Entre fantasme et réalité : regards croisés français et anglo-saxons sur l'hippophagie

Abstract

The horsegate scandal that broke out in Europe in 2013 revived a long-standing debate on food fraud. The issue of hippophagy bears a strong symbolic dimension which goes beyond the mere sanitary or commercial debate surrounding food safety. Many Anglo-Saxon anthropologists and historians (Root, Harris, Simoons, Weil) have come up with a biased and partial vision of what hippophagy is in France. However, Chris Otter published a very convincing article on how the hippophagy propaganda failed in Great Britain in the 19th century. From those research works, this article suggests a confrontation of the French and Anglo-Saxon viewpoints on modern hippophagy (1850-1950), examined in the context of an industrial society that had to feed a numerous urban working class. Furthermore, the inception of an Anglo-Saxon vulgate presenting a very unsubtle version of a horse eating French population while Great Britain remained gastronomically “virtuous” suggests that one could question and examine the mental representations of both countries.