Hors D’oeuvre? (Photo credit: modezero)
So there’s horse meat in burgers. How shocking. How awful. After all it’s far worse eating horse than cow, or pig, or duck, or chicken – isn’t it? Well let’s just think about that shall we? What actually is it about the horse (or the dog for that matter) that stops all the UK carnivores from eating it? Is it because of our national love of the horse that means we can’t bear to see it killed? Probably not. We are quite happy to bet on the Grand National but we do go all gooey eyed when one has to be put down at Beecher’s Brook. Perhaps it harks back to a time when the horse was our main means of transport, and the noble beasts raced from London to York to deliver our mail or our highwaymen. Maybe so, but didn’t they use horses in France, too? No. There’s no logic to it. Meat is meat. One lot is just as good, or as bad (depending on your point of view) as another.
The real shock, the real shame, is that we evidently have no idea what goes into our burgers. The sad truth is that not only have multi-nationals devastated the environment with their policy of deforestation to feed their, and our, greed. They have also failed to uphold the most basic standards of food safety. And the only way to force them to change their habits is to hit them where it hurts – with a total boycott until they can convince us that they will henceforth behave ethically and safely. Actually, there is another way. Why not stop eating meat all together. That way you won’t have to fret over the question of whether the horse is more worthy than the cow.
Write and Prosper 