They said on UK radio news today that they think they horse-in-burger thing may have been going on for decades.
Not an austerity thing.

Whether you think eating horse is good or not, I think we can all agree that 100% ground beef should be 100% ground beef. No pork, no chicken, no buffalo, no horse, no dog, etc.

The same grinder would be used for ground beef and pork sausage, but it doesn't speak very well for the cleanliness of the operation if there is cross contamination.

People in Europe eat horsemeat all the time. More disturbing is the pork, for those Muslims and Jews who do not eat that.

And most hilarious was the fact that the two ads displayed next to the comments (at least for me) were for McDonalds and the movie "Warhorse".

The fun part is figuring out where the horse meat came from. The meat from horses slaughtered in the UK usually goes to France, which also gets a lot of horse meat from Mexico, and thus from the US by a roundabout way. You can't slaughter horses for meat anymore in the US, but you can put the live horses into crammed semi trucks for the long journey to Mexico. Almost all Mexican horse meat goes to Europe, especially France.

Even better, the US horses slaughtered in Mexico have been fed all sorts of antibiotics and other drugs (many are retired unsuccessful racehorses); these drugs are illegal in food animals, even in France, but not in imported horse meat (since what these horses have eaten is unregulated). So the meat is probably chock-full of crap you don't want to eat -- even though horse meat by itself is quite healthful and low in fat, probably more so than beef.

I'm guessing most butcher shops and meat processors aren't changing out their plates and blades on their grinders when switching from one meat to the next. I'm not really sure it's a big deal either. If you're cooking your meat to 160F (which is what the government says to do), it doesn't matter what meat it was, it's all safe. I wouldn't expect them to be scrubbing everything down with bleach simply between switching from one meat to the next. And I'd never recommend cooking ground meat that you didn't grind yourself to anything less than about 160F.

@8: Agreed. I doubt it's anything more than cross contamination. I will say that it's something that should be done better, but I don't find it a surprise or overly concerning.

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Oh, Wilburrr...

It is an austerity thing. Source additives are from Spain and Portugal according to BBC & Reuters.

Beef, it's what's for riding. Whinny!

Good thing Tesco sells giant 10 liter bottles of vodka for next to nothing in Scotland, that's all I'm saying. Helps keep the horse burgers down.

This is why you don't let horses work the drive-thru, the relentless pranksters that they're know to be.

You can be eating bugs right now. Bug parts are allowed in food. I was pretty grossed out by pink slime, though.

"I've eaten horse." - Don Draper

@12, Tesco does not sell ten liter bottles of cheap vodka or anything else in Scotland or anyplace else, Will. Stop making shit up. You're a fucking fool.

As a wise man once pointed out, "If wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak."

I had horse when I was in Europe. It tasted like beef. I wasn't bothered by it. That said, if I'm buying beef then that's what I expect to get.

@16: presumably the 10-liter vodka bottles are stocked right next to the €3 wines that retail for $300 in the states. Liquor stores in the Will-i-verse are awesome.

Horse meat shouldn't be upsetting on its own; it's low-fat, healthy, tasty. The concern arises in its presence in a ground-beef product - cross-contamination is A Bad Thing.

@4 - Kosher or Halal meat is held to a much higher standard than gentile foods and must be independently certified; beef contaminated with horse should never be certified Kosher or Halal.

@18 Agreed. I've eaten horse (from my Dutch grandparents), but it was labelled as such. If it's labelled as beef, it better damn well have been a cow.

Maybe it's Enumclaw cattle.

I agree that they should label their products accurately, but I personally have no more problem eating horse meat than cow meat.

as long as you haven't kept up on your Tetanus shots you can eat horse

@6: The same goes for Canada. Europe has blocked the sale of horsemeat from Canada because it comes from the slaughter of U.S. horses - not categorized as livestock and thus not regulated as such.

I'm ok with that.

@9 FTW!

Parts is parts.

@23, you should. There's nothing inherently wrong with horse meat itself, but horse meat is packed with steroids and antibiotics and a thousand other drugs that would make Lance Armstrong blanch, because it's unregulated and largely comes from racing animals, not food animals.