Flogging Dead Horse

I have just subscribed to Ash Ambridge’s Substack called Year of Living Anywhere after reading the post “Dear World: I Am Eating Pickled Deer Heart.”

It took my mind back.

A few years ago, there were disturbing news stories about horse meat being found in processed food products stocked by supermarket chains in Ireland and the UK. Tests indicated that Findus frozen beef lasagna contained up to 100% horse meat.

Some elitist smart arses pointed out that horse meat can be the favoured delicacy of some European gourmets. Brits with conservative culinary habits may be condescending about the kind of comestibles Johnny Foreigner is happy to consume.

As Ash pointed out, what is acceptable for human consumption can be determined by cultural, ethnic or religious considerations.

Everybody knows that the guinea pig is a cuddly pet (albeit of limited intelligence – endlessly going round and round on its treadmill like a yuppie in a gym). Peruvians have been eating guinea pigs for millennia. I tried it twice myself while in Cuzco. The first time was in a rather swish restaurant called Ciccolina, where the waiters wore black suits and white gloves and the space was lit by candles. I swear that I did not know what cuy was until after I had swallowed it. The restaurant is known for its niggardly portions, and this was just a minute cube of meat, rather like liver, which went down in one swallow. The second occasion was at lunch in a more down-market restaurant catering to office workers on their lunch break. The benighted creature was served whole, splayed out on the plate allowing no room for doubt that it was a guinea pig, a rodent.

Classification of mammals is unstable. Well-known rodents include mice, rats, squirrels, prairie dogs, porcupines, beavers, guinea pigs, and hamsters. However, rabbits, hares, and pikas, which also have incisors that grow continuously (but have two pairs of upper incisors instead of one), were once included with rodents, but are now considered to be in a separate order, the Lagomorpha. Nonetheless, Rodentia and Lagomorpha are sister groups, sharing a single common ancestor and forming the clade of Glires. This is a lot to think about when you are looking at a menu without your reading glasses.

Although, I knew that it was rodent rather than porcine, it did taste like pork crackling. I am afraid the creature died in vain because I could not eat much of it. I did not like the way it was looking at me.

Incidentally, another speciality of the Ciccolina is alpaca steak.

I have eaten peccary in Nepal. The porcine creature accompanied us on our Himalayan trek and became a friend. I named it Gregory Peccary. The porters slaughtered it and roasted it in a hole in the ground.

Our farmer neighbour’s daughter in Ireland had a pet lamb which she was very fond of. That did not stop her eating it. Would she eat her brother? When we politely mentioned to him that their animals were destroying our garden, he said, “Sure, they’re right cunts, all right!”

Patrick D Hahn (of this Substack parish) told me of his eating experiences. “I tried sea urchin roe once in a Japanese restaurant. It was the worst thing I ever tasted. In Ghana I sampled cane rat, ostrich, ray, squid, and cat. The cane rat tasted like rabbit, the ostrich exactly like beef. The ray was kind of tasteless — not something I’d go out of my way for. Squid is good if it’s fried. The cat tasted gamey and rank — not something I’d eat again unless I were very hungry.”

I have eaten alligator tail in New Orleans. I tried jellied eels, which are considered a treat in South London. It was not quite as disgusting as I had feared but I would not repeat the experience. My local Tesco in Lewisham sold ostrich and kangaroo burgers. Koreans eat dogs. I have heard that in Sri Lanka the stray dog population reduces dramatically whenever Chinese or Korean road construction crews are in an area. That could be a racist calumny along the lines of JD Vance’s unfounded allegations about the culinary tastes of Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

Chinese drink mice wine (that is not a typo for rice wine, I mean wine with a mouse in it). West Africans eat monkeys. A 2010 study at Charles de Gaulle Airport estimated that about 270 tonnes of illegal bushmeat could be passing through the airport every year. Nine people were found to be carrying bushmeat, which had a combined mass of 188kg. In total, 11 species were found - including two types of primates, two kinds of crocodiles and three rodent species - four of which were listed as protected species.

The French eat frog legs and snails. I have tried both – frog tasted like fishy chicken (as did alligator) the snail tasted like – well – SNAIL. Does anybody eat slugs? Slugs are not poisonous. They do not produce toxins which will cause us harm when ingested. However, some slugs carry parasites including Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a nematode native to Asia, which has spread to regions of America, Africa and Australia. This parasite is capable of causing meningitis in humans, resulting in significant brain damage. A young Australian died after being dared to eat a slug from a garden. I found a slug in a pub lunch in Manchester and got a free pint. I thought about carrying a slug in a matchbox from pub to pub and getting free pints.

I often purchased wood pigeon from Stockport market on a Saturday afternoon and had it for Saturday supper. It was very bloody and had close-packed meat like liver. I have eaten squabs (baby pigeon) in Morocco. In Ouzarzate (to which my namesake of Ryanair can fly you fon14.99GBP from Essex.) I enjoyed pastilla (in in Ouzarzate. Pastilla is a filo pastry pie with sugar on top filled with squabs.

Ajan Brahm (a Buddhist priest who graduated from Cambridge) told an anecdote about when he was training as a Buddhist monk in Thailand. He said bhikkhus could not be strict vegetarians because they relied on food given to them by the local population. They had to eat what they were given or die. He said he once had to eat a whole frog that wasn’t even fully cooked. Its bladder was still full.

The red squirrel is sadly rare in the British Isles because it has been ousted by the hooligan Canadian grey squirrel. Victorian naturalist, Frank Buckland imported grey squirrels to eat. Apparently, even today, they can be purchased for a couple of pounds and taste like nutty chicken. Buckland wanted to diversify the British diet and was a pioneer of zoophagy. He himself regularly ate mice in batter, horse tongue, squirrel pie and stewed mole. Don’t try mole at home – Buckland said it tasted like poo. I do not know how Buckland knew what poo tasted like, but there is a word for people who eat shit so some must enjoy that kind of repast. The word is coprophagia. London Zoo used to contact Buckland when an animal died, in case he wanted to eat it. In 1859 he founded the Acclimatization Society. At the society’s inaugural dinner in 1862 the menu included roast kangaroo, boiled sea slug and grilled parrot. Such was Buckland’s renown that it was said when he walked past: “Elderly maidens called their cats indoors.”

Buckland was convinced that eating rats would help relieve the hunger of the poor, and ease the infestations that plagued every city in the world. His father, the Very Rev. William Buckland, dean of Westminster, served his dinner guests with dog, panther, crocodile and hedgehog, and canapés of toasted field-mice. Buckland pére claimed to have eaten the desiccated heart of Louis XIV (“I have eaten many strange things but have never eaten the heart of a king before”).

After a disastrous dinner in which every dish, from the soup to the jelly, had been prepared from the carcass of a cab horse, Frank was discouraged and wrote, “in my humble opinion, hippophagy has not the slightest chance of success in this country.”

When I lived in Lewisham, I used to hear horrible screeching cries in the night. Apparently, this was the sound of foxes mating (or vixens being raped). Strolling up to Blackheath Village one would regularly see packs of foxes strolling about and turning over garbage bins. In broad daylight there were about ten of them sunning themselves on the lawn next door to my apartment block. Five of them came regularly to our back garden in Thornton Heath. They were rather cute but their shit did stink. Fox shit is called scat. Fox scat can be many colors, including dark brown, black, light grey, red, and purplish. The color depends on the season and the fox's diet. For example, in the winter, fox scat is usually light grey to black because foxes are eating small mammals and carrion. In the summer and autumn, fox scat can be red and purplish because foxes are eating berries and insects. The Thornton Heath mob expected to be fed Brussels Pâté thanks to my interfering wife who has an interfering nature and is always interfering with nature.

When Boris Johnson was Mayor of London he declared war on urban foxes when a baby in Bromley was bitten by one. He said the incident was a “wake-up call” but he did not seem to do anything about it. Simon Jenkins in the London Evening Standard commented that it certainly was a wake-up call for the baby. Jenkins recommended hunting urban foxes and feeding them to the poor: “Foxes are starting to eat children, and I really don’t care if they do it ‘only rarely’. Calling for strategic reviews is wimpish appeasement. Let’s get killing and eating.” Oscar Wilde described fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.

Many Europeans love horse meat. However, the consumer has a right to know what he or she is eating. If the label says beef, as a vegetarian, I support your right to beef. The problem with horse meat is that it may not have been raised for human consumption. Horses are treated with veterinary drugs which should not be allowed into the human food chain. Phenylbutazone is used as an anti-inflammatory for horses but is toxic to humans — it can cause a serious blood disorder known as aplastic anaemia.

It is more than a little alarming that, according to Professor Alan Reilly, Chief Executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), that Tesco withdrew Findus products from Irish shelves but did not notify the FSAI.

The multi-millionaire beef supplier known as ‘Dirty Larry’ was behind a company that supplied British supermarkets with contaminated food. In Ireland, Larry Goodman’s name was synonymous with financial malpractice after he dragged the country’s beef industry through the dirt in the 1990s by breaking sanctions and doing business with Saddam Hussein. A judicial tribunal in Ireland exposed the corrupt relationship between Goodman and Ireland’s then prime minister, Charles Haughey.

This is an ecumenical scandal. It looks as though meat from Romanian donkeys, processed in France, packaged in Ireland was sold in German-owned supermarkets in Britain and Ireland. Hugh Carnegy in the Financial Times said that investigations revealed a “tortuous supply chain spanning several countries”. A French company named in the scandal said that their meat had come from a “Cypriot trader, which had subcontracted the order to a trader in the Netherlands. The latter was a supplier from an abattoir and butcher located in Romania.”

Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals were sent to the abattoir after a change in road rules. A law banned carts drawn by donkeys. It is alleged that criminal gangs preyed on poor farmers by offering cash for both wild and work horses farmers could afford to keep. They paid 50 to 100 Romanian Lei – as little as £10 to £20. Abattoirs paid up to 27 times that for a horse. A warm-blooded mare weighing 1,000lb can sell for around £270. A vet with intimate knowledge of the business, claimed the abattoirs often turn a blind eye to the illegal trade.

Poland exports around 25,000 horses for slaughter each year. Russian gangs and criminals operating in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are also suspected of involvement.

A finger of suspicion also points at Ireland, a nation famously horse-crazy and densely populated with equines. In 2007, the country produced 12,633 thoroughbred foals – more than the combined total of France and the UK. During the downturn, horses were slaughtered in increasing numbers. Irish authorities seized 2,364 abandoned horses in 2010, treble the number five years earlier.

It is possible that Romanian abattoirs have put CJD (Mad Cow Disease) into the food chain. One recalls the vile UK minister John Selwyn Gummer force feeding a burger to his infant daughter to prove British “beef” was “safe”.

Known pathogens cause an estimated 9.4 million food borne illnesses annually in the USA. The foods most often implicated were beef (13%), dairy (12%), fish (12%), and poultry (11%).

Britain complained about weak European food inspection while cutting the budget for food-safety checks.

My zoophagous days are far behind me and I now aspire to the condition of the vegan. When a peacock strayed into my garden recently, I arranged for it to be humanely escorted to a safe haven rather than my kitchen.