Horse meat

Backgrounder:

http://news.yahoo.com/missouri-town-hopes-first-u-horse-slaughter-plant-225135573.html

Ok, this topic is just for fun.

I once read a book (gasp, he reads! J) back when I was in college entitled “The Impoverished Student’s Handbook of Cookery, Eatery and Housekeepery”. It was great fun. It also had some good tips on a cheap way to live in an apartment off campus and survive.

One of the discussions in the book was on meat, and what to do with it. In keeping with the book’s irreverent tone toward just about everything, it included a passage on horsemeat. You see, Americans have this thing about horses. They seemed so cute (and girls back then just fell in love with every horse in sight) that it was a travesty for a human to eat an equine. It didn’t matter that the meat’s protein was just as good as any other meat (as soldiers from eras long past will tell you as well as other people needing sustenance desperately), it just isn’t done. It is done in other parts of the world, but on this, and dogs and cats, Americans are a bit squeamish.

Now, we (except for vegetarians who forget that humans are omnivores and designed as predators – note the canine teeth and the binocular vision … they are there for a reason and it ain’t eating carrots) Americans will eat a whole lot of different species of animal life (as well as plant life, but we are not talking about that).

The way we get around the fuzzy names like cow, pig, sheep, deer, moose, bear and a host of other mammals is we give it another name. Unfortunately, for the birds, they aren’t as lucky: A chicken is a chicken; a duck is a duck; and a pheasant is a pheasant. Fish is fish, but it also can go by other names. But for the mammals primarily we have a variety of names.

Cow meat is beef, veal, steak or roasts.

Pigs are pork, bacon or ham.

Sheep is mutton.

Wild stuff is venison.

But horse … well it is horse. As are dog is dog and cat is cat.

So, this book, with its tongue firmly stuffed in its cheek, suggested that the poor horse, cat and dog needed other names. The names, it suggested probably should be four-letter words like beef, veal, pork, lamb, chops, etc., because that seemed to go over the best in English.

So, since somebody is thinking of adding horsemeat to the mix … I challenge someone to come up with that four-letter word and let’s start getting it out.