Best joke so far? My doctor said I have to watch what I eat so I've managed to get a couple of tickets to the Grand National. Ba-dum-tish. You gotta admit, this one's got legs. Ok, we give up but only because there's a word limit. The horsemeat scandal will continue to run and run (unlike the horses) and frankly, we wouldn't be surprised if the scandal spreads further than processed food - which, let's face it, we could all avoid if we had to - to institutions such as our schools, hospitals... hey, even lower-end restaurants may not be immune.
Perhaps the most important thing we've learned in this ongoing controversy is that we really have no idea how our food is made or what goes into it. To be fair, it's not made very easy with food labelling at its most opaque, but as a country, as a government, as a consumer, we simply don't ask enough questions. We are not suspicious enough of anything we have not prepared ourselves and until we do reach that level of suspicion - and really, why aren't we there already? - we are simply putting blind faith in an industry that clearly does not have our best interests at heart.
All scaremongering aside, would you eat horse? If you picked up a frozen ready-made lasagne labelled made with 100% fresh horsemeat, would you buy it? There is nothing wrong with horse per se (drug-addled ex-racehorses aside), so let's say for the sake of argument that horse was an acceptable farmed meat in this country, reared organically, would you eat it? Many remember times from the war when horse was more than acceptable (fine and dandy but we can never forgive them for the hideousness that is carrot cake...) along, frankly, with many other animals we nowadays have the luxury of dismissing as a morally and ethically dubious food source. As a meat, it's actually incredibly nutritious, more so than beef or pork, containing high levels of monounsaturated fatty acids like palmitoleic acid, which has been identified as being particularly beneficial for human health, skin repair and so on. Horse fat has been used in skin cream and as a traditional medicine for wounds and burns to help the skin heal, so including horse in our diet may well be a sensible move.
Horse is an acceptable part of the food chain in many countries across the world, most famously France and Belgium, but also Italy, Iceland, Japan, Korea and South America. In fact 4.7 billion horses are consumed each year - a staggering trade for an animal we would consider as taboo as rat or dog. But therein lies the problem: cultural mores are at their strongest and sniffiest when we can afford to disdain what other countries know is good nutritious protein. With the recession showing no sign of abating, is it time for cheval et frites to trot onto our menus?
