Most chefs are happy to serve or eat horsemeat — they just can’t find anyone to buy it from.
In light of Britain's ongoing collective freakout over the discovery that a whole bunch of products containing ground "beef" in U.K. supermarkets are actually full of ground horse, the question must once again be asked: What is the deal with eating horses? Why is this the line (short of kittens and corgis) that past and current citizens of the British Empire just won't cross?
The obvious problem in this particular instance is that no one knew they were eating horse. Mislabeling ingredients is a serious concern, whether you're dealing with fish or quadrupeds. But let's take distributors' dishonesty and/or shoddy inspection standards out of the equation. Then the total absence of horsemeat in U.K. and U.S. restaurants and stores can only be written up to a cultural squeamishness that's pretty odd in countries so comfortable with plenty of other truly disquieting meat products.
"Culturally, horses are more akin to pets or partners," said butcher Tom Mylan of The Meat Hook in Brooklyn. "We're not psychologically set up to think of them as food." That mind-set may have come from our British forefathers, but at a certain point, it's become a U.S. specialty. "Americans, out of all the other cultures in the world, have the most fraught relationship with our diet in general and eating meat in particular," he said. "We're all over the place with strange cultural taboos."
Equine dining is nothing new or special in parts of Canada, Europe, Asia, and plenty of other places in the world. "You can find horsemeat at all of our major grocery stores," said David McMillan, one of the chef-owners of Joe Beef in Montreal. "It's not a question, it's just another protein that we eat." Diners visiting from south of the border seem to have trouble grasping that. "We have a lot of Americans that come to eat it as novelty. Why do you want horse when there are so many other things on the menu? They want something for Instagram, they want something to tweet about."
Please note: We do not endorse the Instagramming of food while at restaurants.
