“The weak are meat and the strong do BEEF.”

A slightly adjusted Japanese proverb there for you 🙂

I was reading a BBC news post on Facebook earlier and it asked readers to share their thoughts on eating Horsemeat. Naturally there were some vegetarians around but the majority said they’d at least try it and some from the continent were describing it.

1 person also said, because he was an Inuit, he’d grown up on walrus and seal and that horse sounded quite nice…

But the comment that attracted my attention the most was one that suggested why we don’t eat horses here in England: What do we call cow meat? What do we call pig meat? What do we call deer meat?

I hope you realised that none of the words we used to describe the meat are that similar to the name of the animal that it came from (with the exceptions of Lamb and some others but I think lamb is distant enough from the more generic Sheep).

I think if we didn’t call meat from a horse ‘Horse meat’ we might be more acceptant of it. I for one probably wouldn’t be so happy if I served up ‘Cow chow main’, ‘Cow and Kidney Pie’ or ‘Pigs in more Pig’.

Ok, the last one was a bad example…

But you also have to realise that horses have been humanity’s long standing allies and are probably the most loved creatures on the planet. They’ve helped us through wars, helped us build and made trade possible. Here in the West they’re generally designated as pets – but then again, so are Rabbits…

I don’t want to eat a horse, in the same way I don’t want to eat a Sheep or a Cow or a Pig, but call it something else and I’ll pretend