Horse meat?
I've also made a note to talk about horse meat. I was a vegetarian for a year, to see what it was like. At that time if you went out to eat you'd finish up with cheese salad. Omelet? Well, you have to know what it was cooked in. Any way I went back to eating meat. If you eat a cow or a pig or a lamb or a chicken, why not other animals?

Then we came to France. When we first arrived there was always horse meat in the meat section at the supermarket. L'Houmeau was visited by a travelling horse butcher on Saturday mornings and some nieghbourhoods had horse butchers of their own. We ate horse steaks at a friends. Can't say I noticed a difference in the taste. I never bought it myself. Then a few years ago there was a big a change; lots of people became ill after eating the meat from one infected horse, normally it wouldn't have posed a problem, but lots of people here prefer their meat underdone. Someone worked out you could make 1000 portions from one horse, this includes 'black pudding' from the blood, sausages and other bits and pieces. As people preferred to eat their meat underdone they stopped eating horses.

The TV program on pets also ran a feature around that time about retired racehorses. In the past they went straight to the butchers. Suprise, surprise, people actually started buying them to ride for pleasure. Horse lovers could get a high class horse reasonable cheaply.