Not since the uproar over Coco has Canadian foodie indignation spilled over onto the pages of Grub Street, but the Huffington Post now reports that certain Canucks are up in arms about an upcoming episode of Top Chef Canada that asks the cheftestants to cook with one of the “most traditional French foods” — horse meat. Actually, this isn’t just a Canadian issue. Earlier this month, PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk wrote in HuffPo about the practice of selling thoroughbreds (some related to Kentucky Derby winners) for as little as $200 so they can be trucked over the borders for slaughter. Horses haven’t been slaughtered in the United States since 2007, a couple of years after the U.S. stopped funding horse-meat inspections, but as the AP reported in January, certain ranchers want to bring back the practice (after all, Argentina, to name just one country, pulls in $75 million from horse-meat exports).
Meanwhile, in Maine, between 1,000 and 1,500 horses per year are sold for transport to Quebec slaughterhouses (as we’ve pointed out before, that number is somewhere around 72,000 nationally). The Bangor Daily News reported that a bill that would’ve outlawed the practice has been shelved after industry protest.
Having tried horse sashimi in Osaka and finding it nowhere near as memorable as grilled chicken ovaries, we can’t say we have a strong opinion about this; the downing of horse semen by New Zealanders, however, is another matter.
