© Christian Hartmann/Reuters
Dining on horsemeat -- hippophagy -- is culturally and historically significant, for good reason.Everyone who seriously studies French or Italian food on scholarly (gluttonous) research trips eats horsemeat. Most every village in France, particularly the southwest and northern border regions with Belgium, and in Italy, particularly the northeast around Verona and Venice, will have a butcher shop specializing in horsemeat, marked with disconcerting gilded horseheads over the shop windows revealing trays of bright lean red meat. Anyone who visits Eastern Europe, especially the Stans, is likely to be used into a restaurant whose specialty is horse cuisine. It's a rite of passage, like watching a pig slaughter and eating fresh blood pudding right afterward.
So I've had horse tournedos, horse sausage, and horse ragu. Several times. For reasons I'll explain, I wasn't eager to continue this line of exploration. But given the recent storm in the media over tainted burgers and ground beef in Europe and possibly all over Europe, I did look further into why eating horse, a seemingly archaic custom that should have died along with other staples of the paleo diet, has persisted.
First, for catchup on what the discovery of horse DNA implies about food safety and what corrective measures might ensue, see
Marion Nestle's chronological links. For a good summary of the media's reaction, see Jack Shafer's
column (and the
Dish debate it provoked).
Comment: Indeed, the similarities are so striking that this brief but succinct summation barely even scratches the surface. Stay tuned for the next volume of the 'Secret History of the World' series, in which Laura Knight-Jadczyk will be taking a close look at the Fall of Rome.