Horse Burger, Anyone?

Anyone who has read Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon is aware that the main character, Aurora, along with her husband and several other characters in the novel, are infatuated with horses and the lucrative business that surrounds these four-legged beauties.  Aurora and her husband don't withhold their funds when it comes to purchasing horses, training them, and betting high stakes on races.  So, I'm sure they would've never considered the possibility of eating one of their own horses, or any kind of horse for that matter.  Do you think if one of their horses became ill or lame that they would've killed it for meat?  Hmm, I'm going to go with 'no.'  Yet, there's a huge fuss in the UK right now concerning that same matter.

 
Edward Garner, director at Kantar Worldpanel, said:"For the four weeks ending 17 February, frozen burger sales were down by 43% and frozen ready meals declined by 13%, clearly demonstrating a change in shopping habits."  I can comprehend why.  I don't forsee myself buying any horse burgers in the near future, either.  Hundreds of thousands of items have been removed from store shelves, only adding fuel to the already-chaotic attitudes of the people in the UK. 

Andy Harrison, the boss of Whitbread (the group behind the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre pub chains), was baffled why more pub and restaurant chains did not appear on a list of co-operating companies published at the back of a weekly FSA horsemeat crisis bulletin. "The suppliers who supply us [Whitbread] also supply many of our competitors," he noted. "There are very many well-known names that are not there [on the FSA's list]."  Well, isn't that comforting to know...there are numerous people who supply horse meat but aren't being charged for it just yet.  I'm wondering how many companies will be discovered in the end of all of this mess, and hopefully penalized for distributing these products to their customers.

What I continue to ask myself through this whole scandal is: why horse meat?  Yet, other cultures might be looking at America and asking: why cow meat?  Why turkey meat?  Well, I don't see the possibility of training any cows to be capable of riding people around, like we are able to do with horses, or having turkey races, like we do with horses, so maybe it's because we view cows and turkeys more 'impersonally' that we find it okay to eat them and not horses?  If it sounds like I'm condoning eating horse meat, I'm not by any means (because that's disgusting), but I also feel like it's because of our culture and the way we have been raised for hundreds of generations (Aurora Floyd was published in 1863) that we live the way we do today and find it okay to eat only certain meats..

I think the major emphasis of this scandal rests on the fact that people weren't aware they were consuming horse meat.  That being said, it must have tasted acceptable, if not delicious then, right?  I mean, if no one noticed a change in taste, it couldn't have been that bad.  The truth is, humans don't like to be tricked or taken advantage of, and with the horse meat situation, society has clearly been dooped.  In a few decades or centuries, who knows, we may be consuming horse meat after all. 

Sorry Ms. Floyd, not all of us are as crazy about horses as you are.