Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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!

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? :-)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com