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Part of the fun of watching Top Chef and other cooking shows is seeing the pros grapple with wacky ingredients we’d never find in our own kitchens. But when the ingredient in question is horse meat, that’s a problem.
Last month, an episode of Top Chef Canada (which airs on Food Network Canada) featured a challenge in which the contestants had to cook horse meat. During the airing of the episode, a Facebook group called “Boycott Top Chef: Protect the Horses” cropped up — now the group has more Facebook fans than Top Chef Canada.
Top Chef Canada execs have pledged to “carefully consider all the facts around this topic” before serving horse meat again. Here are some facts we think they ought to know:
- Horses face horrific conditions during transport to the kill floor and during slaughter itself. Most horses are awake and feel terrible pain when they are killed for meat.
- Many horses are sent to slaughter straight from the racetracks, and may have drugs in their systems that make them too toxic for human consumption.
- Horse slaughter is illegal in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop would-be profiteers from shipping tens of thousands of horses illegally into Mexico and Canada to be slaughtered there.
Several states in the U.S. are even facing legislative fights from those who want to re-open horse slaughterhouses — and having television shows declare that horse meat is a “delicacy” doesn’t help advocates who are working tirelessly to keep horse slaughter illegal.
Please sign the petition today to tell Food Network Canada to pledge not to air any more programming that glamorizes the consumption of horse meat:
http://www.change.org/petitions/call-on-food-network-and-sponsors-to-stop-showing-programs-featuring-horsemeat-or-foie-gras |
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