Horse meat

Horse meat forms a significant part of the culinary traditions of many countries, particularly in Europe and Asia. The eight countries that consume the most horse meat consume the meat from about 4.3 million horses a year. For the majority of humanity's early existence, wild horses were hunted as a source of protein.

Archaic humans hunted wild horses for hundreds of thousands of years following their first arrival in Eurasia. Examples of sites demonstrating horse butchery by archaic humans include: the Boxgrove site in southern England dating to around 500,000 years ago, where horse bones with cut marks (with a horse scapula possibly exhibiting a spear wound) are associated with Acheulean stone tools made by Homo heidelbergensis; the Schöningen site in Germany (also thought to have been created by Homo heidelbergensis) dating to around 300,000 years ago, where butchered horses are associated with wooden spears (the Schöningen spears, amongst the oldest known wooden spears); as well as the Lingjing site in Henan, China, dating to 125-90,000 years ago. During the Upper Palaeolithic, there is evidence for the hunting of horses by modern humans in Europe, as well as Asia. Paleoindians, the first humans to inhabit the Americas, hunted the continents' native horses shortly prior to their extinction.

In many parts of Europe, the consumption of horse meat continued throughout the Middle Ages until modern times, despite a ban on horse meat by Pope Gregory III in 732. Horse meat was also eaten as part of Germanic pagan religious ceremonies in Northern Europe. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spaniards, followed by other European settlers, reintroduced horses to the Americas. Some horses became feral, and began to be hunted by the indigenous Pehuenche people of what is now Chile and Argentina. Initially, early humans hunted horses as they did other game; later, they began to raise them for meat, milk, and transport. The meat was, and still is, preserved by being sun-dried in the high Andes into a product known as charqui.

France dates its taste for horse meat to the Revolution. With the fall of the aristocracy, its auxiliaries had to find new means of subsistence. The horses formerly maintained by the aristocracy as a sign of prestige ended up being used to alleviate the hunger of the masses. During the Napoleonic campaigns, the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grand Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, advised the starving troops to eat the meat of horses. At the siege of Alexandria, the meat of young Arab horses relieved an epidemic of scurvy. At the battle of Eylau in 1807, Larrey served horse as soup and as bœuf à la mode. At Aspern-Essling (1809), cut off from the supply lines, the cavalry used the breastplates of fallen cuirassiers as cooking pans and gunpowder as seasoning, thus founding a practice that carried on until at least the Waterloo campaign.

Horse meat gained widespread acceptance in French cuisine during the later years of the Second French Empire. The high cost of living in Paris prevented many working-class citizens from buying meat such as pork or beef. In 1866, the French government legalized the eating of horse meat, and the first butcher's shop specializing in horse meat opened in eastern Paris, providing quality meat at lower prices.

During the Siege of Paris (1870–1871), horse meat, along with the meat of donkeys and mules, was eaten by anyone who could afford it, partly because of a shortage of fresh meat in the blockaded city, and also because horses were eating grain that was needed by the human populace. Though large numbers of horses were in Paris (estimates suggested between 65,000 and 70,000 were butchered and eaten during the siege), the supply was ultimately limited. Not even champion racehorses were spared (two horses presented to Napoleon III of France by Alexander II of Russia were slaughtered), but the meat became scarce. Many Parisians gained a taste for horse meat during the siege, and after the war ended, horse meat remained popular. Likewise, in other places and times of siege or starvation, horses are viewed as a food source of last resort.

Despite the general Anglophone taboo, horse and donkey meat was eaten in Britain, especially in Yorkshire, until the 1930s, and, in times of postwar food shortages, surged in popularity in the United States and was considered for use as hospital food. A 2007 Time magazine article about horse meat brought to the United States from Canada described the meat as "a sweet, rich, superlean, oddly soft meat, and closer to beef than to venison".

Horse meat has a slightly sweet taste reminiscent of beef. Many consumers allege not being able to tell the difference between beef and horse meat.