Eating Horses In Paris by Michael Parenti
In 1951, only five years after World War II ended, I managed
to make my way to Paris where I landed a job as a courier diplomatique (messenger boy) for the United Nations Sixth
General Assembly. Despite the years of war and deprivation, Paris still was a
special place with its history, its cafes, galleries, bridges, ornate edifices,
and narrow winding cobblestone streets, some seemingly as old as the city
itself.
Recent reports about how horsemeat has been smuggled into
certain meat products in England, Sweden, and elsewhere remind me of one of
Paris's unusual features of 1951: the numerous butcher shops that sold
horsemeat. Such a shop usually sported a mounted life-sized horse head (made of
metal or wood) above the store entrance to advertise unequivocally that the butcher
specialized in the sale of horse flesh.
I ate horsemeat at a small neighborhood Parisian restaurant
a number of times. It was smoothly textured and more gamy than beef. I wasn't
particularly fond of it but it did have the virtue of being affordable. In
those post-war days, low-income Parisians were more inclined to eat horses than
ride them.
All the talk today about how undesirable it is to consume
horses carries the implication that our immense ingestion of other livestock is
perfectly acceptable. We are advised not to eat horses, nor dogs, rabbits, or
cats---no matter how close to starvation we might be. But devouring limitless numbers
of cattle, pigs, sheep, lambs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks is quite all right.
This causes us to overlook the real problem, which is not
horsemeat but meat consumption in general. The world cannot feed itself if it
continues to make meat a common staple. Millions upon millions of livestock require
vast amounts of grain and water, ultimately far more than the environment will
be able to provide.
Aside from the survival problems raised by the consumption
of immense quantities of land, water, and grain in producing meat, there is another
menacing aspect: all the poisons and torture that happen along the way from the
feedlot to the supermarket. For the health of the planet and for our own health
and for the sake of the livestock, we should stop eating animals. Rather than calling
for more regulation of meat production, we need to move entirely away from meat
meals.
Originating from the
top of the food chain, all animal products menace our health. Pesticides and
other toxic run-offs work their way into the food and water consumed by livestock.
So with wild and farmed fish, and seafood. Finally, perched at the highest rung
of the food chain, we humans feast on the accumulated toxins that concentrate
further in our bodies.
Many of us are unsettled about eating horses, dogs, cats, rabbits,
snakes, monkeys, rodents, or alligators---which other people around the world
do eat. Perhaps we should give more attention to the horrid mistreatment of
domesticated livestock, the mass
produced cruelties of factory farms, the torturous stalls, the joyless
overcrowded feedlots, the loads of antibiotic and hormone additives, the frequent
sickness and fatal dismemberments, and the terrible toxic accumulations.
Save your health and your planet. May all animal consumption
go the way of the Paris horsemeat butcher shops.
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Michael Parenti's recent books include The Face of Imperialism and the forthcoming Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid's Life (a memoir of
his early life).
