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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

About 12 years ago I rode from Kanata (west end of Ottawa) down to Kingston— about 145km, I think. As training for it, I had done a few 80km days and one 105km, but the final ride was still a major step up and similarly wiped me out.

The funniest memory I have of the whole experience was how delicious the dinner was that I had at a little greasy spoon in Westport, about 2/3rds of the way there. Similar to camping or being on a canoe trip, it's just nuts how good food tastes when you're physically exhausted and starving. I went back to that diner later with my then-fiancee, and the food was considerably less appealing without the benefit of having cycled 100km to get to it.

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My mother's family has an (apocryphal?) story about an ancestor whose unit during the civil war caved and slaughtered some of their horses for food while starving.

It was the best meal of his life.

After returning home from the war, he determined to raise horses for meat. The first taste-testing, as the story goes, was underwhelming.

There was a huge scandal about a Dutch meat processing company replacing beef with horse meat without mentioning this on the label or in fact anywhere else. The CEO went to prison for that (and the company went bankrupt). It's funny that if the taste is that different that nobody noticed this earlier on.

(Dutch): https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/twintig-maanden-cel-voor-paarde...

As a kid I interpreted the story to mean it wasn't very good, but in retrospect I suppose it could've been ~indistinguishable from beef and it still would've been a big disappointment for someone who expected it to be the second-best cut of meat they'd ever eaten...

Plenty of people that eat beef would really not like to be told they ate horse meat after the fact.

In wartime in NL anything that had protein was fair game, including dogs and other pets, I don't expect that it would be different anywhere else and I'm pretty sure that after a diet of flower bulbs and such those would have tasted just fine. There are some pretty harsh jokes around that theme.

Dachhase (roof rabbit) for cats. Kittenhorror!

That's less to do with the source of the meat than the mislabling of it.

Fraud is fraud.

Yes, but if the taste would have been markedly different you would expect someone to notice it a bit earlier, apparently this ran for years.

Horse and beef really taste pretty different (I've had both, in a number of different preparations), but I suspect that mixing the two together would render the final result close enough to beef that the psychological effect of expecting to eat beef would allow people to taste it as just beef -- sort of like those blind taste tests of wines where they added red food coloring to white wine and people (if I remember right, even a couple of wine experts? I dunno, I'd have to look up that study and it's late. :) ) interpreted the taste as a red.

What I understood from the horse meat scandals lately, replacing with horse meat is often the problem with where did they get the horse meat? If it's not proven to be from horses that hasn't been used for riding or racing, it can contain medicines we humans are not supposed to eat.

Yes, and food labeling laws are pretty strict: it should contain what it says on the tin, no matter where it came from, and you need to have a proper administration right back to the source. This has become a criminal offense since the mad cow disease affair.

And that would be different from industrially produced meat how exactly?

No matter if chicken, beef, or pigs.

Ah yes, the Pferdefleischskandal. Apart from the lie on the label (Etikettenschwindel) I'm still ambivalent about it. Because from time to time I pass butcher shhops advertising horse meat, and in larger supermarkets it's a speciality canned like corned beaf, usually from Poland.

So they got added value with their Gammelfleisch! What's not to like? :-)

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