Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Horse meat

Why is there a taboo against eating horse meat?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100496993

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5 comments:

zhummmeng said...

Anything wrong with eating horse meat? It is like asking the Chinese/Veitnamese anything wrong with eating dog and cat meat, right? Or asking the Hindu eating cow or beef? Or asking the Jews eating pork?
Or for that matter the Bhuddist to any kind of meat?
Or even some cannibals eating human meat?
What is your answer? the meat or your culture or religion ?
The French love horse meat.

February 27, 2013 9:21 AM
Spur said...

Yup, evolutionary and anthropologically true. It's not a coincidence why humans around the world ended up rearing certain types of animals for meat. Actually many people wouldn't mind eating horse meat especially as it has been processed into something unrecogniseable like sausages and meatballs. They will just treat it as deer meat. Many people will be more upset if it is dog meat becoz of the higher emotional connections.

But the concern for the current scandal is that such horse meat comes from unlicensed and unauthorised sources, and not possible to verify health and safety aspects of the animals and people involved in the rearing, butchering, processing and transporting of the meat. E.g. the horses could have been from race courses given hormones and anti-biotics not cleared for human consumptions, or diseased animals.

This is the same reason why Singapore AVA, and all other developed countries, don't allow people to simply bring in any animals from overseas and sell as meat to local population. E.g. Some zhi char stalls used to sell "illegal" M'sian wild boar meat brought in under-the-table.

February 27, 2013 6:51 PM
yujuan said...

There is a valid reason why people are concerned, like what Spurs said the meat comes from dubious sources.
We once spent a weekend at a dairy farm in UK, the farm owners' daughter told us discreetly she never drank the farm's milk, the poor cows were pumped with hormones to induce producing milk, and antibiotics to get them disease free under intense farming.
Some said eating horsemeat related to paganism during pre-Christian eras, find it a strange concept.
However if comes from licensed sources, nothing wrong with horsemeat, had eaten donkey meat and camel meat in Xinjiang, no big deal.

February 28, 2013 10:03 AM
Weng Mao Fa said...

"Actually many people wouldn't mind eating horse meat...... They will just treat it as deer meat" (Spur, Feb 27)

How many is many? Why you encourage misrepresentation of a product in a consumer market?

March 01, 2013 12:41 PM
Weng Mao Fa said...

"Or for that matter the Bhuddist to any kind of meat.."(Zhummmeng)

10 kinds of meat are prohibited according to Buddhist Text. They are horse, deer...

March 01, 2013 12:47 PM

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