What do all the following restaurants have in common? Khublai Khan, Glasgow; L'Escargot Bleu, Edinburgh; Host, Bishops Stortford; King of Prussia, Abergavenny; Oliver Peyton's pop-up, London... Because there's a word count, we'll just tell you: they all serve legitimate, legal horse and apparently sales are soaring. So what's up with the Dobby love?
The horsemeat scandal has had some ramifications. It's hard to believe that the supermarkets were quite so free with our cash as to make free with profits and chillax whilst unethical suppliers laced their products with unrequested and unannounced horsemeat, but that's what happens when the price of beef - and other meats - is going through the barn roof and consumers are the least suspicious of their food that they have ever been in the history of human life. However, we are led to believe from various talking heads that this will have both uplifting and grave consequences for the food industry (depending on what day it is and who needs to make a point) and shopping will change forever. Not that we're cynical but we have our doubts, frankly. Those who require meat to be a daily constituent of their diet will still require cheap meat; those who shop at butchers' and farm shops already will find more reasons to do so. Sales of ready meals will no doubt creep back up as human memory is famously short and time is famously precious and as we have less than 40 - FORTY - food inspectors across the UK, there's no real guarantee that food inspections will become any more hardcore or frequent.
But one of the side-effects has been a definite, almost sneaky, curiosity about horse as a stand-alone meat. The above-mentioned restaurants are serving rump steaks, tartare and burgers and have seen a definitive increase in sales since the crisis, suggesting that we Brits are slowly cottoning on to what the rest of the world has known for some time: horse tastes good. With 4.5 million eaten globally each year, someone's lovin' it. Why not us? Aficionados - who seem to be remaining firmly underground, occasionally piping up then ducking back down again for fear of lynching - cite its sweet gamey flavour, make comparisons with venison for its texture, colour and healthy leanness and make the case for a less disingenuous approach to protein in general. If the animal, be it ostrich, crocodile, cow, pig, guinea pig, is reared humanely and killed in the best possible way, the meat can only be delicious; the only obstacle is our cultural mores and Time itself has proved those weak and transitory. To extend the point, we all see so-called 'exotic meats' on sale at markets and even supermarkets around the UK (although at this point, the crocodile might actually be chicken if sold by a supermarket) and boast about having eaten them, despite the carbon footprint, provenance, even sustainability issues. Horse comes with none of this baggage, being freely available and slaughtered right here in this country and it seems a waste to keep exporting it (especially when it just seems to end up back here anyway).
The moral of the story this time, then, is that perhaps we should just GET OVER OURSELVES. If we see horse on a menu, we should at least try it. If the rest of the world has found a cheaper, less planet-destructive protein than the land-guzzling cow, should we not just get down from our moral high horse and not look a gift horse in the mouth?
