What’s your favorite type of meat? Is it beef, chicken or pork? Or maybe it’s something cool and exotic like venison or rattlesnake? What about horse? Didn’t think about that one, did you? Not exactly exotic, but also not exactly meat to most Americans. Now, though, thanks to a little slip of legislation, the slaughter of horses for meat has been legalized in the USA.

Of course, just legalizing the process doesn’t mean people will start to eat horse meat. It’s still thought of as pretty taboo, but why? The French eat it, as do the Kazakh and other sweet Central Asian people. Let’s not forget how much the Japanese love their horse meat. Raw. Or even as ice cream! And if you want to get all high and mighty and say you’ve never eaten horse, I want you to prove to me that you never shoved a wad of dried up glue in your mouth as a kid and swallowed. Yeah, that was horse.

Aside from the rite of passage of eating glue, I’ve gotten pretty close to eating horse meat by chowing down on the other half of the mule: donkey. It was weird at first, but once I got down to eating, I found it to be an enjoyable experience. You can read more about my donkey-eating here.

Plus, are horses really good for anything other than racing and movies about horse racing? We have cars now. And our own feet if we want to go somewhere cars can’t. Or what about bikes? Maybe they can’t go everywhere horses can, but they also don’t take giant dumps and you can walk behind them without fear of getting the crap kicked out of you.

So, government, I must commend you for allowing the slaughter of horses. Bring on the meat!

(via CNN.com and the Holzmaniac)

While visiting a friend in the city of Yangshuo in Southern China, I decided to try dog. Although I grew up with a dog and loved the creatures, it was time for me to experience that aspect of Asian culture. A bunch of us headed out to a restaurant and went into our own little room. While my Chinese friends placed our order, I sat in anticipation for the event.

After the order had been taken, my friend turned to me to apologize.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not the right season for dog,” she replied.

“Why?” I repeated.

“Because it is too warm outside, dog puts a fire in your stomach.”

Instead, we got donkey. A big, steaming hot pot full of donkey.

I tried it and it wasn’t bad at all. It tasted kind of like beef that you would cook in a stew, but chewier. Perhaps it is how horseys taste. Although decent, it is still no replacement for good old-fashioned beef.

As we finished off the hot pot of donkey, a new pot was brought out. This one containing tripe, better known as stomach. I couldn’t be sure whether this was donkey tripe or from some other animal, but I was sure that it was green. I have always assumed that stomachs are kind of red or pink in color because of the charts I remember from middle school, but perhaps I am wrong. Or perhaps donkey stomachs are green. Or it’s even possible that donkey stomachs turn green when cooked, kinda like how shrimp goes from white to red when cooked.

No matter how it had become green, I wasn’t a big fan of the tripe. It’s too chewy and the texture is a bit too hairy for me. Plus, the green color reminded me too much of vegetables.