Would you eat a horse meat pie?

The popularity of horse meat pies doesn’t seem to be waning. Kim Sok runs lunchbar Eighty8, their two Auckand branches, and their Hamilton bakery have been offering lo’i hoosi pies for the past fortnight.

Sok said customers had been asking them to start selling lo’i hoosi pies since last year, but they were only recently able to secure properly processed horse meat. “Once we found one, it just took off.” she said.

But while the pies have been going down well with purchasers, some members of the public don’t like the idea and have made their feelings known on social media. Sok said she understands people feel strongly about horses, and that it’s a relatively nerw concept for some New Zealanders.

In New Zealand, horse meat is popular among the Tongan community. First Up spoke to University of Auckland academic Sione Taufa who said lo’i hoosi, which can be looslely translated to horse cooked with coconut cream, originated after europeans brought horses to Tonga in the 1700s.

Taufa said they were used as work animals, but pragmatism saw them added to the food chain.

“Somehow it stuck throughout the years,” he said. “And I think because other Pacific Island countries do not eat lo’i hoosi, or horse, we’ve sort of claimed it as our own and it’s tied into what makes us unique.”

Taufa said cultural norms linked with food are often influenced by necessity and availability.

“We are much more flexible in not putting a certain animal in a certain category, that we are able to, let’s say, take a horse and be part of our diet.”

Chef Al Brown told First Up he once served horse during a stint as chef at the New Zealand Embassy in Belgium.

He said he doesn’t know of any New Zealand restaurants offering horse meat now, but says kiwis are getting more adventurous with their tastes, something he caters to at his restaurants. “We had duck tongues for a long time when we could get those. We have veal tongue on at the moment. We do pig’s head croquettes. So we love the bits and pieces and the slightly unusual.”

The changing culinary habits can be seen in Kiwis fish consumption. Fish species that were once seen as bait, are now prized.

“When I used to go fishing, as a kid with my father, he’d pick up two packets of B&H and a box of frozen trevally (bait) to go fishing.”

Brown said now when he takes clients out fishing trevally is one of the top targets.

Amir Sayadabdi is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington who specialises in food studies.

“What counts as edible is never just biological. It is cultural, it is historical, it is economic and it is environmental,” he said.

Sayadabdi said there are two main theories on how animals are deemed to be fit or unfit for eating. The first is about maintaining a society’s natural order. “For example horses in some societies are closely associated with riding. They’re associated with work, with status. So in that context, eating them feels like violating the animal’s social category rather than just choosing a meat.”

Sayadabdi said the second theory is focussed on an anim’s economic value, and suitability to the environment. “Thinking about the Middle East, where avoidance of pork is common pigs are actually a very poor fit for the environment because they don’t graze like cattle or sheep, they need a lot of water. They need a lot of shade. They need a lot of grain. They don’t produce milk. They don’t produce wool.They are not useful for plowing. So from this perspective, pig avoidance can be understood as a simply a sensible adaptation to local conditions, which may or may not get later wrapped in sacred or religious rules.”

Sayadabdi also said urbanisation has created a clearer distinction between which animals are considered pets, and which are considered livestock, as well as distancing many from the realities of slaughtering and processing animals. The economic prosperity of a society also plays a role.

” That separation depends on a whole infrastructure. It depends on supermarkets, refrigeration, wages, labour, and also enough abundance to let people actually put animals into different roles”.

The decision to eat animals at all can involve a degree of mental gymnastics. Brock Bastian, a psychology professer at the University of Melbourne calls this the meat paradox. The term describes the conflict that arises within people that continue to eat meat despite “the idea of actually eating animals and the ways in which those animals come to the plate are not the things that they feel particularly comfortable in dealing with”.

Professor Bastian says one of the ways people get around that discomfort is to downplay the intelligence of the animals that end up on their plates.

“Most people probably don’t see pigs as intelligent as dogs, and yet we know they probably are. So people tend to not want to think about those sorts of mind-based capabilities when thinking about their food.”

In the end an animal’s tastiness is defined not by its flavour, but by our own perceptions.

“It’s a pretty egocentric line of sand that we draw,” Bastian said, “Because it doesn’t really come down to whether the animal has the kinds of qualities and capacities that should lead it to be treated in one way or the other. It more comes down to the relationship that we have with that animal ourselves.”