Hungry Enough To Eat A Horse? Do It.

One awesome thing about the Internet is that we can research things that are held as commonly known facts in order to open our minds and objectively review consensus reality. We all know about the horse meat scandal that happened worldwide earlier this year and instead of blindly following the disgust and uproar that it has caused, I have decided to research the subject. I believe that we shouldn't take anything for granted and EVERYTHING should be questioned.

I recently found this infographic and it got the cogs turning.

So why don't we eat it?

Well actually a large portion of the world's population do. In China it is dried and made into biltong (jerky to you non-South Africans) and dried sausage. Japan serves thinly-sliced raw horse as a sort of sushi called Basahi. In France (its capital is also considered the world's food capital) they often prepare horse meat into steaks called Viande le Cheval. Belgium, Kazakhstan,Russia, Mexico, Mongolia, Argentina, and Sardinia ALL consider Horse meat an integral part of their diet.

So why don't WE eat it? I think it comes down to what my ex boyfriend calls "the pet factor" and what a friend of mine explained to me as the 'matter out of place' theory.

This theory simply says: In life we put things into categories and people don't like to combine these categories. For instance, horses have been used for transport, farm work and companionship for most of recorded history (obviously not in the countries I wrote about earlier) and this makes it hard for us to regard them as food. This could also be for health reasons as it is our natural instinct to avoid eating things that don't fit into the 'food' category in our head which is why it could feel unnatural. Similarly, although a bit off topic, cats don't generally like to drink water from those two in one food and water bowls as it is hardwired into them that water found near their food source/prey is usually contaminated.

 The same friend who educated me on this theory suggested that since we call cows beef and pigs pork, why don't we call horse meat "Heef" to reduce the stigma associated with it? It is a good idea although personally I think that having an alternative name for animals that we eat is ridiculous and just fuels our ignorance about the food we eat.

In a perfect world I would like to hunt my own food because I feel that if we are going to eat meat we should be able to kill it ourselves and watch that animal die while honoring them and giving thanks. We like to pretend that the meat we buy has very little to do with the adorable animals that we gush over on the internet. Supermarkets make this very easy for us by packaging meat like they do so we don't even have to give the life of that animal a second thought.

But back to horses...

I was wondering what horse meat tasted like and after some web surfing I found the following horse meat reviews:

"Horse is a versatile meat that lends itself to a variety of preparations. It has more protein, and less fat than lean beef. It tastes somewhat like a mix between beef and venison. It can be a bit sweeter than other red meats, yet still possesses a dense meat flavor with a hint of gaminess."

- The Huffington post

"It is half the price of beef and undeniably delicious. I went to a steak tasting at Edinburgh's L'Escargot Bleu bistro at the height of the scandal. Chef and patron Fred Berkmillar had packed in 12 Scottish foodies, cooks, and meat suppliers and gave us rump steaks to try. One was the best 30-day-aged Orkney beef, the other Comtois horse, farmed in the Dordogne.

You could have confused the horse with beef, but its steak — juicy, tender, just slightly gamey — won the fry-off by 12 votes to none."

-Alex Renton from The Guardian

"Horse meat is a bit sweet in taste. Some think it is a blend between beef (a cow) and venison (deer). People use it similar to the way they use beef, putting it in sandwiches, or serving it in a slab." 

-The International Bussiness Times

All in all it sounds pretty damn delicious!

If you are health conscious you will be pleased to note that horse meat contains 25% less fat, nearly 20% less sodium, double the iron and less cholesterol than high quality beef cuts, and when compared to ground beef 25% less fat, 30% less cholesterol and 27% less sodium. VIVA LA HEEF!

The problem of course was the fact that companies lied about what was in their meat products. If I pay for beef I want beef- by the same token, if I pay for horse I WANT HORSE. Another problem is that the horse meat that was used came from animals that were never intended or raised for eating. Horses raised for racing and companionship are pumped full of medication and chemicals that stay in their meat. If it was accepted in our society it would be properly regulated and that would not be a problem.

Availability of meat is subject to supply and demand and due to horse meat taboo here in South Africa and in places such as England and America. It is unlikely that we will see horse meat being sold in shops (unless it is disguised as ham).

The biggest problem I have with this uproar and categorical rejection of horse meat as an acceptable food source is that people want to push their illogical morality us and tell us that eating horse meat is disgusting and taboo.

The Death of Dialogue

As a kid I didn’t have many friends but soon found that I preferred books anyway. I soaked up facts and character histories like a sponge at a swimming pool convention. I didn’t need to experience things to know them. Instead I read hundreds of other people’s experiences and considered myself an expert. I felt superior because I knew more arbitrary information than most kids my age and quite a few adults.

 I’m pretty sure you can all see that that sort of attitude wouldn’t be very beneficial to me at school. While I was building my random thought library through hours of reading, it soon became apparent that the part of my brain in charge of social interaction was being neglected (Which is why at the age of 24 I still think it is perfectly appropriate to flirt with a guy by telling him that the price of pistachios is directly related to the fact that they can spontaneously combust and thus are a danger to transport). For a person who talks so much, I have sadly had few true conversations.

Recently somebody brought to my attention that most conversations were intersecting monologues instead of dialogues. This means that instead of really listening to what someone is saying, taking a moment to mull it over and then forming a response, we tend to half listen and then formulate what we are going to say based on our vast internal library before that person has even finished speaking. We are so used to soaking up information through reading monologues that a lot of us have forgotten the art of true dialogue. I know that I am guilty of it.

The Greek philosopher, Socrates (469-399 BC), had a very interesting view on knowledge. He strongly objected to writing, worrying that if relied on that it would destroy memory. More importantly he feared that those who learnt from reading would be misled into thinking that what they had was knowledge when in fact all they really had was data. He believed that real knowledge could only come from dialogues which require both questions and answers. Dialogue allows one to form and interrogate ideas so that actual knowledge can be extracted and truly understood. This suggests that a book could never really give you knowledge unless you had access to the author to dissect the ideas written about. In essence, all writing presents itself as a monologue.

Socrates himself never wrote down any of his thoughts but his protégé Plato (a philosopher in his own right) recorded all of his dialogues. This is one of the dialogues on the deficiencies of writing.

“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”

With the invention of the printing press and then the internet, writing is everywhere and everyone has access to it. There is so much information available and thrust upon us on a daily basis, from television programmes, Google to social media.  Instead of learning from actual experiences and teachers, we can get all our information off the internet and through the media. There is no need to commit things to memory because we know that we can refer to the internet for any of our information needs. Some say that we are “outsourcing our brain to the cloud” implying that technology is making us dumber because we don’t need to think for ourselves. 

So in order to combat this we need to be able to dialogue and find true knowledge – thoughts that have been dissected and proven through your own means. I think we also have to be a lot more discerning with what information we take in. An information snob if you will. 

Sherlock Holmes summed it up quite beautifully while explaining how he ‘furnished his brain attic’:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

To avoid the inevitable brain clutter that we tend to pick up while reading endless amounts of 9gag, Reddit, news articles and the like, I offer you a piece of advice that I gleaned from a site called Pocket Anarchy. Treat journeys into cyberspace like most men do supermarket shopping trips: get a list, get in, buy what you need, then get out!

I think that the internet and print media is incredibly ingrained in all of our lives and it would be damn near impossible to avoid it completely. However, I don’t think that we need to be slaves to it. If we start to use technology as an aid to gaining knowledge and not as a source of knowledge then I think we will be ok. I think the trick is to truly understand the effect of mass media in order to gain power over it. Resurrect the almost lost art of dialogue and de-clutter your brain attic. 

This is what we are trying to avoid people!