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Hippophagy

That’s the fancy term for eating horsemeat. I cringed a special cringe yesterday when I heard on the car radio that IKEA put horsemeat in its delicious Swedish meatballs in Europe. Corby Kummer talks about why some peoples eat horse, and others find it disgusting. Excerpt: Horsemeat seemed the way to fuel the Industrial Revolution: […]

That’s the fancy term for eating horsemeat. I cringed a special cringe yesterday when I heard on the car radio that IKEA put horsemeat in its delicious Swedish meatballs in Europe. Corby Kummer talks about why some peoples eat horse, and others find it disgusting. Excerpt:

Horsemeat seemed the way to fuel the Industrial Revolution: it was cheap, plentiful, and high-protein. The French promoted it as a health food and claimed that it reduced the urge to drink too much. As of 1866 horsemeat shops had opened in Paris, and the year before, a demonstration feast at the Grand Hotel served horse in nearly every course to intellectuals including Flaubert and Dumas. The menu, Larousse says, included vermicelli in horse broth, horse sausage and cured meats, boiled horsemeat and fillet with mushrooms, horse stew, potatoes sautéed in horse fat, salad in horse oil, and rum cake with horse-bone marrow. The wine was Cheval Blanc.

Oddly, news of this menu did not dissuade the entire French populace from consuming horse. It cost half what beef did. People ate it more because they could afford it than because they liked it — the high content of glycogen that makes horse lean and high in protein also makes it taste sweet.

I’ll take his word for it. Not going there. No suh.

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