memecucker:

I kinda wanna informally divide American “meat taboos” into two categories depending on if Fear Factor served that meat as a challenge would it inspire moral outrage from people beyond PETA.

Like on one hand if it’s something like rat meat the answer would be “no”. That’s seen as taboo for reasons of “cleanliness”. On the other if Fear Factor did a “dog meat” challenge there would probably be at least one assault if not attempt on the life of someone involved with the show.

Horse seems to belong to the latter and it’s just interesting because unlike dog it’s not exactly rare in European cuisine (even if it’s not terribly traditionally common in the U.K. it’s still a thing you can order and apparently associated with French cuisine) and most European countries had it at least as a regional dish. Now the answer for why the taboo is seemingly so strong in the US is obviously the beef industry because every time anti-horse meat legislation hit it was in response to horse threatening to becoming a lower priced competitor to beef (it was eaten in WW2 during rationing and afterwards there was a campaign against it because people acquired a taste for it. Likewise in the 1970s there was a huge recession that happened to coincide with a skyrocketing of beef prices pushing many poorer Americans towards horse as a substitute which spurred legislation against horse slaughter).

I just mention that because there’s been like fluff articles from the Atlantic or whatever talking about the subject and it keeps going back to a huge pet peeve of mine which is thinking that “because culture” is an explanation. Like none of the ordinary sources for where American culinary cuisine would come from actually account for the taboo on horse meat so some people just go “guess it’s just an American quirk!” and ignore the massively wealthy and politically powerful beef industry that’s also responsible for the subsidies which makes beef cheaper to buy than things cows eat