Horse meat is the culinary name for meat cut from a horse. It is a major meat in only a few countries, notably in Central Asia, but it forms a significant part of the culinary traditions of many others, from Europe to South America to China. The top eight countries consume about 4.7 million horses a year. For the majority of mankind’s early existence wild horses were hunted as a source of protein. It is slightly sweet, tender, low in fat, and high in protein. However, because of the role horses have played as a companion and as a worker, it is a taboo food in many cultures. These historical associations, as well as ritual and religion, led to the development of the aversion to the consumption of horse meat. The horse is now given pet status by many in the western world, which further solidifies the taboo on eating its meat. This avoidance (and the loss of taste for it) is relatively modern, although it arises out of complex historical and cultural origins.
History
In the late Paleolithic (Magdalenian Era), wild horses formed an important source of food. In many parts of Europe, the consumption of horse meat continued throughout the Middle Ages until modern times, despite a Papal ban of horse meat in 732 CE. Horse meat was also eaten as part of Germanic pagan religious ceremonies in northern Europe, particularly ceremonies associated with the worship of Odin.
Domesticated horses and cattle did not exist in the Americas until the Age of Discovery, and the Conquistadors owed much of their success to their war horses. The Europeans' horses became feral, and were hunted by the indigenous Pehuenche people of what is now Chile and Argentina. At first they hunted horses as they did other game, but later they began to raise them for meat and transport. The meat was, and still is, preserved by being sun-dried in the high Andes into a product known as charqui .
France dates its taste for horse meat to the Revolution. With the fall of the aristocracy, its auxiliaries had to find new means of subsistence. Just as hairdressers and tailors set themselves up to serve commoners, the horses maintained by aristocracy as a sign of prestige ended up alleviating the hunger of lower classes. It was during the Napoleonic campaigns when the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grand Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, advised the starving troops to eat the meat of horses. At the siege of Alexandria, the meat of young Arab horses relieved an epidemic of scurvy. At the battle of Eylau in 1807, Larrey served horse as soup and bœuf à la mode . In Aspern-Essling (1809), cut from the supply lines, the cavalry used the horses' breastplates as cooking pots and gunpowder as seasoning, and thus founded a tradition.
Horse meat gained widespread acceptance in French cuisine during the later years of the Second French Empire. The high cost of living in Paris prevented many working-class citizens from buying meat such as pork or beef, so in 1866 the French government legalized the eating of horse meat and the first butcher's shop specializing in horse meat opened in eastern Paris, providing quality meat at lower prices. During the Siege of 1870-71, horse meat was eaten by anyone who could afford it, partly because of a shortage of fresh meat in the blockaded city, and also because horses were eating grain which was needed by the human populace. Many Parisians gained a taste for horse meat during the siege, and after the war ended, horse meat remained popular. Likewise, in other places and times of siege or starvation, horses are viewed as a food source of last resort.
Despite the general Anglophone taboo, horse and donkey meat was eaten in Britain, especially in Yorkshire, until the 1930s, and in times of post-war food shortage surged in popularity in the United States and was considered for use in hospitals . A 2007 Time magazine article about horse meat brought in from Canada to the United State characterized the meat as sweet, rich, superlean, oddly soft meat, and closer to beef than venison.
The taboo
See also: Taboo food and drinkAttitude of various cultures
Horse is commonly eaten in many countries in Europe and Asia. It is a taboo food in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, the US, English Canada and in Australia; it is also taboo amongst the Romani people and in Brazil and India. Horse meat is not generally eaten in Spain, although the country exports horses both "on the hoof and on the hook" (i.e., live animals and slaughtered meat) for the French and Italian market; however, horse meat is consumed in some Latin American countries such as Mexico. It is illegal in some countries. In Tonga horse meat is eaten nationally, and Tongan emigrees living in Utah have retained the taste for it, claiming Christian missionaries originally introduced it to them .
In many Muslim countries today, horse meat is considered makruh , meaning it is not forbidden, but strongly discouraged. One reason given for its prohibition is the need for horses in military and other uses, and as such, considering the decline in use of horses for such purposes, some consider its consumption permissible. Horse meat is eaten in some Muslim Central Asian countries with a tradition of nomadic pastoralism, e.g., Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. In other majority-Muslim countries there have been many instances, especially wars and famine, when horses were slaughtered and eaten. In the past, horse has been eaten by Persians, Turks, some hanafi Egyptians, and Tatars; but it has never been eaten in the Maghreb.
Horse meat is forbidden by Jewish dietary laws because horses do not have cloven hooves and they are not ruminants. It has been suggested that this holds a practical purpose as horses were used as a means of transportation and did work, although this is doubtful due to the lack of the horse collar at the time of the formation of these laws.
In the eighth century, Popes Gregory III and Zachary instructed Saint Boniface, missionary to the Germans, to forbid the eating of horse meat to those he converted, due to its association with Germanic pagan ceremonies. The people of Iceland allegedly expressed reluctance to embrace Christianity for some time, largely over the issue of giving up horse meat. In the end, the eating of horsemeat was a concession granted in perpetuity when the pagan Norse Icelanders eventually adopted Christianity en masse in the year 1000 (although, in fact, the Church reversed its position soon afterwards). The culturally close people of Sweden still have an ambivalent attitude to horsemeat, said to stem from this time.
Henry Mayhew describes the difference in the acceptability and use of the horse carcasse in London and Paris in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Horse meat was rejected by the British, but continued to be eaten in other European countries such as France and Germany, where knackers often sold horse carcasses underhand despite the Papal ban. Even the hunting of wild horses for meat continued in the area of Westphalia. Londoners also suspected that horse meat was finding its way into sausages, and that offal sold as that of oxen was in fact equine. About 1000 horses were slaughtered a week.
Reasons for the taboo
In some countries the effects of this prohibition by the Roman Catholic Church have lingered, and horse meat prejudices have progressed from taboos, to avoidance, to abhorrence. In other parts of the world, horse meat has the stigma of being something poor people eat and is seen as a cheap substitute for other meats, such as pork and beef.
According to the anthropologist Marvin Harris some cultures class horsemeat as taboo because the horse converts grass into meat less efficiently than ruminants. When breeding cattle for meat, a cow or a sheep will produce more meat than a horse if fed with the same amount of grass.
There is also an element of sentimentality, as horses have long enjoyed a close relationship with many humans, on a similar level to household pets – this can be seen projected in such Anglophone cultural icons such as Black Beauty and My Little Pony . Compare with the anthropomorphic animals in Babe , Charlotte's Web , and Freddy the Pig.
Totemistic taboo is also a possible reason for refusal to eat horsemeat as an everyday food, but did not necessarily preclude ritual slaughter and consumption. Roman sources state that the goddess Epona was widely worshipped in Gaul and southern Britain. Epona, a triple aspect goddess, was the protectress of the horse and horse keepers, and horses were sacrificed to her ; she was paralleled by the Irish Macha and Welsh Rhiannon. The Uffington White Horse is probable evidence of ancient horse worship. The ancient Indian Brahmins engaged in horse sacrifice, as recorded in the Vedas. In 1913, the Finnic Mari people of the Volga region were observed to practice a horse sacrifice..
In ancient Scandinavia, the horse was very important, as a living, working creature, as a sign of the owner's status, and symbolically within the old Norse religion. Horses were slaughtered as a sacrifice to the gods and the meat was eaten by the people taking part in the religious feasts. When the Nordic countries were Christ
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