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Remy Gabalda / AFP - Getty Images, file
A Europe-wide food fraud scandal over horse sold as beef has Britain worrying about criminal conspiracies and drug-tainted food.
Updated 4:45 p.m. ET: Adding to the web of companies caught up in Europe's horse meat scandal, British grocery chain Tesco said Monday that samples of its frozen spaghetti meal contained more than 60 percent horse DNA.
Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and some other countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized by some connoisseurs. Authorities aren't worried about health effects, but it has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers misleading the public.
As Britons choke on discovering they may have eaten horse that was imported as beef, and ministers blame an "international criminal conspiracy," this new scandal has exposed the sometimes murky labyrinth by which food reaches Europe's dinner tables.
But as governments play down the health risks, a greater impact may stem from a shattering of public confidence in E.U. systems of labeling and quality control introduced after previous threats hit the human food chain.
As details emerge of a complex network of slaughterhouses and middlemen standing between the farm and the supermarkets across Europe, France and Britain have vowed to punish those found responsible for selling horse meat purported to be beef.
With DNA tests needed to tell the two kinds of flesh apart, retailers and makers of processed meals complain of being duped by suppliers; one French firm has pointed a finger at Romania.
Scott Heppell / AP
Frozen-food company Findus recalled beef lasagne earlier this week after French supplier Comigel raised concerns that the products didn't "conform to specification." The U.K. Food Standards Agency said the lasagnes were tested as part of an ongoing investigation into mislabeled meat.
"This is a conspiracy against the public," said British farm minister Owen Paterson. "I've got an increasing feeling that it is actually a case of an international criminal conspiracy."
Prime Minister David Cameron has called it "very shocking."
Adding to concerns are indications that some horse meat, perfectly edible in itself, may contain a drug known as bute — a common anti-inflammatory painkiller for sporting horses but banned for animals intended for eventual human consumption.
Britain's Food Standards Agency said it was checking whether horse carcasses exported from Britain contained phenylbutazone. It said five such animals were sold abroad last year and it had told foreign agencies. French media said the horses went there.
One firm hit by the British horse meat scandal, frozen foods group Findus, said it was recalling its beef lasagne product after discovering they included horse meat. Its French supplier, Comigel, said the questionable meat came from E.U. member Romania.
An E.U.-wide alert has been sent out and governments debated how to bring the increasingly complex industry under control.
Food experts say globalization has brought benefits to food supply, with exotic items now available from around the world all year round, but it has also created a system that is so complex it has increased the risks of adulteration, whether by design, to use cheaper inputs, or through neglect of standards.
The "mad cow" crisis, which saw British beef banned in the E.U. in the 1990s over fears of a degenerative brain disease, left a legacy of tight controls on the identity of European animals, intended to ensure the origins of fresh meat are traceable.
But in meat minced into processed product, while hygiene checks are the norm, testing for something as seemingly basic as which species it came from is complex and not widely undertaken.
Difficult to trace
Tracing processed meat back to its source is difficult in Europe's complex market, and the path from abattoirs where cows and horses are slaughtered and minced to people's dinner tables often meanders through a confusing chain of middle companies.
Last week's problems for Findus came less than a month after British supermarkets found horse meat in beef burgers from Ireland.
French officials tracing the contamination of the Findus beef lasagna said a Luxembourg factory had been supplied by the French firm Poujol, which had bought the meat frozen from a Cypriot trader, who in turn had subcontracted the order to a Dutch trader supplied by a Romanian abattoir. But others gave different stories.
France says that Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horsemeat being labeled as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagna, moussaka and the French equivalent of Shepherd's Pie. The affair started earlier this year with worries about horsemeat in burgers in Ireland and Britain.
Romania scrambled Monday to contain the damage from the fast-growing European horsemeat scandal, saying that two plants believed to be the source of mislabeled meat had declared it properly and any fraud was committed somewhere down the line.
Anne McIntosh, who chairs Britain's parliamentary food and environment committee, called for a temporary import ban on processed and frozen meats from the other 26 E.U. states.
"My concern is that consumer confidence will have collapsed across the European Union," McIntosh, from Cameron's Conservative party, told the BBC on Sunday.
"We seem to be no clearer as to what the source of this contamination is, or whether the supply was ever destined for human consumption. Is this a fraud of such a massive scale that it should never have entered the human food chains?"
Alison Mutler, The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related:
Hamburgers pulled from UK supermarket shelves after tests reveal horse meat
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Leave a Comment:
Two words for you Britains: Buy Local.
If horse is as delicious as cow, then I want some horse steaks!
If eating horse meat is distasteful, LOL, how will they view it when the earths population goes over 9 billion and we are all eating Soylent Green.
....a horse is a horse unless of course you serve it up as a main dinner source....
Many, many years ago my mother told me she had gotten horse meat from the meat locker on sale, and as a young child who loved horses, I was shocked, but since I'd already eaten part of it and I was very hungry, I finished it off. Spring forward 30 plus years later and as my family was discussing the different meats we had tried: alligator, snake, frogs legs, venison, bear, etc., etc. I added in "horse meat." My mom started to laugh and said that wasn't horse meat, that was venison that someone had given our family out of season and she didn't want my brother and I to blab about it.
Rattlesnake is delicious. Shark chews like a tough steak and tastes like tuna - no point in eating it. Ostrich and buffalo tend to be tough. Frog is like a skinny chicken. Bottom line is that personal preference is the only issue.
Who saw a lobster, which is extremely ugly, and said: "Hey, I'll be it's ass tastes good!"
Back in the early 70's I had horse meat in Belgium and Luxembourg, I thought it was good, if a cow and a horse eat the same things what is the difference?and after reading how many fingers pointed at someone else over who sold what to whom its as bad as ovomit blaming Mr. Bush for everything!
Now we know the REAL reason the Europeans wanted to by Anheuser-Busch, those Clydesdale horses have a lot of meat.
Mr Ed never tasted so good!
Horse meat is just fine, healthy and lean.
6 middlemen just to get beef to a producer to turn it into a product ready for a consumer to buy?
No wonder food prices are so high!
Here's an idea...if you want to make frozen lasagna, buy your beef from SOMEONE WHO OWNS COWS. It's so crazy, it just might work.
Also, it is incredibly ridiculous and pointless to act all distraught over people eating horses when you have no problem eating a cow.
I wonder how much other DNA (rats, humans?) was found in that meat...
so they are talking about DNA testing now. make an already vastly over complicated system and make it even more complicated? how about from now on if, say, you need bulk quantities of beef....you go to someone who owns cows. visually confirm that they are in fact cows. buy the cows. BAM, YOU HAVE BEEF! It is FOOLPROOF! SIMPLE!
let all those middle men go get real jobs and quit artificially inflating the cost of food by leveraging themselves unnecessarily into the commodities market. seriously, buying frozen "beef" that has been passed through a half dozen hands for who knows how many months? how is that even allowed to happen?
imagine the French blaming someone else....if more people knew what the USA FDA allows in most hotdogs the wouldn't eat them....
Even Hebrew National, Mike?
I can only say this. As a avid hunter and outdoors-man I have eaten many different types of meat. I really do love deer steaks and roasts. When I was a child my uncle would have us over in the fall to go hunting. He would make a pot roast and then pull it apart to make barbecue sandwiches. I have eaten barbecue ground hog without knowing it. It is in fact quite good. If you can eat a squirrel, then you can eat a groundhog.
I've never eaten horse meat. If my family were hungry and I didn't have food to feed them I would eat horse. I wouldn't like it. But beggars can't be choosers. Fresh quail and green beans and "taters" from your own garden is a delicacy.
Just saying!
Mike--what, you have a problem with mouse feces?
they're cooked, who cares?
Take a guess what goes into your box of granola!
that's what they said about smoking, if more people knew blah blah blah. people may not be able to identify all the things in a hot dog by looking at one, but we all know it's full of mouse dander and bugs and scraps of skin and lips and buttholes that were scraped off the floor after all the useful bits were taken away. we know and we eat them anyways. i figure that people in southeast asia have been eating bugs and all kinds of "gross" things (the skin of chicken's feet, innards, etc) for thousands of years, and they seem to be healthier than we are.
Someday my biggest fantasy (sigh again) is to raise all my food myself.
That's really your biggest fantasy?
You are not alone in feeling this way stonepipe2.
I raise all my own food. It's not easy. But it sure tastes better and you know what your getting.
gm stonepipe
Have you got room for horses at your place?
Morning denver bill2
hope all is well.Sounds like you have some nice horses. I have a Tennessee Walker named Mimi Red Fury, 21 hands tall, chestnut red.Sweet as honey, gentle as a breezy morn.
morning stonepipe2,
nice fantasy. I bought a farm when looking to buy my first home. Made sure it had a massive garden area, orchard(pears, peaches, apples, cherries,almonds, walnuts, filberts,and could have live stock on it.Raised chickens, goats, ducks, geese,sheep, horses. Back to basics.Twenty plus years, still there! It even has the original blacksmith shop and smoke house.
I agree, knowing what is in ones food is critical. If you told people they were eating wood in their food do you think they would keep eating ice cream,muffins, cheese,high fiber foods, salad dressings, fast food and bread? Yet that is what cellulose is.But don't worry, your body can't digest wood pulp, so all those labels which say reduced fat, less calories, really mean you won't gain weight.
How about human hair and duck feathers? then don't eat bread products containing L-cysteine. An amino acid which helps give bread texture and makes it springy. The hair is from Chinese women who support their families by cutting their locks.
I won't mention the paint ingredient we eat in white frosting or salad dressings, nor Petroleum-derived preservatives, even though they show up in Mcnuggets and 18 other McDonald products.Certainly beetle juice isn't going to concern anyone now days. No one probably needs to worry about how much sand they eat. Soil fertilizer (ammonium sulfate) either.
One can check the Internet for all sorts of great, oh, I mean disgusting finds.I imagine the British people have their hands full with horse meat.Though, they may just allow, like the United States, a certain amount of unavoidable contamination due to modern mechanical processing.Maybe it's just better not to know what one is eating, in the end. Having taken nutrition in college, it's already too late for me.I'm a stickler for reading labels.Ever since reading about silly putty plastic that foods get deep fried in(dimethylpolysiloxane).
.
Good for you stonepiper...
Stonecipher-I agree, except my fantasy of raising my own food includes a couple of nekkid women!
stonepipe, Since I retired I have put a garden in. My wife and I grow green beans, potatoes, corn, cucumbers(for pickles), tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, Brussels sprouts,cabbage(home made saur kraut), water melons, and broccoli. We have two pressure canners. We transplanted over 60 Hybrid Blackberry plants from along our back alley. My neighbor Jim got them from his brother many years ago. This variety was produced by the University of Illinois many years ago. It has thorns and is prolific with very large berries. We made enough jelly last fall to supply 4 families. We canned green beans till I was very tired of seeing them. They are very tasty though. I think I'll get my wife to make a green bean casserole tonight.
A garden can be a lot of work. When I was a kid I didn't know we were poor. I thought everybody had a garden. We pressure canned loads of food. I thought everyone had green beans and new potatoes for dinner once a week in the winter. I still love green beans and new potatoes. A piece of Smithfield ham in them adds a great flavor.
We live on one acre of land. This provides loads of room for a home garden. We don't even come close to using 1/8th of an acre for garden. With the drought last summer I was glad that we had two ground wells for irrigation. I had to buy a small pump. I already had the PVC pipe to place in the wells.
My wife and I have a two story house. Since the two daughters are both adults and living in St. Louis we are looking for 25 acres in a more secluded area. We are used to the highway, but I want to have more peace and quiet. Not to mention better security. Our house is really too big for us now. We don't use the upstairs anymore. The last time we used the upstairs bedrooms was when the in-laws came down for Thanksgiving. When we find our new spot I'm going to transplant every black berry bush out of our two rows. I really like this variety!
Windancersong-1494878Good on you - wish I had more land to grow more and the CO season was longer and more predictable in late spring. Wife and I always look forward to the annual stew (BIG BATCH) from our garden.
bigdaddysdawgI - I have 2 red raspberry and 1 blackberry bushes - last year was the 1st year we were able to eat the blackberries (about 2 handfulls). Best deserts by far.
Most people are just happy raising children, but I suppose if they're hungry......
it is better to grow indoors, and there are many space saving solutions that allow you to grow quite a lot of food in a single room, and there is no offseason. you can hang plants on the walls like herbs, peas, green beans, the lighter ones. you can put hangers in the ceiling, make sure you hit the joists, and suspend potted tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, etc from the ceiling, you can let them vine out as much as you want with some strings mounted to support the vines. also, research market prices, if tomatoes are very cheap where you live, you might as well buy them and grow other veggies that cost more, that is a great way to use your space/time/money efficiently. don't rule out fruit trees/bushes in the yard either, nature will take care of them, and they provide bountiful amounts of food seasonally, so much that you may consider selling the excess, or trading with other home growers
Good luck on that one. Then I guess you'd have to worry about anthrax, as well lead and other heavy metals being in the soil and industrial waste from fracking in your groundwater.
Thanks for all the cool replies, Bill you are incorrigible and why we love you. WDS, thanks now I don't feel so bad about my vodka habit. DON'T TELL ME!!!!!!!
Mike: I know what's in hotdogs, and don't care, they taste good. Pink slime FTW.
To all you Nayyyy sayers, I found horse meat to give me a little giddy up in my step. What's not to like, it's a useless animal in this day and age anyway. EATMOREHORSE.
So are you! Woody.
I could eat horse. But not mine.
That is positively disgusting. Horses are intelligent beautiful loving animals. Would you eat dogs and cats because that is the same relationship horses have with people. This entire country was built on the backs of horses. We owe them some respect and dignity. Americans have already spoken on slaughtering horses, that is why there are laws against it now.
AP/IL
I would ONLY eat dogs or cats if they were prepared properly! Either lightly sauteed in butter and onions or blackened on the grill. Now, don't even get me started on the taste of horse............lean, muscled, little fat....UMMMM UMMMMM! Besides, cows are intelligent beautiful loving animals too, and the entire WORLD was built on the backs of cows, so you owe them respect and dignity> Next time you go to India, order a cheeseburger!
Some people do eat dogs and cats. Pigs are also said to be quite intelligent, but I don't see anyone complaining about eating them. I think that it's equally ethical/unethical (you could argue either way and I'm not going to get in the debate whether eating any meat is wrong or right) to eat any animal-it's not more or less wrong/right to eat horses than it is cows.
For me, the "wrongness" of the article comes from the fact that people didn't know that they were eating horse-everyone deserves to know what they are eating. If something is labeled as "beef", it better be just beef. If something is labeled as "horse", there better not be other meats in that aren't specified on the packaging.
AP/IL
So are pigs, do you even bat an eye when you chow down that bacon or pork chop??
LOL! Maybe in the early days but the "backs of horses" haven't built jack @!$%# for decades. With a few exceptions the vast majority of horses in this country today are little more than play things or really big pets.
You mean that's why there WERE laws against it. One of the very few laws actually repealed under Obama.
Back country. Quit telling the truth. It upsets the drones out there.
"Horses are intelligent beautiful loving animals."
=====================
And cows are stupid and ugly so they deserve it?
AP/IL
That is positively disgusting. Horses are intelligent beautiful loving animals. Would you eat dogs and cats because that is the same relationship horses have with people. This entire country was built on the backs of horses. We owe them some respect and dignity. Americans have already spoken on slaughtering horses, that is why there are laws against it now.
They do in a lot of other countries. I heard dog meat is kind of sweet and very tender as least that's what my stepfather said. He also said fresh monkey brains are a little gross, giant grubworm were creamy tasting and cobra venom cocktails had a bit of a bite to them.
FYI AP/IL
Horse slaughter has only been illegal in the United States, for 5 years although most of the meat from slaughter was shipped overseas and ends up in the EU meat production. The rest goes to zoo's. Most horses sent for slaughter are healthy and bought at auctions. My husband is an over the road truck driver and has haul multiple loads of horse meat for export. So now all of the horses that would of been for slaughter in the Us, giving Americans jobs are taken to Mexico by Kill buyers.
EXCUSE me! Horses are useless? Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars the horse industry brings to the economy EVERY YEAR? Just because horses are not pulling plows - except for the Amish - doesn't make them useless. Horses are now used for racing, sport, recreation, competition, many kinds of therapy - physical and mental - and companionship, just to name a few. Recreational riders like myself bring millions of dollars to the LOCAL economies where they live - tack shops, feed stores, veterinarians, farriers, riding clothes and other equipment, it goes on and on.
If the horse marked disappeared, the economy - local and national - WOULD feel the hit.
The downside for people who want to EAT horses however is that the 70% of the veterinary products - and over-the-counter products as well - we horse owners use to keep our horses healthy and happy are absolutely BANNED from the human food chain. As stated briefly in the article, bute - only one of many - will render a horse permanently unfit for human consumption. It's the same for ALL banned substances, and American horses are ALL full of them.
Why does this matter to the EU and the UK? Because odds on at least some of that meat they have just found in their beef came from American horses illegally sold for human consumption. Just because we have no slaughter plants in the US, and all our horses receive banned substances doesn't mean a thing. Over 200,000 US horses are slaughtered EVERY YEAR - check USDA statistics - and all of this meat is exported overseas, mostly to the EU.
How does this happen? By way of "kill buyers" who acquire our horses any way they can - theft, purchase under false pretenses, rigged auctions, etc. These men are petty criminals who don't know a thing about the history of these horses and don't care. And, let's not forget all the racehorses that can't run fast enough or the Quarter Horses that aren't the right color or don't have perfect conformation and so on. These horses are then trucked to Mexico and Canada where they are accepted - forged documentation and all - for slaughter for human consumption.
Well, they're tested, right? Sure, a couple of spot checks for thousands of horses. Often, they don't test for bute at all, and bute is THE most common contaminant of all - and one of the most dangerous - especially for children.
It's a criminal enterprise all right, but not quite in the way you might think. It's criminal in SO many ways. The first, of course, it that our horses cannot legally be sold for human consumption. But also, the cruelty to our horses is unbelievable - and illegal. And everyone involved knows all this - even the legislators who will not pass anti-horse slaughter/anti-transport for the purpose of slaughter legislation. The US government is complicit just as much as those in the UK and EU in permitting this cruel, illegal "business" to continue.
To give the EU due credit, they have stated in their food safety regulations for 2013 that they will stop accepting horses from countries that don't have traceability systems comparable to the passport system - which has proven not to be much protection either.
Since American horses are not considered to be food animals, we have no regulation or traceability system at all, hopefully, this will bring an end to the slaughter of American horses, but, as someone has already stated, laws are only as good as the enforcement. So far, the international horse meat trade hasn't been bothered much by laws since the authorities always look the other way, but hopefully this will change now that it's been made apparent to everyone just how corrupt these people are.
Stop putting up with this! The only way horse meat can be even remotely guaranteed to be safe is if they are farmed like ALL other food animals. But horses are not farmed in significant numbers anywhere. Strange? No. They aren't farmed because they are much more expensive than cattle and other food animals. Horses have the lowest reproductive rate of any domestic animal. The conception rate is lower. The gestation period is longer and problems more common. The maturation rate is much slower. More must be spent of fencing and other safety measures for the extremely active horses and their propensity for injuring themselves.
Food animals have been bred to have the traits that they have - including extreme docility and non-reactiveness. This not only makes slaughter safer for the workers, it also makes it more humane for the animals - although that last wasn't the reason they are bred for that. The real reason is to prevent as much a possible the contamination of the meat by stress hormones. Sometimes they still are not able to keep them down to the required level. This is called a "dark kill" and the meat cannot be used for human consumption.
Horses breeders have gone the opposite direction. Great care has been given to retaining the horse's natural "spirit," and "brilliance." Thus horses remain the same panic-prone creatures of flight as their wild ancestors. This is the reason they cannot be humanely slaughtered in the fast-paced assembly line structure of modern commercial slaughter plants. It also means that they pump out more stress hormones - MUCH more, since you can actually SEE their arteries pumping them out in their extreme flight response. I really don't know how this could be controlled whether the horse was farmed or not.
Still want to eat an animal that has served us in SO many other ways, and continues to do so? If you can't see this and still want to eat them even with an abundance of other meats available, that's your call. But I'd get me a good oncologist since most of the substances are banned because they are, among other things, carcinogenic.
China said they will purchase all the unwanted meat. Its a step up from there RAT diet.
Learn to spell.
As someone once told me about the street food there "If rats tasted this good they'd all be extinct!"
Japanese eat raw horse meat quite often. It's called Basashi.
In fact I had some last Saturday at a friend's birthday party. It's okay... Not the greatest raw meat to eat. Raw deer is a bit better.
I'm not sure why this is news
Bankrupt dead Beats (Oil/Gas thieves) of Europe are down to eating their horses?!
After seeing them attacking Qaddafi with their 'something borrowed' (US) missiles and broken down gas guzzling Toronados and playiing the 'Regurgitated colonists' role in Libya and Afghanistan (As they sink into the Sunset, a flat broke country headed for the 'dust bin of history' after 800 years of 'sucking the life of little impotent countries they 'savaged like cannibals' to 'live the life') ) next thing you will see is Cameron and Hague eating (((stuffed))) rats in company as their (also) broken down Queen 'Elizabeth-the'last' (Of the Mohicans).
The Palestinians should be (((cheering))) the demise of the country most responsible for deliverying them into bondage to the predator ZioNazi's under their faggot Lord Balfour).
Insurance man. I believe that you are quite strange. What is a ZioNazi? Is this a tirade about Grreat Britain or the EU? You seem confused. As a Celt I have no love for the British Monarchy. I don't wish them harm. I also wouldn't lift a finger to help them. I essentially don't believe in Foreign aid of any kind. If you are ranting about Empires then you have to include France, Germany, Spain, Italy(do you remember Rome), Greece, and lets not forget the Chinese.
You people keep forgeting the mantra: "We don't need government we can regulate ourselves."
No it's you people who keep forgetting that government doesn't do any better of a job at regulating food than it does anything else. Did you somehow fail to notice that all of the strict European regulations didn't prevent this??? Have you failed to notice that 99% of food recalls are voluntarily done by manufacturers after their own testing finds a problem??
Only a fool looks at something that obviously doesn't work and demands more of it!
Thanks back country. I agree.
This is exactly why we need government oversight, because if left to capitalists forever seeking profits, we will always have problems like this. Read the Jungle from Upton Sinclair to see where we are compared to where we were. The failure of government to be unable to catch "every problem" means that there should be more or better oversight. If you believe that no oversight is better, what do you think will happen? That capitalist will suddenly become "moral" and do the right thing when they didn't while someone was trying to watching over their shoulders?
Backward and bigbehind
They recall products to protect their own arse not yours. The liberal media would roast their gonads when the news was out that they gave the country the runs and worst. Big fines would be levied. What would the tea party do, refuse? Oh my why wouldn't they volunteer the recall? They are smarter than the tea party boys and girls.
psychedout
The FDA budget is in the BILLIONS of dollars now and yet they only manage to inspect a fraction of the food that comes into this country, less than 3% in some cases. Where exactly is the money to do "better" supposed to come from?? Did you want the cost of food to be 10 times what it is now??
YES! They will do the "right thing" for their bottom dollar! This isn't @!$%#ing 1906 genius, there is no way in hell a company would get away with that today! What Upton Sinclair did for the meat packing industry every person with access to social media can do almost instantly today. Look what happened with the so-called "pink slime"; people didn't want it and the company basically went out of business and that product was FDA approved. Maybe you should try looking at some actual facts and reality before forming an opinion.
Mule's Brother
No @!$%# Sherlock. What difference does their motive make as long as they are recalling the products that have a problem. Give me just one example of the FDA stopping something from coming to market because it was tainted. For @!$%#s sake, the FDA has inspectors standing on the line LOOKING for bacterial contamination. Apparently they don't realize that you can't see bacteria with the naked eye. Yeah, lets spend even more money doing stupid @!$%# like that so the sheeple can have a false sense of security.
The fines would be a pittance compared to lost revenue from the bad publicity. Companies that poison people tend to go out of business.
I don't know why the Britts are all up in arms. At least their meat had real meat in it , be it from horse or a cow. Here in the states they sell you meat flavored product , which is a soy bean that has been flavored with meat. These mega corporations are basically poisoning people with the help of FDA. I raise my own beef and mutton. I buy a small calf and I feed it with hay and grass and when it reaches about 1000 lbs I slaughter it and freeze it. Grass fed meat smells and tastes great !!!!
Meat's meat, a man's gotta eat.
Don't eat ground meat. You don't know what's been added to the mix.
Who cares? If you can't tell the difference by taste, why not eat it. It's a whole lot better than cremation and wasting all that perfectly good food.
See my post above about contaminated horse meat.
I was living and working in Holland for a year before I learned that I was eating horse steak. It was served openly and is quite good. Runderpaard steak was it's name. Paard is Dutch for horse. I think that's how cowboys came to say Howdy Paardner, not partner.
Maybe it was safe to eat, or, maybe not. EU inspectors regularly find more contaminated horse meat than the meat from ANY other animal.
Good to see Europe finally improving their dietary habits. Now, if they just do something about dental and killing off their elderly.
Horse meat is delicious. I ate it a couple times a month, while living in Italy. It much better for you than beef. :)
I've eaten horse meat also. They used to sell it in the meat markets in Las Vegas back in the seventies. It was 40 - 60 cents a pound and lean! As a rare (raw) beef eater, I had to cook it thoroughly as it had a sweeter taste than I liked. All those wild mustangs that destroy the environment out west that aren't indigenous could be culled and sold in the meat markets. This sentimental attachment we have to animals is ridiculous. I don't give up beef just because some ffa kid has a calf as a pet. How about lowering the trade deficit and sending all those unwanted cats and dogs to Asia if they like to consume them. It's better than just gassing and filling up our landfills. Are we supposed to let the pythons take over the Everglades just because some people like to keep them as pets (which is how they got there in the first place?)
Wow, ff, I hope YOU don't have any pets.
I agree, AP/IL. falfurious, doesn't even have a clue. Not only are the wild horses NOT harming the environment - it's the cattle, stupid! - they too have been given toxic medications by the BLM in their periodic roundups.
However, I feel so sorry for an individual who believes " This sentimental attachment we have to animals is ridiculous." that I'll leave him to his cold, empty life. You know, it's been proven that people who don't care about cruelty to animals don't worry about it much for people either.
i would eat horse meat if it was available. why not? it's a clean animal.
Go ahead and eat horse meat, it's not clean as you think it is. As pets and companion riding animals we treat horses with wormers, supplements, and pain medication. While most drugs we give livestock (cattle, pigs and other animals that are slaughtered for their meat) the drugs given to livestock often have a weaning off period while the animals are in the feed lot to be finished off (getting off drugs and fatten them up for slaughter). Horses are not. Bute and furicin is a known cancer causing drug (along with a LONG laundry list of them) and most American horses have these drugs given to them on a daily basis.
Horses normally are not put in a feed lot to withdraw, the faster that they can be bought at auction and shipped off to the slaughter house the more money the kill buyer makes. There is no weaning off or finishing for horses. Thus eating horse meat is not healthy as one may think. Horses are not regulated by USDA each cow that is meant for a food source is tagged and identified. Horses are not. Thus having the EU requiring each American horse having a passport with treatments and medications noted starting this year. Europeans don't want to eat contaminated meat.
You are spot on!
If anybody has read about the old West of the U.S. they would find out that the Calvary Soldiers ate a lot of horse meat. They also ate mules, oxen, anything else they could find along the trail. The nearest thing to a stocked chuck wagon the Calvary had was occasionally a herd of cattle that they drove along on long marches. If it is warm blooded you can eat it. Read some of the factual history books, not the romance novels, about the settling of the Western U.S. and you will be amazed what can be eaten. Ever heard of Armadillo or rattle snake steak ?
They didn't have the veterinary products then that they do now, Dufus. And I doubt armadillo and rattle snakes are dosed with them either. Armadillos DO have - and can pass on - leprosy though.
You need to bone up on facts yourself.
It's only a matter of time when we begin hearing news reports of human meat additives. Think about it!
What was the name of that old movie, " Soylent Green " ? Maybe it isn't so old.
Do ya mean like potatoes, onions and carrots? If put in them the pot after the "meat" has cooked awhile, they come out just right..........
Horse meat is a great tasting, rich, red meat. Just tried it in Switzerland and found it in France at upscale eateries on a recent trip there. Horses are a wonderful animal and have been consumed by animals and humans for as long as they have existed. I have heard it was an issued food by most armed forces and that is when the stigma got attached, it became "army ration" food after WWI. Also fueled by the nessecity to cut down on the number of unneeded horses after petro engines became popular. Don't knock it till you try it.
Americans have eaten horses ONLY in emergencies in modern times. That's why American horses are so dangerous to eat. We don't consider them food animals and regulate - or rather do NOT regulate - them accordingly. Modern veterinary medications - and over-the-counter products as well - contain substances that are strictly banned from the human food chain.
In a recent poll taken by one of the most respected pollsters in the country a whopping 80% of Americans - including horse owners - said they were dead set against slaughtering our horses. Just as well, because, as I said, they are much too contaminated to eat anyway.
For your information, my uncle was one of those Army troopers who were offered horse meat. He refused to eat it, as did many others. Those who did try to eat it often threw up. If you're gong to rely on facts, you need to post ALL of them, not just the ones that fit your agenda.
I think I will stick to my squirrel, deer, groundhog, rabbit, possum, frog legs, turkey, pheasant and just ride my horse.
willis, I'm with you!
Willus I have never ate Possum. It's a pretty stinky animal. I couldn't stand to clean it. I'm planning on keeping some rabbits starting next summer. It's good food, and it provides excellent fertilizer for the garden. You can use rabbit crap tea to run hydroponic gardens. Rabbits, chickens, geese(not the big white kind), and guineas. I have raised quail, chukers, and pheasant with some success. I just have to keep my wife from giving them names.
Geese and guinea fowl wil keep most pests out of your garden. They also eat snakes. I hate snakes.
Me too! Although I don't care for those other animals either.
PETA would love this. With so many sources involved I don't see how they keep track of where it came from. They may even have some possum in there. It's all a matter of taste since the Asians eat dog and cat, we eat possum, alligator and snake, and apparently some Europeans eat horse as a delicacy. The Indians would not think of eating a cow.
Wade, they might not have eaten cow, I doubt that, but they wouldn't hesitate to scalp you.
unreal-3070801 --- Wrong Indian, Methinks!
I don't know why they are making such a big deal about "Butazoladine" "Bute" being in horse meat......If anyone has eaten horse meat that came from the states, there is a high likelihood that they consumed meat that had Bute in it. It is nothing more than ibuprofen for horses......
Buta is the same as ibuprofen? That is crap. Apparently you have never taken the human version of bute.
May you have to take it and suffer the side effects.
Sir, you are WAY off base! Phenylbutazone is NOT ibuprofen! It's very dangerous for humans, which is why the pulled the license for it to be used in humans many years ago. That's also why it's BANNED absolutely in the food safety rules of every country I know of. GEEZ!
Food And Toxicology Report: http://www.box.net/shared/lqi4hhkg42
Drugs In Horse Meat: http://habitatforhorses.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/horsemeat-and-drugs/
Bute And The Passport System: http://www.box.net/shared/ln3qh88kz42avo4ys1oa
Horse Meat Is Deadly To Humans: http://www.box.net/shared/smhn2fmdeb
Why The Issue With Bute: http://www.box.com/s/e1ae613e90cc9ebbef6e
The Use of Bute, see especially p. 8: https://www.box.com/s/r09jajve2kimj47ygmuc
From Pasture To Plate FORBES: http://www.forbes.com/sites/vickeryeckhoff/2011/12/06/horse-slaughterhouse-investigation-sounds-food-safety-and-cruelty-alarms/
FVO Inspection of Mexican Plant OFFICIAL: https://www.box.com/s/bgsda62zd15xh4r8bs27
FVO Inspection Report Canada: https://www.box.com/s/horrns3xsr50th1f0dct
If anyone wants more, I have it.
If you are normal, there are certain things that make us shutter and eating horse meat is one of them. I don't want to eat trigger, man of war or any othr famous horse. As for pigs, only famous pig I know is babe and he isn't real. As for europe, eat all the horse meat you want, raise taxes and drink wine.
You forgot Arnold Ziffle, but they turned him into bar-b-que decades ago.