. Equally, horses continue to be pets, used in therapy, for leisure and for work and while other consumed animals, such as pigs and chickens, are often kept as pets, a distinct line hasb een drawn.
Nutritionally, it’s a wonder we haven’t opened up to horse more recently. The obesity crisis is upon us and horse, per 100g, has a lower fat and calorie content than beef, as well as more iron and the same amount of protein. Adversely it has 10mg more cholesterol.
Horse meat is eaten across the world. From zhaya (smoked hip meat) in Kazakhstan to Belgium steak tartare and from fried stallion meat in Malta to Swedish hamburgerkött – a cold cut of smoked meat. We are a minority when it comes to the taboo of consuming horse meat but with dwindling animal numbers, who’s to say we shouln’t be? I can’t see us welcoming it with open arms anytime soon but if you had to choose, I bet you’d prefer eating horse over whale.
scotch pancakes 