The Other Red Meat

I probably offended rabbit pet owners with my earlier blog on rabbit "food" by discussing “how to remove the head”, and now I tip-toe into other pet and food taboos by discussing the “other red meat—Horse meat”.

During our chef’s tour of a French outdoor market, we bought horse meat at a chevaline stand. Horse meat is found in specialty butchers and stands but also in grocery stores. The organization La Viande Chevaline in France promotes the horse meat market by listing recipes, nutrition benefits and pictures that include a sexy woman fork-feeding a sexy man tasty morsels of horsemeat. This organization contrasts with pet and sporting organizations in the US that lobby to ban the processing and sale of horsemeat in the US.

Despite opposition to horse meat consumption, US imports in 2004 of this meat product rank highest among French imports with:
· USA at 24%,
· Argentina at 18%, and
· Canada at 15%.
These imports are necessary because French production of horse meat only meets 38% of the demand. This implies that horse meat is popular in France; however, demand has not increased despite marketing efforts. I’ve reviewed several articles on why this may be the case, but I mostly wonder if price is an issue since horse meat has a history of acceptance in French culture. The average price in 2004 was 13 euro/kg or in current 2007 dollars about $9 per pound, similar to the price of veal.

While I could dwell on the philosophical, religious, cultural and socio-economic considerations for why to eat or not eat horse meat, I will bail out and say “hey, I’m a nutritionist, so is this good eats or not?” One of our chefs’s mentioned that horsemeat had only 2% fat which seemed incredible to me. So I did some research and found several web sites that indeed indicated 2-3% fat. But when I looked at the data, these sites had calculated percent fat based on weight, not percent of calories. A gram of fat is equal to 9 calories, so fat content is meaningful based on a percent of total calories, not percent of weight.

At 30% saturated fat, low cholesterol, high iron and low calories per gram by weight, horse meat compared to beef looks nutritionally advantageous. Particularly since the beef cuts are shown as trimmed to 0% fat (see http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/) for more details and my nutrition table below.

But does it taste good? Check out the picture—only a few pieces remained soon after the chef prepared it for our picnic. To me it tasted like a good cut of beef, but I’m not really a red-meat eater, instead I pounced on the cheese platter (talk about fat content...).