Horse meat

Ever wonder why in Western culture horses are generally not eaten? The answer might be surprising.

Horse meat has been a regular part of the human diet since prehistoric times. In fact, humans in the New World ate horses into extinction. Horses are still part of the diets of many cultures, but in most of the Western world today not only is horse meat not eaten, but doing so is considered disgusting (yes, I know about France. I’m coming to it).

So how and why did horse meat go off the menu? Nowadays we think of horses as pets, and we don’t eat our pets, so that would seem a logical answer. But treating horses as pets is a very recent occurrence. For all the rest of human history horses were either wild animals or were domesticated as draft animals or for transportation. Oxen and cattle served similar purposes and humans ate them with gusto. So why not horses?

The answer goes back to the year 732, when Pope Gregory III issued a papal decree banning Christians from eating horse meat. His decree was in reaction to the pagan practice of eating horse meat as part of some of their religious ceremonies, so that the ban was intended to keep new converts from slipping back into their pagan ways. The papal decree was extraordinary because, unlike most religions, Christianity generally permits its followers to eat anything they wish. But once the ban was in place, horse began to disappear from among the foods eaten in Christendom, and so it has remained.

So why do the French still eat horse meat? Horses returned to the French diet during the French Revolution, when the revolutionaries were not only gleefully disregarding all church teaching, but also thought it just to kill and eat horses, which were generally only owned by the wealthy.

Of course, nowadays any aversion we have to eating horses has nothing to do with papal decrees or pagan rituals—it’s just a taboo that has become part of our culture. That’s a lucky break for horses, of course. If not for Pope Gregory we might well be fattening horses in feedlots and grinding them into fast food burgers, as we do with cattle.

The painting of a “Meat Stall” is from 1551 by the Flemish artist Pieter Aertsen. It is part of the permanent collection in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Notice the absence of any horse meat.