China's Horses May End Up In Russia's Kabobs

Post by Nancy Shute, The Salt at NPR Food (2/28/13)

China isn't a good place to be a horse, if your goal is to avoid ending up as the Russian kabobs known as shashlik.

China exports the most horse meat to the global market, while Russia has the biggest appetite for horseflesh, according to a new infographic on the continuing European scandal over horse meat sold as beef.

Mike Stewart, editor of the newish blog Australian Food Safety News, tried to write a post untangling the many threads of the European horse meat scandal. "But it was all so complex and confusing, it seemed like the simplest way to explain it was to do an infographic," he told The Salt.

So he dug into data from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization on horse meat production, import and export, to find that some of the biggest players in the global market aren't in Europe at all.

If you'd fancy a more Eurocentric version, England's The Guardian did a nice job tracking the (legal) movement of horseflesh through Europe. Polpettine, anyone? The Italians imported twice as much horse meat as the French in 2012.

Via: The Australian Institute of Food Safety

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