In the European history of horsemeat consumption, France and francophone Belgium stand out. There the cultural barrier to selling and eating horsemeat was more successfully breached than in any other part of Europe. As with so many French attitudes, it began with elite exhortation, but it also occurred in a national culture charmed by culinary diversity and invention. Its beginnings can be traced to governmental decisions that French people should eat more flesh foods. By 1850, the opinion was that the French person’s ability to perform industrial work was hindered by insufficient quantities of nitrates in the diet. Ireland was pointed to as a negative case of how dependence on the potato and little or no meat had led to physiological degeneration. In 1853, dietary regulations set a minimum daily intake of 100 grams of meat for a small adult and 140 grams for a large person. In 1889, a government medical commission increased these thresholds to 120 and 200 grams, respectively. In the French. Army, the meat ration was increased in 1881 from 250 to 300 grams per day. Regulations about meat also affected institutions. In 1864, hospices and hospitals were directed to provide meat at meals twice a day, preferably roasted, which was judged to be the most nutritious form of preparation.
As meat consumption in France rose, provisioning became an issue. Since horseflesh was then much cheaper, it was judged by the authorities to be especially worthy of adoption among lower-income groups. A group of distinguished French intellectuals and scientists, led by Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, made a conscious effort to integrate horsemeat into the French diet. Their aim was to show that chevaline (as it was called) was nutritious and that the old prejudices had no rational basis. Even the hierarchy of the French Church did not interfere in this conscious rejection of a medieval taboo, and the first specialized horsemeat shop opened in Paris in 1866. Shortly thereafter, dire food shortages associated with the siege of Paris gave many of that city’s inhabitants an opportunity to eat horsemeat for the first time.
Two prime factors led to a generalized acceptance of horsemeat in France. First, until the 1920s, horse-meat cost half that of comparable cuts of beef and therefore was within reach of the working class. Second, horsemeat got much publicity as a high-energy food and as ostensibly valuable in physiologically reducing the human temptation to overindulge in alcoholic beverages. In touting horsemeat, the bourgeoisie indicated their conviction that it had an appropriate role to play in the diet of the working class, whose members were the main abusers of alcohol in France.
Two basic kinds of horseflesh later characterized its consumption in France. Red meat, preferred by many for its putative association with high iron content, comes mainly from older horses. A colt (poulain) yields light meat, favored for its tenderness and mild flavor approaching that of veal. Patterns of consumption have maintained a certain profile through the decades, with the typical horsemeat consumer in France tending to be young rather than old, working or middle class rather than rich, and urban rather than rural.
Hippophagy in France is highest in the northern part of the country, with southern Belgium an extension of that consumption pattern. Early in the twentieth century, large workhorses were numerous in this part of Europe where the Percheron and the Belgian breeds evolved. Consequently, Paris has had the most avid hippophagists in France, with a per capita consumption three times higher than that of western France and almost seven times higher than that of eastern France. Horsemeat was first promoted in Paris, and it was there that a specialized horse abattoir was set up from which horsemeat was wholesaled elsewhere. The Paris region has also had France’s largest concentration of poor people, who became the most enthusiastic consumers of equine products. Paris, Lille, and other northern cities were major markets for red meat from aged animals, whereas hippophagists in Lyon and Grenoble preferred viande de poulain.
In spite of considerable commercial activity, horse-meat in France has had a marginal position among meat products. Except during the war years, its consumption has never amounted to more than 5 percent of that of beef. Close to 60 percent of French people do not consume any horsemeat, and of the minority that do, the per capita consumption amounts to only about 5 kilograms per year. One result, but also a cause, of such a pattern is availability. Most French towns have not had a clientele large enough to support a boucherie chevaline, and until the 1980s, butchers selling beef could not also sell horsemeat. This prohibition was in the form of a law that had been promulgated to prevent misrepresentation of one meat for another.
Organoleptic perception also affects consumption. Many people, for example, have stated they dislike the flavor of horsemeat. However, disagreement on whether it has a sweetish taste, some other taste, or is simply tasteless suggests differences in the kinds of slaughtered animals or preconceived notions of the meat’s characteristics. The appeal of horsemeat may be culturally conditioned. For example, an organoleptic evaluation in the United States of several kinds of lean beef, regular beef, lamb, horse, and horse mixed with beef fat ranked the last two lowest in appearance, smell, and taste (Pintauro, Yuann, and Bergan 1984).
Matters of health and price explain at least part of the drop in per capita consumption of horsemeat from the 1960s to the 1990s. For many years, horse-meat was valued as a particularly healthful food due to an iron content higher and a fat content lower than beef. Chevaline reputation suffered, however, in 1967, when a highly publicized salmonella outbreak in a school cafeteria was traced to horsemeat patties. When findings emerged that fresh horsemeat deteriorated more rapidly than beef, the French government banned horsemeat for institutional use. In addition, awareness of chevaline’s possible health risk was paralleled by its rising cost. Horsemeat of the first half of the twentieth century was essentially a by-product of animals slaughtered after a useful life of pulling plows or wagons. For that reason, horsemeat was cheap compared to beef. But by the 1970s most horsemeat in France was imported, which influenced its retail price structure.
Thus in the 1990s, the French consumer paid normally as much, if not more, for horsemeat as for beef. This is because sources of horsemeat supply for the French and Belgian markets changed substantially after 1960, when mechanization of agriculture led to a sharp decline in the horse population. To meet the demand in the face of inadequate domestic sources of chevaline, live animals or chilled meat had to be imported from Spain, Portugal, and Eastern European countries. Between 1910 and 1980, imports of horses or horse products increased almost three times. European horses were supplemented with those from the Americas, and beginning in the 1970s, the United States became a major supplier for the French market, as did Australia and South America - especially Argentina, with its substantial horse population.
Horses raised specifically for meat production could, in theory, supply the needed tonnages and at the same time ensure quality. Colt meat in France is now mostly produced that way. Fed a controlled diet, horses grow very quickly, although they cannot compare with ruminants as an efficient converter of herbaceous matter. Breeding of the horse as a meat animal has another value of conserving the genetic patrimony of the famous work breeds of horses that are in danger of eventual extinction. In the long run, such activity might also lead to the emergence of a special kind of high-quality meat animal in the way that Hereford or Aberdeen Angus were developed as cattle with distinguishable phenotypes and genotypes.
World History
