Legal or Not, Will Americans Ever Buy Horse Meat?

For weeks, horse meat has been making unwanted appearances in the European food system. It’s been detected in Ikea meatballs. It’s been found in frozen lasagna in Italy. It’s shown up in frozen beef patties at British supermarkets.

Even though the problem hasn’t been detected in the U.S., the widening scandal has caused outrage and revulsion among Americans, who haven’t practiced hippophagy — the practice of eating horse flesh — on a regular basis for decades. U.S. horse meat consumption briefly peaked during World War II, when more conventional meats like beef were rationed, says Andy Smith, a culinary historian at the New School. But within a few decades, Americans had almost entirely forsworn the practice. Why? The animal rights movement played a role. More significantly, though, we had anthropomorphized horses, just as we had our other household pets: Horses weren’t livestock; they were our friends.

Even so, we were still sending horses to domestic slaughterhouses until the middle of the last decade. But after sustained pressure from animal rights advocates — Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, says that meat processing plants often jammed horses into cattle trucks and failed to limit aggression between the animals – Congress shut down the industry in 2005 by de-funding inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. No inspections, no legal slaughterhouses. By 2007, domestic horse meat was essentially non-existent.

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