By
Veronika Robinson
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| Me and my fruit and veges, 2006. |
Fancy a little horsemeat (or a lot) in your bolognese?
As someone who was raised on a horse stud, the thought of any of my precious friends being in someone’s meal makes me ill to the core. But is horsemeat so different from beef? Both horses and cows have tails, tongues, eat grass, have babies, make milk for their young…. There does seem something rather inconsistent about how we can judge one animal as fit for eating (e.g. a cow), but find another animal repulsive. How quickly we judge some cultures for eating dog or cat, but in reality, an animal is an animal, and a life is a life.
The issue, of course, isn’t about which animal is right to eat, but about fraud. If you buy a ready-made meal, the ingredients listed should be what you find inside. I remember there was a scare some years ago when meat was found in Linda McCartney's vegetarian ready-made meals. Needless to say they quickly moved to a factory where no meat was used!
But the REAL issue is about how humans have become so removed from their food. And instead of looking at this issue, and really questioning this, everyone’s running around looking for someone to blame!
I have been saying the same thing all week - if you eat beef or chicken or lamb why is that any different to eating horse? As a vegetarien the way I see it an animal is an animal and obviously my choice tells me it is wrong to eat either. You are right, the real issue is the deception and like you say ingredient lists should be honest but we live in a culture of blame so the tabloids and the politicians need to point fingers and sensationalize. I have nothing to worry about as we eat whole foods and our meals are fresh - unless they are fresh cooked meals I froze and dug out at a later date. X
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. If you can't recognize what you are eating it means that it shouldn't be eaten. Simple as! Roberta X
ReplyDeleteI don't think that it is eating horse-it is as you say the fraud. It is the fact that no one knows what the horses ate- and the fact that they were most probably not bred for human consumption.
ReplyDeleteThis is the reason that I always buy locally sourced meat. We are too far removed from the food chain, my children, from the start, have seen the pigs in the field and gone inside and seen the sausages on the counter.
It is no different with any sort of food-you are taking it on trust. You can't tell what you are eating with a carrot-the organic carrot on the shelf looks the same as the one that is not organic-and you could quite easily fool the customer with a bit of mud and a non uniform shape.
You would like to think that you could tell with taste but blind tastings have proved that many can't.
I would like to think that I could tell the difference between beef and horse, and even locally produced beef and cheap foreign beef-but mixed up with vegetables, herbs or spices I very much doubt it.
It shows that you are safer cooking from scratch, from a supplier that you trust. Whether you eat meat or not isn't an issue-it applies to any food.