HORSE MEAT AND HARVARD.

HORSE MEAT AND HARVARD. Horse meat is in the news a lot recently because of scandals where consumers were not told they were eating horse meat. That led to this post by Julia Ioffe in the New Republic in which she says: “I love horse meat,” and explains why. (link via Instapundit and Ann Altschuler). When I was a teaching fellow at Harvard some 50 years ago, I had the privilege of eating at the Harvard Faculty Club. Item number 8 on the menu was always “fresh horse steak”. I often chose it. At the time, I heard the story that horse meat had been introduced during World War II and that once it had been on the menu for a couple of years, it became a Harvard tradition that was hard to change. This wikipedia article says that in fact horse meat was on the menu for over a hundred years until it was discontinued in 1985. And this letter to the Wall Street Journal from Tom McCann says that the general manager of the faculty Club was told by the delivery man: “… I have three customers in the Boston area for horse meat: the zoo, the dog-racing track and the Harvard Faculty Club.”