Iceland reportedly hesitated over Christianity because converts had to give up horse meat
In the eighth century, popes told the missionary Saint Boniface to forbid horse meat among converted Germans, since it was bound up with pagan rites. Icelanders allegedly resisted Christianity for a while largely over that rule. The papal ban stayed on the books until 1983, and Iceland still raises horses for the table.
People ate horses long before anyone farmed them. At Boxgrove in southern England, horse bones about 500,000 years old bear cut marks beside stone tools made by Homo heidelbergensis, and at Schöningen in Germany, butchered horses around 300,000 years old lie with some of the oldest wooden spears known. After Spaniards brought horses back to the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Pehuenche of today's Chile and Argentina hunted the feral herds, and Andean cooks still sun-dry the meat into charqui.
France traces its appetite to the Revolution, when horses once kept as aristocratic status symbols fed hungry crowds. Napoleon's chief surgeon, Baron Larrey, urged starving troops to eat their mounts, serving it as soup at Eylau in 1807. Paris legalised the meat in 1866, and a specialist butcher opened in the east of the city offering cheaper cuts than pork or beef. During the siege of 1870 to 1871, an estimated 65,000 to 70,000 horses were eaten, including two presented to Napoleon III by the Russian tsar.
Attitudes still split sharply. The meat is common across much of Europe and Asia and especially among historically nomadic Central Asian peoples, yet taboo in Ireland, Poland, Brazil and Israel and hard to find in most English-speaking countries. Jewish dietary law rules it out because horses neither chew cud nor have cloven hooves. Yorkshire ate horse and donkey until the 1930s, and Tongan emigrants kept the national taste, crediting Christian missionaries with introducing it.
In 2005 the eight biggest producers turned out over 700,000 tonnes, with China alone consuming 421,000. Tasters describe it as lean and slightly sweet, close to beef. Because horses convert feed to meat poorly, western countries rarely breed them for it, and the idea that most end up as pet food is a myth: the United States banned that use in the 1970s.
Source: Horse meat
