Horsemeat in Canada

Top Chef trots into taboo territory

"Producers of the competitive culinary TV show Top Chef Canada galloped headlong into an internet outcry after news spread about an upcoming episode's focus on horse meat as an ingredient. In the challenge, scheduled to air on May 16th on Food Network Canada, contestants were required to cook traditional French dishes, including both foie gras (also a controversially-obtained food) and horse.

Protesters took to the show's Facebook page after promos for the episode aired, flooding the comments with mentions of Top Chef boycotts, links to anti-horse meat websites and advice on how to contact the show's advertisers. A specifically targeted Facebook group called "Boycott Top Chef – Protect the Horses" was swiftly established as a central location to share resources including educational material and contact information for the show's advertisers and the network's executives.

"Food Network Canada has issued a statement saying, "Please be assured it is not our intention to offend our viewers. The challenge in this episode involves having the competitors create a truly authentic, traditional French menu. One of the most traditional French foods is horsemeat. Horsemeat is also considered a delicacy in many cultures around the world. While we understand that this content may not appeal to all viewers, Food Network Canada aims to engage a wide audience, embracing different food cultures in our programming."

...

"Protesters, however, argue that not only is eating horse meat a moral taboo on par with the consumption of dogs and cats - it's also insufficiently regulated in Canada.

...

While horse meat is not an especially predominant ingredient in Canadian cuisine, and the majority of the meat processed in the country is exported internationally, it can be found for sale in supermarkets and at butcher shops.

An Eatocracy poll from earlier this year indicates that a substantial potion of the population expects to see a shift in perception toward horse meat consumption in the United States.

Do you think Americans will ever accept horse meat as part of their diet?
- No way. Never. 34.82%
- Only if there is no other option and we run out of other food sources 13.71%
- People don't really care that much what they put in their mouths, so yes 5.55%
- Possibly, but only after its health benefits are really proven 3.47%
- It'll take time, but why not? 14.3%
- It would be a huge success now if it were legal 4.11%
- People might try it as a novelty, but not as a staple - it'll always have a bit of a taboo 13.73%
- Maybe some food freaks will consider it a delicacy, but most people won't touch it 9.28%
- Other (please share below) 1.05% 

HT: Joshua Gans (the Canadian professor:) 

Irish horses going the way of Celtic tigers

Facing Starvation: The Sad Plight of Ireland's Abandoned Horses

"During Ireland's boom years, thousands of people bought horses as a status symbol. But with the economy in crisis, many owners can't afford to keep them. Some 20,000 abandoned horses are roaming Ireland and could face starvation this winter.
...
"A horse slaughterhouse in Kilkenny processed more than 3,000 horses last year, five times more than in 2005. Most of the horse steaks are exported to France.


"But only well-nourished horses whose health has been comprehensively logged are allowed to be slaughtered. One wrong drug and the meat is labelled as unsellable. Contrary to EU rules, most Irish horses don't carry implanted microchips containing their most important data. So their remains can't even be processed into dog food. The absence of microchips also makes it impossible to track where an abandoned horse came from. That makes it tempting for troubled owners just to dump their horses by the roadside because it would cost €300 to have the animal put down and disposed of by a vet."

For some related previous posts, see
Why can't you eat horse meat in the U.S.? and Abandoned horses not headed for foreign tables

The market for knife sharpening

There was a time when knife sharpeners brought their grindstones to the meat packers and butchers who were their main customers, and sharpened customers' knives on customers' premises. Now, the NY Times reports, the model is to rent a double set of knives to customers (who now include restaurants), so that the knife sharpener can come in and exchange all the dull knives for sharp ones, and sharpen the knives on his own premises: Venerable Craft, Modern Practitioner.

Apparently this business is one with ethnic, networked roots:
"Mr. Ambrosi’s grandfather, who came to the United States in the 1920s, hailed from the poor village of Carisolo. The village, with two neighboring towns of Pinzolo and Giustino, produced many of the more than 100 commercial knife sharpeners at work today in North America, sharpeners said. "
...
"At first the immigrants came mainly to New York, but soon their offspring scattered to stake out new routes, a dozen sharpeners across the country said in interviews. Ambrosis with grindstones do business in Connecticut, New Jersey and Ohio, as well as boroughs of New York. The Binellis set up knife-sharpening businesses in Detroit, Chicago and Medford, Mass.; the Maganzinis ended up in and around Boston. The Povinellis set up shop in Buffalo and ventured to North and South Carolina and Arizona; offshoots of the Nella family went to Toronto and Vancouver, as well as Long Island, Seattle and West Jordan, Utah.

"Robert Ambrosi’s grandfather traveled the Bronx in a horse-drawn cart with a grindstone powered by a foot pedal, serving, like the other knife sharpeners, mainly butchers and meatpackers.

"Mr. Ambrosi’s father used a grindstone fueled by a battery carried in a truck. The battery had to be plugged in each night in the garage to recharge. Then in the 1950s came the great innovation — double sets of knives — that eventually freed the Ambrosis to set up their first shop."
...
"Some of the northern Italian knife sharpeners still function in the old style, as members of the New York Grinders Association. The rules used to be simple: Don’t mess with someone’s turf. Stick to your own route — the one you inherited from your father or grandfather. Avoid the vendettas that have overtaken sharpeners in other cities.

“People will trade stops,” said Rinaldo Beltrami, the association’s president.

"Mr. Ambrosi, who let his membership in the association lapse, said, “I was brought up in that way of thinking.” Yet he will still sometimes appease a competitor by saying, “Let’s sit down, we’ll have a meeting, we’ll make a borderline — I won’t bother you.”

"Yet his sons have been knocking on doors to establish new routes, and Mr. Ambrosi has developed a Web site and a mail-order service, because his sons need enough business to sustain their future families, too. "

Pet food

Luke Stein at Stanford points me to Brian Palmer's column in Slate about where it is illegal to eat pets: Is it legal to eat your cat?

"Few states have specific laws barring the use of pets for food. The ones that do typically ban the slaughter or sale of dog and cat meat. The state of New York expressly prohibits "any person to slaughter or butcher domesticated dog (canis familiaris) or domesticated cat (felis catus or domesticus) to create food, meat or meat products for human or animal consumption." It's not clear whether the eating itself is outlawed or only the butchery. If you managed to buy dog or cat flesh from someone else who broke the anti-slaughter law, you might be OK. The law also doesn't cover ferrets, gerbils, parakeets, or other less familiar pet species. (Although the general anti-cruelty law might protect exotics.)

"California's anti-pet-eating law has a broader reach. It bars possession of the carcass, so having bought your cat steaks from someone else wouldn't be a useful alibi. The California law also protects "any animal traditionally or commonly kept as a pet or companion," rather than just Fido and Fluffy. The statute is somewhat untested, though, so no one really knows which animals are included. Pigs are not, even though they are commonly kept as pets, because they are farm animals. Horses are specifically covered by a different section of the code. There's no precedent on iguanas, goldfish, or boa constrictors.

"In most of the country, the legality of pet-eating would come down to the specific language of the general animal cruelty statute and how a judge interpreted it. Some states, such as Virginia, bar the unnecessary killing of an animal, with a specific exemption for "farming activities." In those places, it's very likely that killing a cat for dinner would get you in trouble, because the killing wouldn't be necessary, and cats aren't commonly associated with farming.
...
"Worldwide, cat and dog meat seem to be at a crossroads. China pulled dog meat off the market for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and is considering a law barring it permanently. South Korea, on the other hand, has inched toward explicitly legalizing the widespread and officially tolerated dog-meat trade."

Back in February, Roger Cohen described eating dog in China: Dog Days in China
"Now, we are appalled in the West at the notion of eating dog while considering it natural to have a dog as a pet — I own a Beagle myself (“Ned”) and I’m very fond of him. This is the inverse of the preponderant Western view of pigs: fine to eat (religious objections aside) but not to pet."

On a related matter, Abe Othman  writes about Horseflesh and Hypocrisy

"Remember, if they can come after the horse slaughterers, they can come after the hedge funds. So if you really believe in free markets, have some horse today!"

And see my earlier post: Why can't you eat horse meat in the U.S.?

This raises the question of why some people are disgusted by the idea of eating horse meat.
Michael Webster points me to the Boston Globe article "Ewwwwwwwww! The surprising moral force of disgust," which reports on a recent conference of psychologists.

"Psychologists like Haidt are leading a wave of research into the so-called moral emotions — not just disgust, but others like anger and compassion — and the role those feelings play in how we form moral codes and apply them in our daily lives. A few, like Haidt, go so far as to claim that all the world’s moral systems can best be characterized not by what their adherents believe, but what emotions they rely on.

"There is deep skepticism in parts of the psychology world about claims like these. And even within the movement there is a lively debate over how much power moral reasoning has — whether our behavior is driven by thinking and reasoning, or whether thinking and reasoning are nothing more than ornate rationalizations of what our emotions ineluctably drive us to do."

See my earlier post on this, Repugnance and/or disgust.

Repugnance and/or disgust

I like to distinguish what I've called repugnant transactions from those that elicit disgust. By repugnant transactions I mean transactions that some people want to engage in and that others don't want them to (e.g. same sex marriage, or buying or selling a kidney, or ordering horse meat at a U.S. restaurant). One sign that a transaction is viewed as repugnant by a sufficiently big part of the population is if it is illegal. Disgusting transactions most often don't elicit legislation (except in a consumer protection way), e.g. it's illegal in CA to offer to sell horse meat for human consumption, but not, say, spit: the difference being that some people would like to buy and eat horse meat.

However there's no denying that part of what makes some transactions repugnant to some people is that they find them disgusting (see e.g. Martha Nussbaum on same sex marriage). There have been recent reports in the press and blogosphere on attempts to link physiological indicators of disgust to, among other things, political proclivities.

Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times gives a quick overview of some conclusions of this sort: Our Politics May Be All in Our Head

Mark Liberman at Language Log takes a closer look: Physiological politics, and suggests that at least some of the results could be artifacts of the experiment. (He has a followup here: Icktheology.)

In the context of organ transplantation, I've noted that the repugnance to sales of organs is hard to equate with a visceral disgust reaction, since there isn't repugnance to transplants in general. There may of course be specific exceptions to that, see e.g. this article in the American Journal of Transplantation:

"Specific Unwillingness to Donate Eyes: The Impact of Disfigurement, Knowledge and Procurement on Corneal Donation" (p 657-663)M. Lawlor, I. Kerridge, R. Ankeny, T. A. Dobbins, F. BillsonPublished Online: Jan 29 2010 2:23PM

Abandoned horses not headed for foreign tables

Speaking of the pony express, Activists Keep Nev. Horses From Going to Slaughter
"With the financial backing of the wife of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens and others, activists on Saturday purchased almost all 174 horses up for sale at a state-sanctioned auction in Nevada to keep the horses from going to the slaughterhouse.

"Stephanie Hoefener of the Lancaster, Calif.-based Livesavers Wild Horse Rescue group said activists purchased 172 horses for $31,415. The other two horses were acquired by private individuals for their personal use, she said.
...
"The horses were rounded up by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management last month near the Nevada-Utah line and turned over to the Nevada Department of Agriculture for disposal.

"Agriculture department officials acknowledge the stray horses could have wound up at slaughterhouses because they did not have the federal protections afforded to wild-roaming horses.
"The horses are believed to be strays or descendants of horses abandoned by private owners over the years in Pilot Valley north of West Wendover.

''For advocacy groups to step up to the plate and make a financial commitment like this to save the horses, we think this is a wonderful thing,'' Nevada Department of Agriculture spokesman Ed Foster said.

"Jill Starr, president of Lifesavers, said the purchase of the horses at the Fallon auction was made possible by the financial backing of Madeleine Pickens and other donors.

"Starr said high bidders of such horses usually are representatives of slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. The meat of the horses is processed for sale in Europe and Asia, where it fetches as much as $25 a pound, she added. "

For previous posts on the American repugnance for the use of horse meat for human consumption, as compared to the high prices it fetches overseas, see here.

Horse meets versus horse meat

The question of Why can't you eat horse meat in the U.S.? takes on special force when the horses in question are retired race horses. The NY Times reports that the slaughter of such horses for human consumption arouses special repugnance.
The article Ignoble Endings Far From Winner’s Circle reports(emphasis added):

"The most significant source of racehorse deaths is the slaughter industry, one driven by overbreeding and demand from the lucrative global meat market. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, more than 100,000 American horses are slaughtered each year in Canada and Mexico to satisfy horse meat markets in Europe and Asia.
The slaughter of domestically bred horses represents a breach of the American covenant between horses and humans: horses bred for sport, industry and agriculture are not part of our food chain. They are not supposed to meet death in a slaughterhouse."
...
"Many owners, faced with the choice of keeping retired horses and continuing to pay for their feed and care, instead opt to sell them at auction for $300 to $500 a horse, not realizing or not caring that if they are exported they can eventually be slaughtered.
“We’ve got lots of work to do here,” Waldrop said. “The problem is far from being solved. There is a high demand for horse meat around the world, and they create a market for horses that competes with our efforts to adopt and retrain these horses.”
The last of the horse slaughterhouses in the United States were shut down in 2007. But at least four states — Montana, Illinois, North Dakota and Tennessee — have either proposed or contemplated legislation to reintroduce horse slaughter. Two bills stuck in committee in the House and the Senate would make it illegal to transport horses across state lines or to foreign countries for the purpose of slaughter. The industry should push Congress to pass pending anti-slaughter legislation."

In a related story, concerned with wild horses also, see Pickens Once Raced Horses, Now Works to Save Them

HT: Muriel Niederle

Why can't you eat horse meat in the U.S.?

The first sentence of Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets asks "Why can't you eat horse meat" in California? The answer is that it's against the law. But while similar bills to outlaw the sale of horse meat for human consumption have passed by big majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, they have never managed to pass into law. Nationally such bills are opposed (as they were in California) by many horse breeders, cattle ranchers, and veterinarians. Nevertheless, the department of Agriculture removed funds for inspection of slaughterhouses.

Now the NY Times reports: Surge in Abandoned Horses Renews Debate Over Slaughterhouses .

"Emaciated horses eating bark off trees. Abandoned horses tied to telephone poles. Horses subsisting on feces, walking among carcasses.
As the economy continues to falter, law enforcement officers in Kentucky and throughout the country are seeing major increases in the number of unwanted and neglected horses, some abandoned on public land, others left to starve by their owners.
The situation has renewed the debate over whether reopening slaughterhouses in the United States — the last ones closed in 2007 — would help address the problem. Some states, Missouri, Montana and North and South Dakota, for example, are looking at ways to bring slaughterhouses back. "

Animal rights and food production in CA--Proposition 2

Animal rights, and what kinds of food can be sold, continue to be an issue in California (and not just in connection with the 1998 referendum banning the sale of horse meat). Here are two stories about Proposition 2, on this year's ballot:
A California Ballot Measure Offers Rights for Farm Animals , and
The Barnyard Strategist

"Proposition 2, co-sponsored by the Humane Society and Farm Sanctuary, the biggest farm-animal-rights group in the United States, focuses on what are considered the worst animal-confinement systems in factory farms. The ballot initiative, which voters will decide on Nov. 4, requires that by 2015 farm animals be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and fully extend their limbs. In effect that translates into a ban on the two-foot-wide crates that tightly confine pregnant pigs and calves raised for veal — a space so small that they can’t turn around. And it would eliminate so-called battery cages where four or more hens share a space about the size of a file drawer."

Some years ago, New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act of 1999 gave considerable deference to the rights of "Non-Human Hominids," such as chimps and other 'great apes'. I recall Ted Bergstrom remarking at the time that there weren't many chimps in New Zealand, and that New Zealanders could have made more of a statement by giving rights to sheep. It looks like Californians are going to have an option like that at the polls next week.