Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  • • •

  As a culinary prospect, horse presents a different problem to Anglo eaters. It is too familiar a creature for them to eat comfortably. But eat it they do. In early 2013, Tesco, the British supermarket chain, made a startling revelation: some of its frozen beef patties contained horse meat, one sample as much as 29 percent. Then Burger King, which used the same Irish supplier (who put the blame on its supplier, in Poland), admitted that its meat was potentially contaminated, too. A British food manufacturer disclosed that its beef lasagna was purely horse. Ikea pulled its meatballs—horse—from locations across Europe. For Americans who worried that something similar might happen here, it was hard to say what was more disconcerting, the idea that you wouldn’t be able to taste the horse, or that you would. Foodies had the opposite reaction. Canada’s CBC News reported that they were rushing to try it.

  Horse meat is red, bloody, unmarbled, and is said to be reminiscent of venison (venison, apparently, is the chicken of the alt-meat world). It takes a lot of grass to make a little bit of horse; given a choice, people have preferred to use horses as work animals, for transportation, and as instruments of war. In the first millennium, the Catholic Church, threatened by the stubborn pagan habit of ritual horse-eating—it was tied to Odin worship in Germany and Northern Europe—took the unusual step of banning it. Mostly, the ban was successful; only Iceland, which made exemption from the ban a condition of conversion, persisted.

  Smart people have been making a logical argument in favor of horse meat for centuries. Parisians discovered it the hard way, as a food of last resort during the Revolution, but by the mid-nineteenth century—just in time for the Siege of Paris, when it came in handy again—intellectuals were promoting it as a cheap, nutritious, and tasty solution to the problem of hunger. The French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who championed the cause, recommended horse by saying that “it has been sold in restaurants, even in the best, as venison, and without the customers ever suspecting the fraud or complaining of it.” In The Curiosities of Food, published in 1859, Peter Lund Simmonds, a British journalist who fashioned himself as a Victorian-era Herodotus, reported, “Horse-flesh pie, too, eaten cold, is a dainty now at Berlin and Toulouse, and boiled horse, rechauffé, has usurped the place of ragouts and secondary dishes!” But trusty, tin-eared Anglo-Saxon—“horse-flesh pie”—was not the way to introduce the delicacy that, Simmonds said, was “at the present the rage” in Europe’s dining clubs and salons. At home in England, members of the Society for the Propagation of Horse Flesh as an Article of Food hired French chefs to prepare banquets of chevaline. Previously, the English had known chevaline by the name “cat food.”

  Anxieties about sustainability also prompted another intellectual, Calvin W. Schwabe, the “father of veterinary epidemiology,” to urge a reconsideration of the obvious, spurned protein. In 1979, he published Unmentionable Cuisine, which he described as “a practical guide to help us and our children prepare for the not too distant day when the world’s growing food-population problem presses closer upon us and our overly restrictive eating habits become less tolerable.” The taste for horse, he wrote, was “superficially latent” in many Americans. Case in point: a horse-meat shop in Westbrook, Connecticut, that opened during a period of high beef prices in the early seventies and was hugely successful. “I’ll sell it as long as it moves,” the proprietor told a reporter amid brisk sales on opening day, a cavalry of mounted protestors outside his door. Schwabe provided a recipe for meat loaf—three parts horse to one part pork—he and his wife made often during his years in vet school.

  Horse advocacy groups have long pressed for a federal ban on horse slaughter, arguing that horses are companion animals and therefore should not end their lives as food. The “Americans don’t eat pets” argument strikes me as a weak one, rooted in denial. Who’s to say what is a pet, or under what circumstances? Besides, it’s a standard that is unevenly applied. The rose-haired tarantula Daniella Martin made into sushi came from a pet store and was likely intended to be a friend for an introverted twelve-year-old, but inspired no extra sympathy as a result.

  At the turn of the twenty-first century there were only three horse slaughterhouses operating in the United States, all foreign-owned, with all the meat going to Europe and Japan. In 2007, the last of them closed, and USDA inspections were struck from the federal budget, effectively banning domestic slaughter. Over the next five years, hundreds of thousands of live horses left America to be slaughtered in Canada and Mexico, under conditions advocates of domestic slaughter and animal-rights groups alike deplored. A report by ProPublica suggested that, in spite of laws against the practice, some of them might have been wild horses captured by the Bureau of Land Management in roundups and sold to “kill buyers”; others came from racetracks and were full of steroids, anti-inflammatories, and other medications prohibited in food animals.

  In 2012, funding for USDA inspection was restored, and various companies have announced plans to open slaughterhouses. While the majority of the market will likely be foreign, boosters are making a direct appeal to adventurous American foodies, on the basis of the other exotic foods they have accepted. “The Promise of Cheval,” a document recently produced by the International Equine Business Association, asks, “In a country where common gastronomic choices include everything from baby lambs and suckling pigs to grasshopper tacos and alligator tails, why can you not find the horse steak that was available on the menu of the Harvard dining room in the 1990s?” (The Faculty Club served it, with mushroom sauce and vegetables.) It goes on to describe a cheap, sweet, red meat, just out of reach. “When our Canadian neighbors are dining on delightful meals of Cheval au Porto, where is the same lean, tender dish to tempt our palates?” When I talked to Sue Wallis, a state legislator in Wyoming who is trying to open a slaughterhouse in Missouri, she said, “There’s great action going on with artisanal meats and butchery, and I think cheval would be interesting to those folks.” Wallis is also a raw-milk advocate. Her favorite, of course, is raw horse milk, which she has tried courtesy of an Amish farmer who sells it to the cosmetics industry but holds some back to drink with his family.

  • • •

  The history of accidental horse-eating is long. Simmonds, in The Curiosities of Food, remarked that no one in the English knackers’ yards could account for the hearts and tongues, and suggested that the “ox-tongues” sold as Russian imports might be equine instead. Upton Sinclair put it on par with the other horrors depicted in The Jungle, revealing that, until public outrage temporarily put a stop to it, the packers, in addition to all their other crimes against purse and palate, were slaughtering and tinning horses. At the turn of the last century, The New York Times reported frequently on a German butcher named Henry Bosse, “of horse-bologna-sausage fame,” who operated a slaughterhouse beside the racetrack in Maspeth, Long Island. His business was “transforming decrepit quadrupeds into odiferous bologna sausages” for shipment to Belgium and Germany. Sometimes, the paper alleged, “after the horse meat was shipped to Europe and manufactured into sausage it was resent to this country and sold as some of the famous brands.”

  Hugue Dufour came by his “horse-bologna-sausage fame” differently—by openly appealing to the outré tastes of foodies. Dufour, who is Canadian, grew up on a working farm; sometimes the family slaughtered and ate their horses. Before coming to New York, he worked for Martin Picard at Au Pied du Cochon, in Montreal. The restaurant is known for its hedonistic foie gras and whole-animal frenzies: Animal plus Incanto. In an idiosyncratic homemade cookbook, Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack, Picard chronicles a sugaring season at a maple orchard forty-five minutes outside of town, where he has a second restaurant. Among photographs of syrup-immersed bacchantes and detailed instructions on how to make squirrel sushi, he writes, “I LOVE carcasses! I like tearing them apart and picking them clean with my fingers and I don’t feel the slightest bit shy about doing it in public.”

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sp; Au Pied du Cochon avoided serving beef, which it saw as the product of a wasteful, unwholesome industry. Under Picard, Dufour learned to cook red deer, venison, bison. Although the restaurant did not serve horse, he began to wonder about it. The stuff he’d eaten as a kid had not been good; he wanted to see if as a chef he could make it delicious. “It has long ribs so you can do a very Flintstoneish rack that’s kind of cool,” he said. He played around with tartare, a classic presentation—and the Tatars ate their horses, too. Ultimately, he decided that the leanness of the meat made it ideal for charcuterie.

  In the spring of 2012, Dufour, by this time living in New York, was invited to participate in the Great Googa-Mooga, a food festival in Prospect Park, and was given a booth in Tony’s Corner, an area overseen by Anthony Bourdain. “It’s supposed to be the big foodie happening, so let’s see how far foodies can go,” Dufour recalled thinking. He sourced some horse from a friend with a slaughterhouse in Canada, and imported it legally, with the knowledge of the health department. His offering was a grilled horse-bologna, cheddar, and foie gras sandwich. At his booth, there was a horse cutout—you could stick your head through and get a picture taken. How’s that for identification with your meal?

  It was a moment of truth for the self-selected contingent that ventured over to Tony’s Corner. “The foodies got torn,” Dufour said. “Should I go for horse meat or should I not be a foodie?” Five thousand of them went for it. When the VIP section ran out of food, the organizers came to him to beg for horse.

  For Dufour, the bologna was exploratory; he wanted to see what the public could tolerate. He was happily surprised. “They loved us so much,” he said. “I was, like, ‘New Yorkers are great. They have no problem with horse meat. Let’s do it.’” Soon afterward, he announced that he would serve horse tartare at M. Wells Dinette, the new restaurant he was opening at MoMA PS1 in Queens. The response was so virulent—angry callers told him he didn’t deserve to live in America and should leave—that he wrote a statement saying that he would drop the tartare from the menu. His motive, he wrote, had merely been to “offer customers new things,” beyond the trinity of beef-chicken-pork. He went on, “It was certainly not our intent to insult American culture. However, it must be said, part of living in a city like New York means learning to tolerate different customs.” Then he invited his critics to come in for a drink “and a bite of whatever animal they do consume (if any)”—which included, at the time, foie gras bread pudding, escargot and bone marrow, and blood pudding.

  “Maybe the whole foodie counterculture is a reaction to the oppression of just a few things to eat and big supermarkets where you find everywhere the same thing,” Dufour said. “For me, eating other animals, including horses, is a responsible thing to do. If you like meat, it’s trying to find other sources, meat that is already around that would otherwise go to waste.” Because it’s not raised for human consumption, the meat sometimes poses a health risk—but, he says, so do conventionally raised beef and poultry. He finds the sentimental argument weak and insupportable. “It’s more like recycling a dead animal,” he said. “We can’t start burying horses with tombstones every time.”

  For his next restaurant, M. Wells Steakhouse, Dufour envisions a “meat temple,” where he will serve a zoo’s worth of birds and beasts, and forgotten cuts of familiar animals. “When I call my butcher I ask for whatever people don’t want, what’s cheap, and make it nice,” he said. His plans call for a wood-fired grill, next to a concrete trough filled with lobsters, trout, sea urchins. “Everything crawling and live,” he said. “I grab and butcher them real quick and grill them really quickly.” From time to time, he hopes to have exotic meats like rattlesnake and lion, which he imagines serving in a black peppercorn sauce. “I would have loved to do horse,” he said ruefully.

  • • •

  Most people hold back some species or another from consideration as food, and the reasons can seem arbitrary. Usually it seems to come down to relatability. But to be upset only about the animals we identify with leads us, helpless, toward hypocrisy. Diana Reiss, the dolphin researcher, isn’t vegetarian, and she has her doubts. “Different cultures have different accepted animals to eat,” she says. “How do we grapple with that?” One former Hump regular I spoke with said he refuses to eat anything too smart, but, when it comes to pigs, he just avoids thinking about it, because he loves eating them so much. “In a perfect world, I’d be a vegetarian,” he said. When I told Vidor, a snake-blood-drinker and scorpion-eater who closed one of his restaurants after admitting to serving an endangered mammal, that I had eaten dog in Vietnam, he was aghast. “See, I wouldn’t eat dog,” he said, withdrawing self-protectively, as if I might bite his hand.

  For myself, I began to feel that the principle I had eaten by—I’ll try anything once—was inadequate to the times. Foodie-ism is pushing things too far and too fast for that. I felt a new line etching itself on my conscience. The Tailless Whip Scorpion Rule was: Don’t be the first to try something. After thinking about The Hump, I arrived at a new criterion for consumption: Don’t be the last.

  Nine

  THE HUNT

  At Starry Kitchen on the night of the escamoles, I struck up a conversation with a young chef named Craig Thornton, who was at the table next to me. He had on a camouflage hat and black T-shirt and was eating dinner with Eva Card, a dark-haired actress who models for women’s magazines and was his girlfriend at the time. Habitual extreme eating had led her to conclude that ignorance was to be preferred. “I probably wouldn’t have eaten it if I’d known what it was,” she said about the ant pupae. “I don’t ask anymore.” Thornton said he’d had escamoles a bunch of times, and had even served them. “It’s hard to find a clean source, though, and I’m very, very particular,” he said. In order to find goat that meets his standards, for example, he drives to a farm forty miles east of L.A. and kills it himself. “When you’re killing something, you have a whole new outlook,” he said. Scarcity was on his mind, and the developing world’s demand for meat. “I get more and more paranoid about food. It’s affecting the way I’m cooking. I’m cooking thinking about the future of food rather than thinking about right now,” he said. He was planning to start a hydroponic garden so he’d have more control over his produce. I asked him where his restaurant was. “My apartment,” he said.

  Jonathan Gold’s ideal restaurant is one where people cook personal, home-style food in an intimate setting with the weird music they like and their strange art on the wall. For him, this means the “traditional” restaurants of Los Angeles: unassimilated ethnic cooking intended for a narrow audience. Thornton also cooks what he likes, on his own terms, for a tiny, very specific group; it’s his music on the stereo, his bedroom just beyond that makeshift door. Here, I thought, was a chance to look unobstructed at the new American cooking that is taking shape. With no health department to worry about and no investors to please, and an audience made up of adoring foodies who have sometimes waited years for a spot, the features of the movement would be laid out plain.

  Several nights a week, a group of sixteen strangers gathers around Thornton’s dining-room table to eat delicacies he has handpicked and prepared for them, from a meticulously considered menu over which they have no say. It is the toughest reservation in the city: when he announces a dinner, hundreds of people typically respond. The group is selected with an eye toward occupational balance—all lawyers, a party foul that was recently avoided thanks to Google, would have been too monochrome—and, when possible, democracy. Your dinner companion might be a former UFC heavyweight champion, Ludo Lefebvre, a foodie with a Lumix, or a kid who saved his money and drove four hours from Fresno to be there. At the end, you place a “donation”—whatever you think the meal was worth—in a desiccated crocodile head that sits in the middle of the table. Most people pay around $90; after buying the ingredients and paying a small crew, Thornton usually breaks even. The experiment is called Wolvesmouth, the loft Wolvesd
en; Thornton is the Wolf. “I grew up in a survival atmosphere,” he says. “I like that aggressiveness. And I like that it’s a shy animal that avoids confrontation.”

  Thornton is known never to prepare a dish the same way twice, an ideal conceit for the age of social media that also speaks to his nimbleness and resourcefulness, his hunter’s sense of opportunity. From above, the food—smeared, brushed, and spattered with sauces in safety orange, violet, yolk yellow, acid green—is as vivid as a Kandinsky; from the table’s edge, it forms eerie landscapes of hand-torn meat, loamy crumbles, and strewn blossoms. Being presented with a plate of Thornton’s food often feels like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods. A recipe for Wolves in the Snow, a dish of venison with cauliflower purée, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, beet-blackberry gastrique, and Douglas-fir gelée, which Thornton published in the LA Weekly, instructs, “Rip venison apart with two forks, which will act as sharp teeth. . . . Attack the plate with your blackberry beet ‘blood.’”

  He introduces his courses with minimal fanfare, rattling off the main components almost dismissively. “This is rabbit, with poblano pepper, Monterey jack, sopapillas, apple, and zucchini,” he announced at a recent dinner. Later, he told me, “We say ‘apple.’ But we took butter, vanilla, lemon juice, and cooked it at one twenty-eight—at that temperature, you’re just opening up the pores to give it a little punch—then we took it out, cooled it, resealed it, compressed it. When you put it on the plate, it’s just an apple. And then you’re, like, ‘Holy crap, this is intense.’”