Here in Seattle, there are tons of vegans and vegetarians who question my choice to eat meat; occasionally, there are even naked Peta protestors lining the sidewalks dressed as mermaids. But the Europeans who come here seem quite the opposite; they tend to question why the grocery stores don’t carry much other meat beyond pork, beef, and chicken. Some of them long for horse. Which, as you should know if you’re an American, we would never even dream of eating. 

Slate ran a historical piece today on the reasons that Americans don’t commonly eat horse, while some of our European counterparts do--specifically, in France, Belgium, and Sweden. Higgophagy, which is a nice-sounding word that is bound to greatly disturb any horse-lover out there, means to eat horse. 

Europeans apparently went back and forth on horse-eating for a while, and horse-meat surged in popularity again in the the late 1800’s in several European countries. The Americans didn’t get into eating horse meat, but did export horse meat to Europe. Which indicates to me that Americans didn’t avoid eating horse flesh for any particular moral reasons.

In the 1940’s, there were those that tried to make horse meat fashionable in the United States; horse steak was even on the menu at the Harvard Club. But the finicky Americans at the time just didn’t like it. Again, according to the Slate writer (who for all I know could be making this part of the story up), American women would later substitute horse meat for beef because it was cheaper to try and trick their unsuspecting husbands. (The beef for horse meat switch sounds kind of like the Folger’s Crystals Instant coffee substitutions of the 1970’s, but much worse. I’ve also seen people do the same thing with Torfurky, but I’ve never seen a sober person fooled.)

So, all in all, it seems that Americans never really got into eating horse meat, but not because of any special love for Mister Ed or for any of his family members. Horse meat has been banned in the United States since 2007 and some Americans (and Europeans) are questioning why the slaughter of horse meat was banned when the slaughter of other animals was not banned. 

Again, I guess the lack of horse meat in American grocery stores is something that Europeans lucky enough to visit our fair country will have to deal with whether they like it or not.