On Eating Mr Ed

The first horse I ever saw was on TV.  Mr Ed was, as most will recall, a talking horse on a black and white comedy series that had more brains and logic than the humans around him.  He wore dark framed glasses and had the kind of cheek that would qualify him for a stand-up comedy competition, grinning most inappropriately with his giant horse teeth whenever he had the upper hand (hoof?) in a situation.

Fast forward years ahead to South Australia, where I would chuckle at reading freeway signs saying "no horses or carriages allowed", the idea that every Australian state has a public holiday for its state horse race, and that everyone bets on the One Big Race every November.  It was a rite of passage, the day you became old enough to understand the different ways of betting on a horse race and dress up duly for the lunches and champagne teas around it.

Now, in Victoria, I hear rumblings around horse eating.

The death threats that poor Embrasse received have resulted in their pulling horse meat off the Taste of Melbourne 2010 menu, even though their three-course horse meat degustation was sold out once The Age Espresso found out about it.  This of course alerted us to the fact that horse meat is actually available for purchase to cook and eat.  Then we all realised that Australia just happens to be an exporter country in horse meat for human consumption. 

Let the Great Debate begin!

Is it, as they say, a matter of cultural background whereby Mr A may be quite happy to eat Mr Ed because Mr Ed has always featured on the Christmas dinner menu but Miss B may be very unhappy to even think of it because she used to ride Mr Ed to school and along the green pastures or beside the freeway? 

Is it perhaps an issue of resource usage, whereby horse eating should be discouraged in the way that cattle eating should be discouraged (i.e. for environmental reasons)?  One can argue that horses can be better used for law enforcement (military calvary, police horses etc), transport in remote countries, psychological therapy (children who have suffered trauma tend to get along very well with horses), and gambling activities (races).

Is it even an image matter?  After all, many countries baulk at the thought of Australians eating kangaroo meat because "how can you eat one of the icons on your own Commonwealth emblem?!" and "they look so cute and cuddly!" but many others see them as a environmental-friendly alternative to cattle as a source of red meat. 

As a child, I refused to eat turtle eggs before turtles were ever listed as an endangered species and would glare at people eating dog and cat meat.  Yet when TW alerted me to Chris Badenoch's experience with horse meat, I had to confess a twang of envy.  I wanted to be on Embrasse's list of people sampling horse meat the way the French do, with the one person I knew personally in Melbourne who had actually eaten horse meat before (raw, in Japan) and thereby piqued my gourmet interest.   I even became tempted to find out if it was possible to import the stuff from Western Australia (where the only licensed butcher for horse meat is) without incurring a confiscation order from state customs or vegans.

Am I evil?  Am I immoral?  Am I being culturally insensitive to most Australians?

All I understand is that I did not grow up riding horses and never had them as pets, that horses used for human consumption are usually specifically farmed for the purpose and therefore farmers are not permitted to affect wild horse populations like brumbies, that horses are not approaching endangerment or extinction anytime soon, and that they have actually been a part of the human diet in many parts of the world for a very long time.

I also know that a culinary delight, Roquefort blue cheese, was banned from Australia for more than a decade because food scientists in this country were concerned about the level of bacteria and the issue of unpasteurisation.  This is a cheese that has a history dating back to AD 79, that is almost revered in France as the first recipient of France's appellation-of-origin protection laws and was actually commonly applied to wounds to avoid gangrene before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

With that in mind, I can only promise I will not want to eat a horse that children love to ride, wears glasses (or racing colours or military/police garb) or responds to the name "Mr Ed" (or Makybe Diva).##