Business as Usual

Horse meat is not scandalous. Meat is meat, although there are cultural taboos. The next time you chow down on a cheeseburger, remember that billions of people believe cows are sacred animals.

The real issue here is honesty and transparency. Also, the quality of the "food" we are sold.

In Vickery Eckhoff's Five Reasons Why Burger King's Horsemeat Scandal Could Happen Here, she describes serious concerns with how animals are medicated, slaughtered, and fed to us unknowingly. Industry procedures are designed to minimize liability rather than maximize safety:

"Your average beef burger is a big mash-up of edible scraps and parts from different cows from different plants, often from different states (and even countries), with fat and additives ground in. Producing ground beef this way 'makes it difficult to trace liability to any particular plant in the case of e-coli contamination,' says Dr. Lester Castro Friedlander, DVM, a veterinarian and former USDA inspector and inspections trainer of the year." 

There are other health risks:

"...phenylbutazone (bute), a known human carcinogen. It also happens to be the most widely administered equine pain reliever in the U.S. as well as abroad. The difficulty with phenylbutazone is that it, or its metabolite, can cause aplastic anemia in children. If a child were to consume an animal-based product containing even the minutest amount of bute or its metabolite then the child may develop aplastic anemia."

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic #2878.